Customer Reviews

The Adventures of the Mini Goddess - The Gan-Chan Files (Vol. 1)

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

It's not animation that will change the world or make you think. And that's the point. Adventures of the Mini-Goddess is a foray into cute, harmless fun, and there's nothing wrong with that.

Fifteen episodes of your favorite Goddesses, Belldandy, Urd, and Skuld, as they explore the house in a diminuitive size, and have adventures with their friend (and constant foil for their mischevious pranks) Gan-Chan.

Missions to the moon, weddings among household appliances, and battles with giant moldy monsters (remember kids, just toss the moldy cake and don't eat it), as well as adventures in weight loss, and a game of baseball, it's good clean fun.

This is the funniest little anime bits I've seen in a long time. I really laughed hard. While the animation is good and consistant, it's not amazing as some purists may want it. Being 'shorts' allows for funny genre parodies that would probably have failed if they were any longer. While these bits are part of the Ah! My Goddess universe, there really is no need to know anything about A!MG to watch. If you need some comic relief, pick up a copy of Mini Goddess. You'll find yourself, for the first time, feeling sorry for a rat.

This is the cutest, funniest, most adorable thing you will probably ever see. I've had import VCD's of this for the past couple of years and have watched them over and over. I'm excited that it's now coming out with english subtitles so that I can fully appreciate some of the jokes. Even without the translations, the stories are so easy to follow that anyone can enjoy them. The goddesses and Gan-chan lampoon everything from Godzilla to Galaxy Express 999, and from the Wright Brothers to the first landing on the moon. What makes these stories so funny is that you can never tell how much is real and how much is just in the characters' imaginations. It's really the anime version of Muppet Babies, just done much, much better. If you like silly parody anime, you won't be disappointed in this.

I watched first the Ah! My Goddess ovas, then the movie when it came out. I was touched by the romantic story and character design, all which make the sensitive side in me get beaten up by the sports jock side of me. The straight truth, however, concerning the Mini-Goddesses and Ganchan is that it throws out everything story wise from the movie and series,(except the goddesses and their presence), for the sake of comedy. So if you dislike seeing the beautiful goddesses shrunk down to the size of cell phones, the near complete absence of K1,(inside joke for japanese language students, Keichi), the overwhelming presence of a rat, and a main focus on just Urd and Skald,. .....then skip Mini-Goddess.
If you said no to the above, super.
Now to the grits of the Mini-Goddesses. First off, as mentioned above, you can get a taste of the series on the dvd of the Ah! My Goddess movie.(great movie). If the hook sets in properly, then continue on to the Mini-Goddesses dvd. Each episode is approximately five minutes long,(not counting credits), and is basically stand alone story lines involving Urd, Skald, and the rat, Ganchan. The stories are as grounded in truth as much as Ronald McDonald is acclaimed as a serious dramatic actor. To give a point of reference, the Mini-Goddesses emerged from a panel cartoon consisting of perhaps three to four panels; hence their shortness, lack of continuity, and hardly any grounding in reality.
The complaint that it has an educational slant is entirely out of base. One of the running gags of the show is that Belldandy pops up and gives real short lectures,(it happens maybe twice?). Utterly, Mini-Goddesses is a straight up comedy that while often time using a poor rodent as a punching bag, its still repeatedly entertaining.

At

This is the weirdest thing ever. The 3 goddesses of the ah my goddess series use their powers to become small! They hang out with this talking rat and do stuff!! Its funny but weird as hell. To get a taste for it and to see if you want to continue watching, I would buy the Ah My Goddess movie dvd, which has the first episode of the mini goddess series.(in my opinion I actually thought mini goddess wasn't that funny and kinda dumb)

"The Adventures of Mini-Goddess" (sic) are not so much a continuation of the "Oh My Goddess!" storyline as a detour around them. Where the OAVs (direct-to-video releases) and the movie dealt with the romance between Keichi, the lonely college student, and his goddess girlfriend Belldandy, the OAVs revolve around Belldandy's sisters and their adventures with one of the household rats.

If this sounds a bit odd, it is. The stories are all quite cute - it's the main selling point in the advertisements - and light, but they also tend to lose their spontaneity quite quickly and devolve into various forms of mischief that can be wreaked on the rodent sidekick. While references to other classic anime and monster movies abound ("Neon Genesis Evangelion" and "Godzilla" come to mind), it seems that the series loses it's focus on the line between entertainment and education for little kids (tutorials and morals do pop up a lot) and nostalgia for grown-up anime fans. The result makes it really hard to spot the target audience here. Given that each of the episodes also weighs in at around seven minutes, two of those minutes being taken up by the opening dialogue establishing the premise and the closing credits, it also makes it hard to get involved in any one story before careening off into another (even given the preponderance of 2- and 3-part stories).

Technically, the DVD is fine, although the extras are minimal. There's a quick description of who Belldandy is (hardly necessary given how little she shows up) and an image gallery for her, but that's it. Even the menus come up a little dry by comparison to a lot of Pioneer's other recent work.

On the whole, I find it hard to dislike this series as it works so hard at light, funny cuteness, but it makes it really hard to like it either. "Oh My Goddess!" fans may like it or not based on what drew them to the series, but if your predilection for anime is deep, epic plot I recommend giving this one a miss.

This is the first volume of 4 Mini goddess series along with Beldandy, Urd, and Sculd files. As you may know, this is a kind of parody version of the original "Ah My Goddess" series where the original characters are miniaturized with exaggerated personalities of their own. Gan, the rat living in their house, joins as a hilarious sidekick and sometimes literally as a experimental rat for testing Urd's and Sculd's untrustworthy magic. Like three other volumes, this is super cute, dangerously pretty, and sometimes cheesy funny. Comparing with other volumes, however, this one is a bit focusless. Another pitfall of this volume is the Japanese voice of Beldandy is not the one who acted in other series. Every episode, such as "Ah My Goddess" the TV series, "Oh My Goddess" the OVA version, and "Ah My Goddess" the movie version, the voice of Beldandy was... well I forgot her name... but anyway, always the same person with the whispering and soft tone. But for some reason, in this volume someone else was acting for the Beldandy in Japanese, that makes distracted. But, don't worry too much, in other Mini Goddess series, the original Beldandy voice is back. My guess was they just made this first volume and found that the Beldandy voice must be restored with the original one. The Gabira episode is somewhat needs explanation, especially for viewers who has no exposure to the original Gojira and Ultraman animation. Throughout the Mini Goddess series, they often bring themes from other vary famous Japanese animations. The Gabira episodes are the good example. The original animation where the Gabira theme is from is the Ultraman. The animation is kind of old Japanese animation where a Ultraman is fighting against many monster dinosaurs. Gojira is the king of such monsters. And apparently, transformed rat Gan, Gabira is a joke for the original Gojira. Moreover, when Sculd makes a robot against Gabira, she calls it as Mecha Gabira. Mecha Gojira is also in the original film and here the funny Mecha Gabira reminds that. Also, the background music and many features of the episodes have great similarity with the famous Japanese animation Majinga. So, what I want to say is, if you find some of episodes are off the track and don't make much sense to you, it should because only people who know the original animations can laugh for those episodes, finding stupid funny resemblance between Mini Goddess episodes and the other original animations.

This DVD will not break in any new social thoughts or change how you think about the world. Rather, it will just simply make you laugh. As previously noted, the characters from the Oh My Goddess! anime series return in a mini form to have short adventures. Most are very humorous and off the wall. The dvd contains 12 of them so you are sure to find one you like. I highly recommend that anyone who is looking for light-hearted fun check this one out!

I bought this on a whim, having seen the OAV version of OMG recently and wondering what this was.

And the editorial review is correct. This series is funny, but a bit shallow and lacks the depth of the OAV series. Despite the premise, miniaturized goddesses toying with a morose rat, only a few episodes a genuinely funny.

Most seem to teether between satirizing/ridiculing genres of both movies/books and only succeed partially in doing that.

The funniest ones I found was the 2-part episode about the 'Godzilla'-rat, which (with the longer running time) succeeds
in making fun of the whole 'monster' rampage thing.

I would suggest renting this, before you buy it.

Mini is among my favorite anime series ever made. The story of AMG-Mini is that the goddesses can reduce their size down to about the size of a small mouse. They then have various funny and interesting adventures. Mini uses a super deformed style and this alone causes some of the comedy. The main characters are Gan-Chan, Urd, and Skuld. Belldandy and Keichi make very small appearances every so often however. I greatly enjoyed this anime and reccomend it to everyone. Even though you may not enjoy AMG you will definetly love this series.