FILM : The Spirit of Wonder - Miss China's Ring (a.k.a. The Melancholy of Miss China, 1992, Japan)

Quite possibly one of the most obscure yet entertaining anime one-offs released in the US, The Spirit of Wonder is a Miyazaki-esque OVA short produced to tie-in with the serialised manga in the early 90s. For a direct-to-video production, the film has its outstanding moments : the animation is generally superb, the soundtrack can be really beautiful (in particular during the final scene with the moon), and the story is a unique semi-steampunk adventure. While not perfect, and rather sluggish in pace, the short is well worth a watch for the aforementioned points alone. Unfortunately, I only currently have the hokey English dub (although the video source used was the high quality Japanese DVD) in which most of the voice actors are Americans attempting British accents; but hopefully it'll interest people enough to track down the much more interesting manga as well as the original Japanese dub of this OVA.

Enjoy!

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• 1992
• anime
• Spirit
• of
• Wonder
• China
• moon
• obscure
• manga
• serialised
• steampunk
• Britain

[Kiddcade]

I own this on DVD. took me years to find!



[Neurodisco77]

I really loved the late Takeshi Anno version, particularly the two China short features.

They even improved the manga source

[Neurodisco77]

Thank you very much for giving us the opportunity to watch this story

[RetroToledo]

In the US, aside from this OVA getting a release on VHS, LD and faintly on DVD, the Miss China stories were published as individual comic book issues and later as a graphic novel by Dark Horse, but they were the only stories from the main Spirit of Wonder manga to be published in English here.

[RetroToledo]

Spirit of Wonder itself was a rather lengthy 402 paged manga that focused primarily on romance and discovery through science and invention (of which is pretty silly if you notice what they're doing). Miss China's story though really only covers three chapters of the book, the rest is devoted to other characters and timelines including "The Scientific Boys Club" and their trip to Mars which was adapted into a later OVA in the early 2000's.

[RetroToledo]

I think the English dub is enjoyable at least. It was done by an outfit over here called "Coastal Carolina" back when they were producing English dubs of many anime titles that were licensed to "AnimEigo" in the 90's. A later Japanese DVD release of this OVA also included the dub that AnimEigo had to proudly state on their site for the film's linear notes. They weren't necessarily aiming for a more British feel, but somewhat left it ambiguous where the story might take place.