“Sugar Baby Love
\nOn my lips
\nThe rouge of tears\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
A Little Snow Fairy Sugar<\/i> is possibly the best anime about a fairy training to control snow by playing the flute in Germany that I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve ever seen. This is the sort of thing that I expect from good shoujo<\/i> anime. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not quite mahou shoujo<\/i>, although it does bear many of the hallmarks of the genre. Like many of this sort of program, it has charm enough for all audiences.
\n
\nSaga Bergman is an 11 year old girl who lives in the fictional German town of Muhlenberg. Saga lives with her grandmother and makes strict plans that she follows on a daily basis. When a little snow fairy by the name of Sugar turns up in Muhlenberg and moves into Saga\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s house, these plans are all thrown into disarray!
\nSaga is reluctant at first, but in time comes to value Sugar and assist her in her studies.<\/p>\n
Sugar<\/I> is evidence that anime directors are wildly inconsistent in the works that they take on, unless they are an “auteur\u00e2\u20ac\u009d along the lines of Miyazaki, Oshii or … I was going to say Kon, but Kon\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s stamp is that all of his projects are wildly different.
\nSugar<\/i> is the work of Kimura Shinichiro, a man who has made his mark in harem comedies of varying degrees of execrableness: from the fairly entertaining police comedy Burn Up Excess<\/i> to the spottily okay Hand Maid May<\/i> to the not-very-good-at-all Cosplay Complex<\/i>.
\nKimura\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s work here is strong and plays just the right amount of sentiment, keeping to the sort of schedule favoured by childrens\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 shows without feeling too much like routine: almost every episode features Saga and Sugar bathing together, another vague genre hallmark made famous by Ryo-Ohki and Kero-chan the loofah sailor.<\/p>\n
The characters sell Sugar<\/i>: Sugar and Saga are a well-matched team, with Saga being something of a mother to her resident fairy. Sugar\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s friends Salt and Pepper, who respectively control sun and wind, have their own little stories that are allowed to be fleshed out just as well as the major growth of the leads.
\nThe real highlight is Greta, the traditional spoiled child who turns out to have a heart of gold. That’s not really anything to be surprised by, but it certainly was welcome to see a character shed her superficiality and reveal her true nature.<\/p>\n
Character designs are from the incomparable Koge-Donbo, the woman behind Di-Gi Charat<\/i> and some excellent Harry Potter<\/i> fan art. Sugar is cute, but not insufferably so. Apparently some people have issues with Koge-Donbo\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s stamp, but this is exactly my style so I can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t exactly be objective on it \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 although that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not exactly my job<\/i> \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 but I love it.<\/p>\n
The town of Muhlenberg is based on the real town of Rothenberg, and one can really get the feel of a large, classically designed European village. The city looks slightly watercoloured, yet always in focus. The animation is all digital and works well with the situations. The production notes say that the fairies are actually drawn full size and then scaled down, and this works very well. Sugar<\/I> was not exactly the first anime to be done digitally, but it is plainly one of the best from J.C. Staff\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s early days in the field (with works such as Excel Saga<\/I> and Geobreeders Breakthrough<\/I> looking slightly dodgy). <\/p>\n
The OP is a Japanese remake of the fifties classic “Sugar Baby Love\u00e2\u20ac\u009d which, at first seems unbearable but becomes a real mainstay of the series. This is one of those series wherein the score is composed of variations on the OP and ED, but that is nothing to complain about. The scenes that vary “Sugar Baby Love” tend to flow with sentiment and the song helps unleash this aspect of the series marvellously.
\nThere is really nothing to complain about in this series: Kawakami Tomoko turns in one of her traditional shoujo<\/I> performances as Sugar, and Mitsuishi Kotono even turns up along the way to play the Rain fairy Ginger. What this means, essentially, is a comfy-warm, puffy-fluffy feeling is forged inside the hearts of those who watch Sugar<\/i>.<\/p>\n
A Little Snow Fairy Sugar<\/i> is excellent anime with a streak of sentiment, a minimum of annoyance, and an episode dedicated to a romance between a tortoise and a dove. There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s really nothing more you can ask for.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
“Sugar Baby Love On my lips The rouge of tears\u00e2\u20ac\u009d A Little Snow Fairy Sugar is possibly the best anime about a fairy training to control snow by playing the flute in Germany that I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve ever seen. This is the sort of thing that I expect from good shoujo anime. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not quite mahou shoujo, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[102],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-264","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sugar"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/anime\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/anime\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/anime\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/anime\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/anime\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=264"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/anime\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/anime\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=264"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/anime\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=264"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/anime\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=264"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}