Video Girl Ai (電影少女 Den'nei Shōjo) is a manga series created by Masakazu Katsura and published by Shueisha's Weekly Shonen Jump. It also has an anime adaptation. The manga is published in English by Viz Communications. It was formerly published in the anthology Animerica Extra by Viz.

It was started in 1990 and continued until 1993, and fifteen manga series were produced. The first 13 series is a story about a Video Girl named "Ai Amano". The last two series, which came years later, tells a story about a Video Girl named "Len". Although they have different characters, the stories between the series are not entirely different; they are all continuous.

The Video Girl Ai anime is a six part OVA (Original Video Animation) series which was produced by I.G. Tatsunoko. The series was released in 1992 by Jump Video. It roughly covers most of the material found in Volumes 1 and 3 of the manga (and some of Volume 2). The character designs for the anime remained faithful to the manga style and the overall animation is excellent.

Story

The story starts when Yota Moteuchi (弄内洋太 Moteuchi Yōta) found out that the girl he liked, Moemi Hayakawa (早川もえみ Hayakawa Moemi) was in love with his best friend, Takashi Niimai (新舞貴志 Niimai Takashi). Disappointed with this fact, he decided to rent a video from a mysterious video store that came out from nowhere on his way home. The video store was called "Gokuraku" ("Paradise"). The unique thing about this video store was that every video that they had in the store could bring its character from the video to real life. One particular video resulted in a girl named Ai Amano (天野あい Amano Ai). Ai came to life with the purpose to brighten up Yota's life and encouraged him to pursue his love.

At first everything worked like it’s supposed to, but because of an accident they had earlier with Yota's broken video, Ai was given an unique gift that the other Video girls did not have: a gift to feel love from within her heart. With this, Ai, who at first did not have any intentions with Yota, had eventually fallen in love with his personality and gentleness. At first, their relationship was developing just fine, but because she was a video girl, her function was to support Yota to get the love he needed, and not to love him herself. Their love was forbidden by Ai's creator, "Rolex", because he refused to believe in the existence of love.

From that point on, the story was about how Yota and Ai tried to find ways to be together and release Ai from the hands of her creator. Yota's life become more complicated when a girl named Nobuko entered the story, and it became even harder for Yota when the girl he liked, Moemi, had finally fallen in love with him.