Okami-San & Her Seven Companions: Complete Series Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.5
Extras		2.5
Overall		4.0

Okami-San & Her Seven Companions: Complete Series Blu-ray Movie Review

Thrice upon a time.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman March 17, 2012

The world of fairy tales has been a ripe one for revisiting by any number of recent creative types in film and television, though with lackluster box office for such fare as Red Riding Hood and respectable but not blockbuster ratings for ABC’s Once Upon a Time and NBC’s Grimm (filmed here in my hometown of Portland, Oregon), it’s obvious that simply alluding to beloved stories from childhood isn’t enough to guarantee success. Anime visits the world of fairy tales perhaps more often than other idioms, partially attributable to the built in connection between animated outings and storybook adaptation stretching back to Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Contemporary animes almost always deal with their source material with a dash (and sometimes more than a dash) of post-modern irony, and that’s certainly the case with Okami-san and Her Seven Companions, a piece that takes a little Little Red Riding Hood, a dash of Snow White, a hint of Cinderella and a handful of other vaunted fairy tales of yore and mixes them together into a fairly conventional shōnen dealing with a bunch of outcast youth working together to form a family of sorts, as they take on tasks to help other kids they know. The series offers a rather mordant sense of humor, one that helps its overall tone immensely, especially with regard to its ultra-sarcastic narrator, who frequently disses the very characters she’s describing and isn’t above lampooning some of the tropes of anime itself. When the flat chested heroine Ryoko Okami is glimpsed in a shower, the narrator drily intones, “With a chest like that, this is more like fan dis service!” Now that’s a funny line, but it also comes at the expense of one of the characters the audience is supposed to be rooting for, and that’s part of the trouble with Okami-san and Her Seven Companions: we never know if we’re supposed to be laughing at or with these struggling characters.

Ryoko Okami is one of three main characters in Okami-san and Her Seven Companions, a kind of masculine girl whose gruff exterior has earned her the nickname of The Wolf. Underneath Okami-san’s tough as nails façade beats a sensitive heart of gold, but you wouldn’t know it by the way she acts. Okami-san’s aide de camp is a diminutive sprite known as Ringo Akai, a somewhat manipulative young girl who wears—yes, you guessed it—a red riding hood. Into the lives of these two oddly matched females stumbles Ryoshi Morino, an almost pathologically shy young man who happens to have an overwhelming crush on Ryoko. It turns out that the two girls are part of a high school club called the Otogi High School Bank, which doesn’t traffic in monies but instead trades favors for students in need with the understanding that those students will do return service at some future point. There’s nothing really ominous or portentous about any of the “deals” that Okami-san and Her Seven Companions features, and so the series is more often than not a kind of sweet natured, goofily comic enterprise that focuses on character interactions rather than huge involving plot arcs.

The series features a glut of supporting characters including both the other members of the Otogi High School Bank as well as the various “clients” who come to the bank for help. The first episode sees Ryoshi recruited to join the Bank and it’s revealed that while he may be inordinately shy in human interactions, he’s also a whiz with a really cool slingshot contraption attached to his arm, from which he’s able to fire projectiles with amazing accuracy. That of course comes in handy in several subsequent episodes when he’s forced to deal with various bad folks who are out to do harm to this or that client. In a not exactly unexpected development, Okami-san also has battle skills and so the two mismatched ostensibly star-crossed lovers work together to defeat common enemies, while Ringo looks on and tries to figure out how to get these two to not just realize they’re in love, but to voice those feelings to each other.

Okami-San and Her Seven Companions is yet another low key, laid back enterprise (despite a few rounds of fisticuffs and/or slingshot battles) that requires a certain amount of patience and a laissez faire attitude to totally enjoy. The series is perhaps most interesting from the “meta” angle the ubiquitous narration provides, though as funny as it often is, it also introduces a distancing effect which keeps the viewer at arm’s length from these characters. That’s too bad in a way, for as obviously redolent of fairy tale characters that many of this series’ leading players are, they’re also strangely human, especially with regard to their foibles. It might have worked better had the narration been just slightly less arch so that some actual emotional tethering between the audience and the show could have blossomed.

Okami-San & Her Seven Companions: Complete Series Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Okami-San and Her Seven Companions is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of FUNimation Entertainment with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1. This is generally a great looking high definition presentation with bright and bold colors that are extremely well saturated, sharp and distinct line detail for the most part and an overall very clear looking image. The series does have a tendency toward softness a lot of the time, due both to its impressionistic background paintings but also due to some less than precisely animated elements that give a just slightly slapdash character to some of the proceedings. There aren't any incredibly innovative techniques on display here, but this certainly looks well defined and beautifully colorful, albeit within a pretty traditional framework.

Okami-San & Her Seven Companions: Complete Series Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Okami-San and Her Seven Companions has two lossless audio options, the original Japanese language track in a Dolby TrueHD 2.0 stereo mix, and an English dub in a Dolby TrueHD 5.1 surround mix. The Japanese track is a little quieter than the English dub, especially in terms of some of the voice work, which seems just a tad subtler (in tone, anyway) than the typically raucous (and sometimes screechy) FUNimation dub. The English language track does offer some fantastic immersion, and not just in the battle sequences which dot most episodes. The narration is decidedly more sarcastic sounding (with a faux British accent) in the English dub, and is presented front and center all of the time. The appealing music is considerably opened up in the surround mix and populates the side and rear channels very nicely.

Okami-San & Her Seven Companions: Complete Series Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Episode 1 Commentary features Colleen Clinkenbeard and Chuck Huber. Colleen directed and Chuck was one of the writers. While this is yet another raucous FUNimation commentary, this one is pretty funny, as the two joke and laugh over the creation of the English version of the series. This does get off track fairly consistently, and it's a pretty noisy affair despite only having two participants, but there is some interesting information imparted here about voice casting and the process of reworking the show in English.


• Episode 6 Commentary features Brina Polencia, who voices Ryoko and Monica Rial, who voices Ringo. This is a little more laid back than the Episode 1 Commentary, but the two get into how they feel about their characters. It is more than a little funny when these two insist the fairy tale angle of the series is done in a subtle manner.


• Tokyo International Anime Fair Promotional Video (1080i; 2:47) is a brief introduction to the series, in Japanese with English subtitles.


• Promotional Video (HD; 1:44). In Japanese with English subtitles.


• Original TV Commercials (1080i; 1:08). In Japanese with English subtitles.


• U.S. Trailer (HD; 00:59)


• Textless Opening Song (HD; 1:32)


• Textless Closing Song (HD; 1:32)


• Trailers for other FUNimation Releases

Okami-San & Her Seven Companions: Complete Series Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Okami-San and Her Seven Companions is an undeniably sweet and good natured show, but it is most likely going to disappoint anyone who thinks that Ryoshi and Ryoko are going to be some kind of new action oriented Odd Couple, out to smite bad guys. This is a much "smaller", more intimate, series that gets by on an abundance of charm and some considerable wit, especially with regard to the often very funny narration, rather than any huge plot machinations. If you simply relax and let the slowly evolving relationship between Ryoshi and Ryoko run its course, there's a lot to enjoy in this series, especially if it's approached with suitable expectations. The animation style is bright and expressive if not especially innovative, and the soundtrack offers some great sounding music to augment dialogue and effects. This two Blu-ray set also has some decent supplements, so with sufficient awareness of the issues discussed above, Okami-san and Her Seven Companions comes Recommended.