Over the Rainbow Vol. #01

By Jarred Pine     March 08, 2005
Release Date: January 12, 2005



Creative Talent
Writer/Artist:Keiko Honda
Translated by:Akiko Yabuki
Adapted by:

What They Say
Arou and Keita are two clueless lawyers whose law office serves all manner of zany characters with way-out problems. Things get even crazier when they meet Key, a young woman with amnesia. Can our heroes help Key retrieve her lost memories...and does she want them to?

The Review
Packaging:
The cover features a nice illustration of our three main characters standing outside in the snow and looking in an upwards direction toward the cover. The logo is along the top and it really looks cheesy. The logo is the title with rainbow colors highlighting the edge of the text. The “Original Manga” stamp is in the bottom right corner and creator credits in the bottom left. Back cover features another illustration of Key with the title as the background image. Inside are volume and chapter headers with illustrations and a character profile at the beginning of the book.

Art:
The artwork is pretty standard shoujo with blurred eyes and scatterings of flowers and tears. I noticed a lot of panels that were just blank, with maybe a couple text bubbles in them. Overall there seemed to be a lot of white space and not a lot of background art. The character designs stay pretty much on model most of the time, although I did notice hair color changing quite often from white to black to grey.

Text/SFX:
SFX are translated and subtitled. The subtitles are about the same size as the original SFX text and are placed in a way that minimizes intruding on the artwork. There isn’t a lot of SFX, so this works out just fine.

The translation felt a little rough. There was an overuse of the “. . ” to connect sentences that maybe should have been separate. It gave the impression of a lot of run on sentences which didn’t sit right with me. The words after the connecting dots had random capitalization, which just made the text look amateurish. There’s also an excessive use of bolding certain words in the text. There were a couple errors with mixing up he/she and Mrs./Mr..

Contents (Watch out spoilers ahead):
Over the Rainbow is a one volume collection of 5 shoujo stories that attempt to tell a sweet story about a team of lawyers, Arou and Keita, and their amnesiac administrative assistant, Key. The first three stories are about 3 different clients that the law firm has to deal with. While I thought the first two were semi-touching stories about family and the crises that they have to sometimes deal with, the third one is utterly boring.

The fourth story attempts to add in the typical shoujo drama as Key starts to regain her memories. However, since there was no character development at all in the previous chapters this big moment comes off extremely flat. The conflict in this revelation is a complete joke and nothing is revealed about Key’s past. The last story deals with Key and Arou, who are now married and living in an apartment complex, as they deal with a rude neighbor. Again, there’s no development, a sex scene that was just awkward (there was no nudity for those wondering), and it attempts a silly twist that is completely telegraphed earlier on.

The pace through these stories are very swift, which didn’t allow much to sink in and in the end were pretty forgettable. We don’t really ever get to know any of the characters, which really makes the big dramatic moment in chapter 4 completely fall flat. Had the book stuck to just the silly encounters with strange clients, it might have been more interesting.

Comments
In the end, Over the Rainbow has trouble figuring out if it wants to be a slice-of-life manga or something bigger and more dramatic. What is supposed to be the climax in chapter 4 isn’t pulled off very well because of the lack of any developments in the previous three stand alone chapters. As soon as I had closed the book I had completely forgotten everything and found nothing really to discuss.