Rainbow Across the Pacific Ocean / Taiheiyou ni Kakeru Niji / 太平洋にかける虹 OVA (1992)

This one has been in the backlog since December 2023, but now I've finally run out of patience with Ziusudra's QC and Shanghaied someone else into it. 

RAWs: Unknown (more on that later) 

Translation: Perevodildo 

Quality Checking: True Noobow Gamer

The video is what we concluded to be an HDTV rebroadcast recording, since there are no traces of a DVD/LD for this show. But even if it was aired in HD, it's safe to say that at least two layers of compression it's been through downscaled it back to 480p. How did it happen? Well, I found it on a certain streaming site. When I asked the uploader for the source, it turned out that he also snatched it from some Japanese guy's YouTube channel. As of December 2023, said channel was already terminated, so the trail goes cold there, and I had to settle for this video from VK. Still, even under two layers of compression, it blows previously available ARR's raws out of the Pacific Ocean. Kudos to Psychomorphosis for preserving it. On the downside, the interlacing is all over the place, but because it's been up- and down-scaled multiple times, our resident encoding guru advised against trying to fix it after a short examination, so I just cut the pillarboxing and downscaled it to 480p.

The story is a straightforward fairy tale-ish adaptation of Daisaku Ikeda's short anti-war story, pretty mid even compared to his other adaptions. Sometime in the latter half of the 20th century, a Chinese elementary school student Gyokuren who transfers to Japan finds herself at odds with her new classmates. Mitsuko, one of her new classmates, finds an old American celluloid doll, whose backstory helps her establish contact with Gyokuren and help the latter open up to the rainbow across the Pacific.

The ED song is rather nice too. 

Nyaa | DDL | AniDB | Subs only