The Intro

How would you react if one day out of nowhere, a freak accident created six clones of yourself, each one representing one aspect of your personality to the extreme? Luckily, none of us will ever have to answer that question but in this anime, that question is not only asked... it is answered.

The Story

In this anime, our star is a young girl named Nana. She is a very average girl in the ninth grade at her jr. high. She gets average grades, has a best friend, gets teased by other girls and has a crush on a boy at her school but she is much too shy to actually do anything about it.

The only thing that is slightly peculiar about her life is that her grandfather is an inventor who creates tons of things that will never ever be useful and one such invention goes haywire and creates six copies of Nana!

Five episodes are shown to us on this volume all of them revolving around two things: Nana and how she learns to cope with having six copies of herself, each one of them an extreme aspect of her personality. There's the angry Nana, the brainy Nana, the lazy Nana, the sensitive crybaby Nana, the flirty feminine Nana and finally the weird Nana... all of which suddenly develop the same crush as the original Nana has on the boy, Yuichi.

The second thing that the show constantly revolves around is the plot line where Nana is desperate to do well on her tests because in one year, she will be moving onto high school and she desperately wants to go to the same high school as Yuichi so that they won't be separated and she can finally tell him how she feels about him though the thought occurs to me...... why not tell him now ya dork?!?

The Good and the Bad

OK, flat out... this series is bad. I mean, really bad. I haven't seen a series this poorly executed in months! The characters are under developed (but to be fair, when you have seven versions of one character, how developed can they get?) and the plots are all very weak. It was barely all I could do to force myself to move from one episode to the next because I hated to think what stupid idea they were going to pull out next to force this snail like pace along.

The animation is cute though and so I have to give it that much credit.

Dub vs. Sub

I listened to both the dub and sub track on this volume and neither one of them really struck me as anything special. I think the only thing that could be really mentioned as noteworthy is that Veronica Taylor had her work cut out for her in this series and she did a fantastic job with the script that was given to her.

In the original Japanese version of this series, each version of Nana was played by a different voice actress but in the American dub, instead of hiring seven different actors, Veronica Taylor had the job of playing each one which I can imagine was quite the difficult feat but she pulls it off very well and I have to give her major credit it for that.

Music

I really enjoyed the background music used in this volume though. It was really unobtrusive and made a lot of the scenes much more bearable but the opening and closing themes I really couldn't stand. The opening theme in particular is bad. Titled "Success, Success", it's lyrics are basically just a big pep talk about how it's important for Nana to skip everything that's fun in life (movies, comics, festivals, etc., etc.) and spend all of her time studying so that she can be with Yuichi. Definitely one of my least favorite anime songs that I've heard.

Extras

There are no extras on this volume.

Overall

This series is bad. Really bad and I have no problems giving it only two stars. Young kids may enjoy it and it is appropriate for them since there is nothing objectionable in it but I would warn just about anyone else to stay far away from this series. It's times like these that I hate being an anime reviewer because now I know that I still have 2 more volumes of this to watch. Bleh!

This show bombed in Japan and to me, it's obvious why.

Related Reviews

Nana 7 of 7 Vol. 2: Test Of Love
Nana 7 of 7 Vol. 3: Greatest American Heroes
Nana 7 of 7 Vol. 4: Heartbreak By The Numbers
Nana 7 of 7 Vol. 5: Eight Is Enough

©L.B. Bryant 2004

Recommended:
No

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: None of the Above
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 9 - 12