Review for Fruits Basket: Complete Collection (Review)
Wednesday, 8th February 2012, 17:41

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Introduction
It was a couple of series released here by MVM that turned my casual interest in anime into a full blown obsession. One was Love Hina, and the other was this, Fruits Basket. I’ll be the first to admit that Love Hina has dated, but even then, I could see that there was enough depth to Fruits Basket to ensure longevity. I reviewed Fruits Basket back in 2004, and looking back on those reviews now, I hardly recognise myself as the person who wrote them.

Fruits Basket has had something of a muddled history when it comes to UK retail. MVM had the series at first, but then the US licensor Funimation transferred the rights to their UK sister company Revelation. Revelation re-released the single volumes, and collected them into a deluxe artbox for a complete series release. In 2012, MVM have now regained the rights for Fruits Basket, and another Funimation title, Kiddy Grade, and are finally releasing them as budget collections in the UK, with Kiddy Grade appearing for the first time here as a collection. Eight years on, I’m eager to see if Fruits Basket is just as special as I once considered it to be, and also to see if MVM’s re-release has anything new to offer.

You would think that Tohru Honda has a hard life. She was recently orphaned when her mother was killed in a car accident, and had to move in with her grandfather. It got crowded enough when his family moved back in, but when the house had to be renovated, and there wasn’t enough room at his family’s place, Tohru offered to find somewhere else to live. That turns out to be a tent in the forest. But Tohru is resolutely upbeat, and rather than burden her best friends Arisa and Hana, she’s determined to keep her promise to her mother and finish high school, even if it means working her way through school, while living in a tent.

The trouble is that she’s pitched her tent on Sohma land. Yuki Sohma is in her class at school, the elegant, handsome young man who all the girls swoon over, but who keeps a resolute distance from everyone, never letting himself get too close. It turns out that he comes from an extensive and influential family, and they are surprised to learn that they have a squatter on their land. She’s a squatter they wind up rescuing when her tent is caught in a landslide. It also seems to be serendipitous, as Yuki’s house isn’t the most hospitable of residences, and he and his relative Shigure are badly in need of a housekeeper. The offer of a roof over her head seems heaven sent for Tohru, until Kyo Sohma returns from a retreat in the mountains, looking to pick a fight with his eternal rival Yuki, and oblivious to his surroundings. In the ensuing mayhem, disaster strikes, and the Sohma family’s darkest secret is revealed.

For the Sohma family is cursed. For generations, they have been afflicted with a condition that causes them to transform into the animals of the Chinese Zodiac when hugged by a member of the opposite sex. Yuki is the rat, Shigure is the dog, and following the legend of the animal that was tricked out of the Zodiac (and the cause of Kyo’s antagonism with Yuki), Kyo is the cat. Now Tohru will have to keep their secret if she is to remain among them. But there is far more to the curse than just the cute animals, and as Tohru lives among them, and meets the other members of the Sohma clan, she begins to learn the dark truths and tensions that keep them isolated and separate. But if she has the strength of will, she may just be able to help heal these damaged souls, and in the process find a place that she can call home.

Back in 2004, when anime cost £20 a disc, and the average release had just three or four episodes to it, Fruits Basket was astonishingly good value, released over four volumes, with six or seven episodes per disc, and extra features. These four discs are now collected into a budget collection that you can pick up at a price less than that of what a single volume would have set you back. The 26 episodes are distributed in a 6,6,7,7 format.

Picture
The transfer for Fruits Basket is unchanged from the previous release, a 4:3 regular image that dates from that period where Japanese animation was changing over from hand painted cel acetate, to works created completely in the digital realm. Compared to modern anime, Fruits Basket’s digimation is beginning to show its age, with simple character designs, a greater prevalence of jaggies and other such digital artefacts, and a somewhat limited scope to its animation. Having said that, it’s easy to forget all this and just lose oneself in the story, and accept the animation for what it is. What this transfer does inherit from the previous release is a fine shimmer and moiré on fine detail, but the character designs are effective, and this time around I really appreciated the warm colours and gentle atmosphere to the background artwork.

Sound
You have the choice of DD 2.0 English and Japanese with a translated subtitle track to go with the Japanese audio, and an optional HOH English track to go with the English audio, which follows the dub dialogue exactly. Which one is required is selected automatically depending on which audio language you select. It’s a civilised way of doing things that covers all the bases, with the exception that there isn’t a signs only track for the on screen text with the English dialogue; it’s either all of nothing with the HOH subs.

Experiencing the subtitles with the Japanese dialogue again, this time I realised that there was a little confusion when there was more than one conversation being translated at a time, or dialogue was overlapping with the signs translations. This could have been solved by using different fonts and colours for the subtitles according to what they were translating, but using the same yellow font for subtitles and captions tended to make a muddle of things.

I was very happy with the original Japanese audio, I like the character voices in this version, and Ritsuko Okazaki’s theme songs just can’t be matched by the translated English dub versions. However I did take in an episode of the English dub version, and after 8 years of anime dub homogeneity, I found it to be very refreshing. While the script translation is awkward at times, Fruit Basket’s dub is unusual in that its cast maintains a US tone to its delivery. Instead of the female voice actresses pitching their voices up to match the Japanese performances, they maintain a more natural register for them. I have to say that it’s a delight not to hear teenage girls in anime voiced with the aid of copious helium inhalation.

The layer change on disc 3 is in the middle of the opening sequence for episode 16, awkward to say the least, and a change from the original release.

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