Rating summary

Movie		2.0
Video		3.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.5
Overall		2.5

To Love-Ru: Complete Collection Blu-ray Movie Review

Love conquers all?

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman March 14, 2014

As To Love-Ru gets underway, some anime fans may wonder if they’ve wandered into some weird animated reboot of the iconic battle in the high tech valleys of the Death Star in Star Wars. The opening sequence of the anime was obviously based on the George Lucas classic, which may lead some to believe they’re about to enter an old fashioned space opera pitting valiant heroes clad in white against nefarious villains all dressed in black, with all of them tooling about in ultra sleek looking spacecraft. Well, while it can’t be denied that a lot of To Love-Ru is indeed old fashioned, and even hackneyed by the often predictable standards of anime, it’s only partially about those aforementioned elements. This is yet another outing that posits an extraterrestrial female suddenly entering the life of an initially confused human male, with hilarity and action supposedly ensuing. And in fact To Love-Ru actually turns out to be fairly amusing quite a bit of the time in its portrayal of hormonal human Rito Yuuki, one of those anime staples who can barely contain the blood flow to his nether regions but who is simultaneously completely incapable of ultimately acting upon his urges. Rito has nurtured a near lifelong crush on one of his young schoolmates, a pretty girl named Haruna. Haruna had defended Rito long ago when Haruna was suspected of some bad behavior at school (the anime is frankly a little murky about this incident), a defense which immediately sparked love in Rito’s heart. But Rito has been spectacularly unable to voice his affections to Haruna, despite at least occasionally trying to. A fairly funny montage shows a series of increasingly improbable obstacles preventing Rito from his goal, things as varied as a truck and an elephant slamming into the poor boy. The latest sticking point turns out to be what appears like a spaceship crashing perilously close to Rito just as he’s about to finally be able to spill his guts to Haruna. Later that evening when Rito is nursing his wounds in his steamy bathtub, an even weirder phenomenon crops up when a buxom (and completely naked) female just materializes right there next to him. Rito’s hands innocently end up on the girl’s bosom, which turns out to be a marriage proposal in the alien’s home world. And thus the crazy antics of To Love-Ru get underway.

The girl turns out to be an alien named Lala, who comes from a planet known as Deviluke. Lala isn’t just any alien, she is the daughter of her planet’s king, and like any good strong willed princess (think Brave, transported to Japan), she’s none too keen on her father having prearranged suitable candidates for her to marry. Lala also happens to be a skilled inventor, and one of her little gadgets actually allowed her to teleport right smack dab into Rito’s bathtub where his infelicitous hand placement has now betrothed the girl to him.

That hand placement turns out to be Rito’s way out of the engagement, since Deviluke morés evidently allow for fondling to also serve as a petition to break up. But just as he failed for years to divulge his true feelings to Haruna, Rito is unable to “unconsummate” his “proposal” to Lala in the proscribed three day period where an annulment of sorts can be facilitated. In the meantime, Rito mistakenly furthers what Lala perceives as his interest in her by saving the hapless young girl from a contingent of Devilukean guards who show up to transport her back to her native planet. That escape attempt is actually also witnessed by Haruna, who comes to believe that Rito has found a girlfriend, unaware of how he really feels about her.

Things get considerably more complex when it turns out that despite his obvious lack of experience (in every sense of the word), Rito is indeed seen as a reasonable enough alternative for a husband, and that to completely prove his mettle, he will need to defeat the other suitors that Lala’s father had already set up to try to win her hand. A number of tangential characters soon enter the fray, and To Love-Ru becomes increasingly farcical and manic as the first season proceeds. The series in undeniably derivative in several key areas, but it also has a just as undeniably entertaining goofy sense of humor that saves the show from feeling completely like a retread.

However, the geniality of some of the humor (juvenile though much of it is) is at least partially offset by the series’ overall kind of tedious pace. This is a show that probably could have easily been wrapped up in half the episodes of just the first season alone, let alone the OVAs and subsequent reboots which followed. To Love-Ru also suffers from an anomaly that tends to afflict other similar anime, namely a lot of the supporting characters tend to be more interesting than the focal pair. This ends up being a passable time killer that has a few decent laughs scattered through its first season, but which never really ultimately rises to any appreciable heights. Maybe Lala should have looked into inventing a more innovative premise.

To Love-Ru: Complete Collection Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

To Love-Ru is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Sentai Filmworks with an AVC encoded 1080i transfer in 1.78:1. This series was originally produced in 2008 and while this technically may not be an upscale (I have no authoritative information), it certainly is far from a great looking high definition presentation. Part of this is due to the lackluster animation, which frequently treats backgrounds like they're sketches made by a third grader. Character designs are at least agreeable enough, and when Rito has moments of arousal or fits of pique, there are some amusing animated consequences (as shown in several of the screenshots accompanying this review). While there's nothing as horrible as stairstepping on the line detail, there are repeated anomalies with things like letters (and occasionally with line detail itself) becoming unstable, no doubt due to the interlaced presentation. This creates a kind of quasi-shimmer at times that is quite noticeable. Colors look pretty good here, if never overwhelmingly vivid and saturated. All in all, while this is watchable, it's far from ideal.

To Love-Ru: Complete Collection Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

To Love-Ru's lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mix (in Japanese only) is quite busy and noisy at times, but remains well prioritized, delivering both dialogue and effects with good fidelity and some surprisingly wide dynamic range. The music in this show is fairly annoying (one of the closing themes is about the glories of polka dots), but sounds fine in this lossless environment.

To Love-Ru: Complete Collection Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Clean Opening Animation (1080i; 1:32)


• Clean Closing Animations (1080i; 3:04)

To Love-Ru: Complete Collection Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

If you've been a fan of anime for a while, you've seen most of the elements of To Love-Ru before, and usually in much better shows. There's nothing downright horrible here, but much of it is resolutely predictable, and there's quite a bit of filler material making the first season seem longer than it already is. That's countered by some occasionally pretty funny humor and an overall manic feel that plays like classic farce at times. The video component is the weak link in the technical presentation, though supplements are once again at a bare minimum.