I’ve just finished watching Maison Ikkoku [めぞん一刻] and I really love that anime. It’s not one of my all-time favourites like Full Metal Panic or Neon Genesis Evangelion but nevertheless is, by far, the best romance drama (some would say it’s a comedy, but I digress…) without magic, science fiction or anything outside of the ordinary that I’ve ever seen.

I can’t deny this show is long… veeeeery long… with 96 episodes is the longest anime series I’ve seen so far (Urusei Yatsura and Ranma ½ are both in the backlog of things to see, but maybe next year).
Extraordinary long by the today standard of 12 or 24 episodes per serie.

So.…I really love the plot, the characters’ development, I found the two main characters to be enjoyable and relatable (Kyoko-san is such a lovely character, ahhh…) and since I lived (when I was young at least) in an era before cell phones and pervasive wireless high-speed internet access… the era when you had to put coins in a public phone in order to communicate with someone while you where on the street or at a train station or somewhere far from home, I can perfectly relate to a story set in the ’80s because I know first hand how things were going at that time.

… and that’s the problem.

The problem is that this is a show I love, a show most of my friends around the same age as me would enjoy (if they enjoy the genre of course) but it’s a show that is aging (and will continue to age) bad.

Really bad.

It’s not science fiction: I can picture myself watching today Star Trek – The Next Generation (Gundam if talking about anime) because… well… it’s Star Trek (or Gundam).
It’s not a two-hour comedy movie you can enjoy on tv, something like Wilder’s Some like it hot or Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove.
It’s not a war/action movie (a-la Die Hard or Terminator).

It’s a serie someone born in 2000/2005, a perfect age to relate to the main characters, will probably struggle to watch and even to understand.

And that’s sad, really sad, because it really is a masterpiece, maybe as some said, Rumiko Takahashi’s more mature and best work, but to really appreciate it, more than anything, you have to relate to the characters.

Something I feel will be difficult for the generations to come.