There’s a VHS tape I found at a convention dealer room in the mid-2000s with no English text on the spine. Handwritten label said “Twinkle Heart.” The seller wanted two bucks for it. I bought it because the cover art had three girls and what appeared to be a sentient stuffed animal, and at that price, I figured I couldn’t lose.
Wrong. Absolutely could lose. Forty-four minutes of my life, gone, and I’d do it again in a heartbeat.
Twinkle Heart: Gingakei made Todokanai dropped on December 5, 1986, right in the thick of the OVA boom when every studio in Tokyo was throwing spaghetti at the direct-to-video wall. The setup: God has two daughters, Cherry and Lemon. He sends them along with their governess Berry to recover Heaven’s lost treasure, which is literally called “Love.” Their mission takes them to an alien planet where stuffed animals have come to life, and a villain named Cecilian wants to steal the Essence of Life for some vaguely sinister purpose.
If that sounds like someone threw a magical girl show, a Star Wars knockoff, and a Sanrio catalog into a blender, that’s because it is.
The studio behind this was Project Team Eikyuu Kikan, a name so obscure that even dedicated anime databases can barely fill in their credits page. But the staff list tells a different story. Screenplay by Kenji Terada, who was writing Dragon Ball the same year. Maya Okamoto, fresh off voicing Emma Sheen in Zeta Gundam, plays Lemon. The three lead voice actresses even formed a singing group called The Winkies to perform the opening theme, “Yes, we are open!” It’s catchy in the way that only 1986 J-pop performed by voice actresses can be.
The animation is competent but unremarkable. Character designer Sawako Yamamoto gives the girls distinct enough silhouettes that you can tell them apart, which is more than some OVAs of this era managed. The backgrounds by art director Mitsuki Nakamura are better than the show deserves. There’s a hamburger shop scene early on that has no business looking as polished as it does.
The comedy is broad. Slapstick, sight gags, characters yelling directly at the camera. If you’ve seen any 80s anime comedy OVA, you know the beats. Cherry is the serious one, Lemon is the energetic one, Berry is the put-upon adult. The stuffed animal villains are more confusing than threatening. The big fight at the end pulls a deus ex machina so blatant it feels like the writers ran out of pages and just wrote “and then they won” in the margin.
Here’s what’s interesting about Twinkle Heart, though: it was labeled “Part 1” in some databases. There was supposed to be more. A sequel was planned, or at least implied, and it never materialized. That was the OVA market in 1986 — you could get greenlit on a concept and a character sheet, release one episode, and if the sales weren’t there, that was it. No continuation. No conclusion. No closure. Just 44 minutes floating in the void with a “to be continued” that never continued.
1986 was the year Megazone 23 was already rewriting what OVAs could be. Fist of the North Star was on TV. Dragon Ball had just launched. Against that backdrop, a silly comedy about divine daughters fighting plush toys was never going to set the world on fire. But there’s something honest about it. Nobody involved was trying to change anime. They made a goofy, colorful, self-aware 44 minutes of television and shipped it to video stores, and a few thousand people bought it, and that was enough.
I still have that VHS tape. The label’s peeling. I’ll probably never watch it again. But I’m glad it exists.