Piyo Piyo Productions presents: What’s Michael? OVA 1-2 9/6/17 https://www.otakubell.com/ Project notes: What’s Michael? He’s a cat, thanks for asking! In fact, he’s a pretty normal cat (except that he has kinda disturbing flat human teeth instead of cat fangs, but whatevs). Its just the people around him are totally insane. For example, in the second OVA, Micahel has several encounters with Dr. Richard Kimble – The Fugitive himself – who does something nice for Michael, then plays a trick on him and runs away. BTW, the second OVA was made in 1988, five years before the movie remake of The Fugitive, which makes this plot device all the weirder. Oh, and sometimes he isn’t a normal cat, and he plays baseball with other pets, but he doesn’t talk, because that would just be silly. Also, Michael gets kidnapped by a live-action singing... alien, I guess? Or a guy from the future? What I’m trying to say is, you should watch What’s Michael. There is also a TV series, which I for one am now interested in seeing as well. That wonderful positivity out of the way: I sincerely hope that whoever mastered the first OVA was fired, because this is a whole new low point in quality. Much of the OVA has these rounded black borders around various corners of the screen, which should have been matted out. I did the best I could to trim out some of the mess, but every scene is wildly misframed from every other scene. And check out around frame 5400, at the around the 3:45 mark. Yeah, that’s the top of the frame at the bottom of the screen. And it happens a lot. Pathetic. And scene cuts? I’ve seen rough cuts on discs before, but here’s a clear one at just before the 10 minute mark, around frame 14384. That’s right – they didn’t even bother to clear the frames. Fortunately, the second OVA is much improved, exhibiting none of these issues. Whatever. Unfiltered high-bitrate DVD included for archival purposes.