Once upon a time there was a King who wanted a local dragon slain. He hired a brave knight to rid the land of her but in a strange twist of fate the knight wound up falling in love with the dragon and running away with her to enjoy a long and successful marriage. The king was angry but his attention would soon be diverted by a beautiful mysterious woman who fell head over heels in love with him. The two were married but when their first child turned out to be a baby slime he learned her dark secret... His bride was also previously a slime who used a magic potion to obtain human form But he wasnt the only one to father a half breed as the knight and his dragon bride also had a daughter... A dragon half born with human form and various draconic features. Their feud never truly settled would be inherited by their offspring as Mink the dragon half and Vena the slime half battle it out over the ultimate prize... The heart of their favorite teen heartthrob hero Dick Saucer Or at least tickets to his concert. If youve seen your fair share of nineties anime youre probably aware that this decade saw a massive boom of shortlength OVA anime releases. With the economy having crashed at the end of the eighties and an overseas market just beginning to explode production companies began to push titles in this format because they were cheap to make as they were often rushed together on a shoestring budget and they were easy to make a quick buck off of especially for the casual and curious viewers in other countries whose exposure to Japanese animation was probably minimal at that point and who had probably never seen anything like the cellpainted oddities that were being produced for a far wider range than just child audiences. The stories in these OVAs were usually pretty compact as the ones that were adapted from manga had to lose a ton of reexisting story content to fit the medium and even the original stories were often highly derivative in the way they chased popular trends and blatantly ripped off the far more popular titles that actually had a fair bit of faith and resources poured into them due to their perceived marketability. Dragon Half is one of these titles hailing from the early nineties but in my opinion its also one of the better looking ones. Most OVAs were made severely underbudget as they didnt necessarily need fluid movement and jaw dropping action to appease western markets that were only looking for something different anyway and as long as you gave them the scifi heroes bloody action savage gore and gratuitous nudity that they had never seen in a cartoon before who cared how bad the animation was? But of course there were exceptions to this. There were a handful of auteur directors who had the clout to turn their threeepisode shovelware into legitimate works of art and while Dragon Half didnt exactly have one of thosealthough director Shinya Sadamitsu did have a fair bit of low key directing experience going into this but it DID have the benefit of being produced by Production IG a studio thats synonymous with the term Maximum Effort and who always tends to be at the forefront of animation technology in their country. Now Dragon Half may look cheap at first glance but dont let that fool you... The visual style of the series is firmly in line with the visual style of the original manga albeit slightly tweaked to bring the wackiness of the material from a nine up to an eleven. Faces go off model on purpose. Key frames occasionally drag on a little too long on purpose. All of the superdeformed chibi humor and the janky movement that follows is on purpose. Dragon Half was intended from its inception to be a wacky random gag comedy and while the manga did feature a longer and more focused storyor so Ive heard I havent actually read it yet the anime condenses everything into two episodes of hyperfast comedy that uses its visual derpiness to the best possible effect. Because this is Production IG a company that never says fuck it under any circumstances a ton of effort went into the visual direction and cinematography even if it is difficult to appreciate that what with the breakneck pace of the story. The backgrounds are intricate and lively even when theyre featured in the shortest shots possible and their budget allocation game is top notch... From shot to shot IG knows exactly how much money is needed at any given time and they never waste a single penny where its not required making for an overall pleasant aesthetic that supports the pacing and comedy perfectly. I dont have a lot to say about the music except that the ending theme is one of the strangest Ive ever come across. The song each episode closes on is literally just the main character singing nonstop gibberish nonsense over a medley of famous Beethoven tunes. I dont know how I feel about this except that its undeniably memorable and it stands out among every other ending theme Ive heard. The english dub was an early ADV effort which shouldnt be surprising given their once firmly held reputation as the company that would pick up anything the other companies wouldnt but I dont mean that as a negative at all because one way or another ADV at the time were the perfect doorstep for this OVA to land on. A lot of Japanese humor relies on wordplay as a lot of Japanese words can have wildly different meanings depending on context and pronunciation so a lot of jokes wind up getting lost in translation... But thankfully ADV is usually pretty good at working around that finding decent English replacement puns or just omitting them entirely in a way that doesnt draw attention to itself. And because this is an early ADV project its also yet another time capsule of classic anime voice actors from that particular stable. To match the hyper jokeasecond comedy style and the main characters hyper motormouthing the protagonist Mink was played by the legendary Jessica Calvello who employs the exact same brand of insane delivery that would later injure her voice box while recording for Excel Saga. Calvello is one of my favorite voice actors of all time for her ability to spit like Eminem while still showing off her undeniable acting chops and thankfully only voicing two episodes of this show means she didnt have to hurt herself to pull it off. On the other hand you have her rival the haughty princess Vena played by one of my least favorite actors Amanda Winn Lee. Her voice has always sounded rocky to me outside of Evangelion but due to the nature of the material she works fine here. Still out of the entire ADV crew I feel like Jessica Boone would have been a better choice. The rest of the early gang is here with Andy McAvin and Brett Weaver playing hilariously incompetent minions and Tiffany Grant making a hilarious last minute cameo. Its a fun dub it does an admirable job representing the crazy source material and I highly recommend checking out. So Im pretty damn sick right now. Its not covid its just a cold but because I have been taking enough NyQuil in the last few days to kill a horse I figured Id put another far more serious review Im preparing for on pause to tackle some good old fashioned random gag comedy I noticed about a week ago that Amazon Prime had Dragon Half an ancient OVA that Im honestly surprised hasnt been lost to time like Puni Puni Poemy so I figured Id revisit it and try to figure out why this thirty year old bite size oddity is still in print to this day still easily available online and still so wellreceived that even Amazon Prime is still streaming it. Also NyQuil. NyQuil was definitely influencing this decision. At first glance Dragon Half was exactly how I remembered it... A mileaminute hyper comedy that keeps throwing jokes at you with every breath it takes to a point that just by the law of averages you have to laugh at some of it. Like I said before the voice acting complemented the delivery of the comedy perfectly and while there were a fair amount of jokes that fell flat none of them were particularly annoying or cringey. It was to put it simply the kind of humor Im perfectly willing to enjoy for exactly two episodes. But then I started noticing something and while I did pause to wonder if this was just my deliriously overmedicated mind talking but there seemed to be at least some small hint of sophistication to the comedy. Nothing terribly deep mind you but it felt noticeably elevated compared to other gag comedies Ive seen before. For one thing theres nothing truly random about it. Sure its a wacky as fuck premise but it all fits together in some bizarre way that fills out the setting. Speaking of the setting the story is taking place in a generic RPG world but a human and a dragon can raise a family together peacefully in a decent looking house with no issues there are elements of modern day technology sprinkled in and it just feels... Right. Like all of these outthere anachronistic details just are what they are and none of it feels especially worldbreaking. It become apparent pretty quickly that this show is highly selfaware and while a lot of that comes from the original mangas tongueincheek attempts at parodying fantasy RPGs like Dragon Quest and the then recently translated for Japan Dungeons and Dragons where its literally a story of a teenage halfdragon girl going on an epic quest to conquer a dark lord so she can have a chance of sleeping with the celebrity shes been stalking it really does feel like the writers involved had so much material to work with just out of the genre alone that they didnt need to resort to random bullshit to entertain the viewer. There is so much about the fantasy RPG genre thats ripe for parody and while I can definitely think of examples that have been done it never feels like its been done enough and true to form there are some surprisingly well crafted jokes in this show that Ive never seen anywhere else. Remember the slime who became human to marry the king? She was attracted to him because he has a balding vaguely slimeshaped head. Thats fucking funny. The kings court magician uses dry ice to create the mysterious fog that heralds his entrance and thats fucking funny. Seeing a knight and a dragon as this adorable married couple enjoying the domestic life as dedicated parents is inherently funny and there are jokes like this throughout the OVA... Some are presented right up front some are hidden in sight gags almost all of it is pretty tightly timed and unless you were watching with subtitles I think youd be hardpressed to find any jokes that were lost in translation... The humor in this show could be potentially abrasive for some viewers and I get if you wound up noping out of it really early out of annoyance but I stand by it. I think the reason this OVA has outlived titles like Puni Puni Poemy is that rather than parodying the anime trends of the time the humor in Dragon Half has a more timeless quality to it... The genre its parodying has defiantly stood the test of time lending a sense of relevance to these damn near thirty year old jokes and fastpaced slapstick gag comedy is a permanent anime staple whether you like it or not. Of course having said all that there is a story to this OVA... It can be kind of hard to decipher if you arent paying attention but even in episode one alone there is a strong story being told full of recognizable beats unexpected twists and a distinctly coherent plot that only starts to go off the rails in episode 2. There was an attempt made to make it feel like this breakneck pacing was just part of the joke but no matter how you look at it its hard not to see the outline of what was once a genuine epic. Like I said its not their fault they had to condense the first two story arcs of a seven volume manga into a two episode anime... Which was supposed to be four episodes but got cut back due to lack of interest... But while they may have failed to tell the original story as it deserved I feel like they accidentally created something even more impressive. Breaking Dragon Half down to its simplest elements what Production IG created whether intentionally or not is the purest example of an abridged series that Ive ever seen and hell it might even hold up as the original abridged series. I know some people are going to want to point their fingers at Ghost Stories but that was never an abridged series. Stephen Foster might have rewritten the dialogue in a manner thats similar to most popular abridged series but he didnt abridge anything. When you abridge a story you shorten and simplify in order to make it more digestible for a certain audience. Wishbone books are abridged. This is what abridged series on were like before they evolved to the point of rewriting and transforming the material in the creators own image but what Dragon Half did is closer to the original Yugioh abridging... The writers cut out a ton of material compressed everything down to the barest possible plot points and used comedy... Most of which was taken directly from the manga... To create a new experience thats both representative of and mutually exclusive to the original property. As a result it doesnt have the strongest or most immediately coherent story on its own but its more than funny enough to be worth an hour of your time and hey it DID drum up enough interest in the manga to get it released stateside. Speaking of which you can find that manga series in English from Seven Seas entertainment and you can find the anime pretty much anywhere you go to find anime. The original ADV and more recent Eastern Star DVDs are available and affordable from several online retailers and it can be streamed on Amazon Crunchyroll and Youtube. Yes the version is technically illegal but you get some cool retro trailers out of it. I suppose its fair to say this is not the definitive Dragon Half experience and it would probably plummet from relevancy pretty hard if a more accurate traditional series adaptation were ever released but for what it is I think this is a pretty neat OVA. Even when completely divorced from the original manga and presented on its own with no context whatsoever its still managed to stand the test of time where so many similar and in some cases far younger projects have fallen by the wayside. The overall style in terms of the visuals pacing and comedy is probably not for everyone which is to say nothing of the fact that comedy is already subjective in the first place but I honestly wouldnt be surprised if certain viewers found this kind of anime in general to be abrasive and highly annoying and if it kept up this pace for the length of a full series Id be inclined to agree. But for only two episodes clocking in at less than an hour of material this basket case has just enough substance in it to be enjoyable without overstaying its welcome and it certainly doesnt drag on. I give Dragon Half a 6/10.