If there's anything that explores male wish fulfillment better than Video Girl Ai, I haven't seen it. And please note that I'm not talking about oily-lesbian-wrestling wish fulfillment here. I mean full-on male-oriented romance, where the erstwhile Y-chromosome-bearing lead just wants to get the girl he likes to like him back... with the aid of a magical, shamelessly sexy and flirtatious girl who came out of his TV screen, of course.

This anime is the flip side of all those sugary shojo anime that have been so popular here. You know, the ones where the schoolgirl main character is supposed to save the world while at the same time agonizing over her love for some impossibly handsome animated studmuffin. Cardcaptor Sakura, Fushigi Yuugi, the first season of Sailor Moon, and so on... all feature a love-and-romance theme pretty heavily. Even my favorite anime ever, Vision of Escaflowne, uses the relationship trials and tribulations of heroine Hitomi in several important plot threads.

Video Girl Ai contains most of the elements so common in shojo anime: tender romance, star-crossed relationships, and physical and emotional sacrifice for the sake of love. However, it does it from a decidedly male perspective... and as a result it hooks you in a way most cookie-cutter shojo doesn't. Yota Moteuchi, a kind-hearted yet unlucky in love schoolboy (his school peers have nicknamed him "dateless") is completely and utterly head-over-heels for his classmate Moemi. Yota being the luckless schlub he is, though, Moemi only has eyes for his best friend. Heartbroken after being given the infamous "let's be friends" speech by the object of his affection (you guys reading this know what I'm talking about), Yota makes his depressed way home.

Along the way, Yota discovers a small video shop that he can't recall noticing before. The kindly owner, recognizing Yota's emotionally distressing situation, rents him a tape of a "video girl" named Ai. For those of you unfamiliar with the often f[il]ked-up nature of Japanese pop culture, a video girl is just a tape of a sweet young girl, speaking comforting feminine words through the TV screen, so young, lonely, socially-inept Japanese males can at least pretend that a cute girl is talking to them. This particular video girl is special, though (as if you couldn't tell by the title): when Yota pops the tape in his VCR, the girl on screen actually comes through his TV and into his room in a burst of light.

Again, Yota's poor luck comes into play; he made the mistake of playing the tape on a damaged VCR, and the resulting video girl that appears on his bed is not exactly what was advertised. Instead of being sweet, sexy, compassionate, demure, and a good cook, Ai is loudmouthed, tomboyish, flat-chested, crude-talking, pushy, and couldn't cook a meal to save her life. But a video girl is a video girl, and Ai dutifully sets out to get Yota and Moemi together, by any means possible.

Yota's damaged VCR did more than make Ai a tough-talking tomboy, however. While this anime does get much intensely-amusing mileage out of Ai's utter unsuitability as a comforting, compliant love doll, the story of this anime doesn't really focus on that. Instead, it's all about the one other flaw in Ai introduced by her tape being played on a broken machine: Ai falling in love with Yota. Video girls aren't supposed to fall in love, and when Ai's angry creator returns to take the "tainted" video girl away, Yota has to decide if he loves her, too... and if he does, how far he's willing to go to get her back.

Being a guy-oriented anime, there's plenty of nudity and even more innuendo in Video Girl Ai (especially whenever the brash Ai herself is on screen), but it's not hentai. Its sex-comedy antics take a back seat to the surprisingly tender relationship between Ai and Yota. The fantasy elements of this anime (cute girls popping out of TV sets to help you fulfill all your romantic wishes) likewise take a back seat to well-defined, if a bit archetypal, characters. Yota's misfortunes with the female sex are remarkably true to life... a bit TOO true to life, if you ask me. Either bad experiences with love are more universal than I'd really like to believe, or the producers of this anime were spying on me.

At any rate, Video Girl Ai is a fantastic and tender story of romance, from an unusually male perspective. If it has any flaws, it's that it's too short: the anime condenses a massive manga down into six episodes, resulting in a rather rushed and confusing ending. And while the original voice track is awesome (no one does cute tomboys like Megumi Hayashibara), the dub... well, isn't. But hey...you get all the episodes on this one DVD, and Viz also publishes the excellent manga in English, in their Animerica Extra magazine.

Almost unique among anime for its guy-centered yet love-focused story, Video Girl Ai tempers its sexiness with a warm heart and appealingly sympathetic characters. And the format simply can't be beat: all six episodes together, subtitled, on digital video. If you want to see how guys tell sweet relationship stories, get this DVD. Then get the manga to learn the rest of the story. Because you'll want to learn the rest.

Trust me.