Wedding Peach: Love Wave - Volume 1(1995)
Animation Production: KSS
Released by: ADV Films
Official Website: ADV's Wedding Peach Page
Episodes: 1-6
By Jeffrey Couto

Introduction

To my wife’s great amusement I popped in Wedding Peach Volume-1 into my DVD player last night. Why was she amused, you may wonder, well the simple answer to that is that her 25+ year old husband was about to watch a mahou shoujo (Magical Girl) anime about girls who use the power of love to protect the innocent from the evil Raindevila, whose goal is to rid the world of such fuzzy and happy emotions as love and friendship.

…And so without hesitation or second thoughts I entered the colorful and upbeat anime world of Wedding Peach!

Story

"So you want to meet someone, fall in love and get married? Think again! Love is on the run as the deliciously wicked Lady Raindevila conspires to rid the world of romance and love. With the help of her henchman, Pluie, the world is turned upside down, as lovers stab each other in the back, mothers attack daughters, and best friends try to rip each other’s throats out. Armed with a mysterious ruby ring left by her mother, the unsuspecting Momoko finds herself caught in the middle of this cosmic battle. She’s cute, she’s sassy, and she’s full of love! But will it be enough? Hold on to your corsages! Who ever knew love could be quite like this???"-- ADV's Wedding Peach Webpage

Review

We begin as we join the series’ main character, Momoko, as she tries on her deceased mother’s wedding dress to see what she would like in it all while dreaming of the day she too will get married to the man of her dreams, that is until she is interrupted by her father, who is so surprised to see his daughter wearing his wife’s wedding dress, momentarily seeing her face in Momoko’s. After some expository dialogue that reveals her father to be a professional photographer, who must travel a lot for his work, Momoko leaves the house with her friends to cover a soccer game for their school’s newspaper.

After the soccer game our trio of friends is walking in the park talking about boys and the type of dates they would love to go out on when they are suddenly interrupted by Pluei, Raindevila’s henchman, who is after a ring that Momoko’s mom left her after she died. The confrontation leads to the inevitable revelation to our heroine that she is in fact the legendary Love Angel Wedding Peach! Now, armed with the Saint Miroir she transforms into her heroic persona in order to protect the world from Raindevila’s evil plans!

Volume one of this release serves for the most part as a preparatory DVD, containing mostly introductory episodes for our three heroines, the bad guys and the overall universe they live in. As such these episodes have a nice pace and keep things moving with the first appearances of Wedding Peach’s attacks, fighting dress and her two comrades in the fight for love, Angel Daisy and Angel Lily.

The premise and execution of Wedding Peach conform perfectly to the norms of the Magical Girl anime genre. As such you get heroic female characters, who must fight evil using magical powers all while dealing with real life issues such as boys, dates, and growing up.

After seeing this show for the first time I would imagine that many people see Wedding Peach as nothing more than a Sailor Moon rip-off. While design-wise it does borrow much from Sailor Moon for its visuals, I think that Wedding Peach employs enough unique elements to set it apart from it’s more popular counterpart. We also need to keep in mind that these shows are part of a bigger genre that goes back to 1966 (Mahou Tsukai Sally). Sailor Moon itself is nothing more than a combination of previous Magical Girl anime show ideas mixed in with the team aspects of Go Ranger.

All this aside, Wedding Peach is a rather fun anime to watch. If you enjoyed Sailor Moon to any degree you will also like this one. It’s a simple series that centers around the themes of love and friendship, something we can all relate too, with some humor and battle scenes thrown in for good measure.

The animation is perfect for this type of show, keeping things simple and lively. Generally speaking the production’s quality is strikingly similar to Sailor Moon’s so if you seen any of the entries in that series you should know what to expect here. The video transfer for the DVD is also solid and very sharp.

On the sound and music ends Wedding Peach also does a nice job. I particularly like the BGM tracks used during the henshin sequences and battle portions of the episodes. The opening and closing songs were also a good listen.

Now how about for the DVD itself? Volume one includes the following episodes:

Episode 1- Celebrate! Birth of the Love Angel
Episode 2- Splendid! Bridal Dress Change
Episode 3 - The Targeted Bride
Episode 4 - Angel Lily is Born
Episode 5 - The Third Love Angel
Episode 6 - Jama-P's Counterattack

The DVD also comes with clean versions of the opening and closing themes, a wonderfully done English dubbed track, a reversible cover, the original Japanese language version and promos for other ADV products. The cover art features some nice artwork of Momoko in her Wedding Peach dress and three Angels of Love in their battle dresses.

Final Thoughts

If you enjoyed Sailor Moon or any of the many Magical Girl shows that have been produced over the years you should definitely check out Wedding Peach, you’ll be happy you did. This is a fun show with a lighter tone that doesn’t fail to entertain. I also recommend it to everyone who generally enjoys anime and might be inclined to try something new..

Good stuff!

Jeffrey Couto