デ・ジ・キャラット ウィンターガーデン Di Gi Charat: Winter Garden/Winter Garden from Di Gi Charat

Note, 10.2.07 Ehhh? What is it with Di Gi Charat and King Crimson? First a reference to the inside cover of the first album, and now the front cover appears on the door of a ‘Prog Club’ in Puchiko’s school in the serious reimagining OVA Winter Garden. 

Initial Impressions, 25.4.07. Bizarre, seeing the bizarre made mundane. Entertaining, though. That final twist was obvious from the beginning of the episode. Nice to hear the girl who debuted as Takahashi in Bokura Ga Ita in another role

Final thoughts, 18.9.12. I have to say, I didn’t notice that ‘Prog Club’ from five years ago when I rewatched the Winter Garden OVAs. Maybe between broadcast and DVD release the sign got changed. It was the weirdest moment in the otherwise largely naturalistic adaptation (along with a twitchy cameo for a piece of ‘art’…!), with the sign changing every few moments, and I’d certainly have noticed such an iconic image. This time I just smiled at how Puchiko was joining the Keiongaku club – and imagining her in K-On.

Anyway, five years later the idea of a complete reimagining of a series isn’t such a new idea for me, and at least to my mind this strange little nugget of seriousness in a franchise known for its ultra-cutesiness and insanity strikes me as very funny. It’s less like Mai-HiME becoming the rather different Mai-Otome, and more like the skits in Rock Lee’s Springtime of Youth being spun out to whole episodes and played much straighter, which lends considerable subtlety. It’s more like imagined universes with the Vocaloid characters, or, I suppose, Xenoglossia with the girls from The iDOLM@STER. The studio even changed: from Madhouse to J.C.Staff.

Winter Garden is not funny, other than a few little moments, mostly with Puchiko being either blunt or a cutey, having brought more of her personality from the original than her sister did. It’s not zany. It’s actually a very, very typical love story, starting with lots of coincidental meetings, and then being given tension with a misunderstanding and the possibility of separation. What makes it funny is the very idea that it’s based on Di Gi Charat, that these sweet, ordinary girls are based on Dejiko and Puchiko – that Rabi-en-Rose is a recognisable but consistently dismissed minor celebrity. It’s just a funny concept, and the disappointment of viewers like me who didn’t get told the nature of the adaptation beforehand and expected more me-kara-beams and kuchi-kara-bazookas masked that.

Well, years have passed now, and while it’s sad that more Di Gi Charat doesn’t seem anywhere on the horizon, I consider this one a bit of gem overall and am happy it’s part of the DGC canon, confusing all who stumble upon it unprepared.

And, y’know, it’s adorable how Dejiko doesn’t even seem like herself until she gets to the verge of yelling, and the old Dejiko can just be heard in that voice. Only just! 

デ・ジ･キャラット/ Di Gi Charat – s1, OVAs and movie

First Impressions - 3.10.05

Tried some new anime – cutesy classic Di Gi Charat, designed by the same person who came up with Pita Ten, but it was extremely annoying and not at all cute, so I didn’t download any more of it.

Follow-up - 8.1.07

Fortunately, I’m not in bad spirits because Di Gi Charat turned out to be just what I wanted last night. I think I was put off by episode one because I was hoping for something like Pita Ten, and seeing the totally random humour, Dejiko’s annoying hyperactivity and the fact that most of the humans were drawn as fingers with faces, I was just irritated. Total randomness with bits of slapstick really doesn’t make me laugh – that’s why Furi Kuri grated on me. But when more characters are introduced into Di Gi Charat, their totally archetypal character quirks may not be fresh or new, but they at least give a warmth and humour to proceedings, and I’ve now watched all 16 original 3-minute episodes and think it’s actually quite a funny and cute series. Nothing near as good as Pita Ten or that other cute Kogo Donbo-designed series, Chicchana Yuki Tsukai Shugaa (A Little Snow Fairy Sugar), but much zanier and sillier and worth watching when the brain needs to be turned off.

Final Thoughts - 21.1.12

On the strength of those two old entries, Di Gi Charat would be an excellent example of a time I’ve had a bad first impression of an anime but then picked it up again – over a year later – and actually come to enjoy it. It’s happened a few times, including to greater and lesser extents all of Shounen Jump’s big three series. Like Tales of Symphonia’s OVAs, it’s also one I intended to write up full impressions of when I had seen everything, but in this case it’s a little more complicated: I was happily watching everything Di Gi Charat-related a couple of years back when there was a big computer failure and various things got transferred between various computers, and along with Sayonara Zetsubou-Sensei, this is one of the series that has suffered, because I’m not quite sure what episodes I do and don’t have floating about, or when I’m going to get back to watching them. So I’ve decided that I’ll give Nyo!, Panyo and Winter Garden separate entries later, and look at the (loosely continuous) rest here – the firstseries, the specials, the short movie and the Leave it to Piyoko! side-story OVAs.

The story, inasmuch as there is one, is that green-haired alien Dejiko arrives in Akihabara with her sidekick Puchiko and their weird floating mascot Gema. Dejiko wants to be an idol, but has no money and nowhere to live, so takes employment (and a room) in a Gamers store – which makes sense, given that the character was conceived by Koge-Donbo as a mascot for the chain. Dejiko soon clashes with local idol Rabi-en-Rose, and usually outdoes her, while various outlandish and surreal things happen. In the OVAs, the Black Gema Gema gang, along with little Piyoko, who is adorably useless at being evil, try to kidnap Dejiko in the name of interplanetary war, getting into various scuffles that usually end up with Dejiko using amazingly destructive eye beams, Piyoko using her mouth bazooka and poor Puchiko failing entirely to contribute.

Dejiko is a pretty annoying character, all things considered, but manages to just about be cute. The rest, though, are genuinely adorable, and I have a soft spot for the peripheral male characters like Coo, Murataku and overenthusiastic weeaboo Rodoyan. Really, the best thing about Di Gi Charat is how funny and even clever it is when it gets totally reimagined, though – something that would not work without a strong and distinctive base. And that’s exactly what this is. Not everyone’s cup of tea, not all that funny and not clever, it is still adorable, memorable and a great start to a franchise.

ぴたテン / Pita-Ten

First Impressions
PitaTen is the adorable story of a little boy’s relationship with a teenaged angel who moves in next door, and utterly adores him – much to the chagrin of his little childhood friend, who is in love with him and for some reason has big cat-ears. Love triangles and unrequited affection drive so much of anime, whether anime or comedy, and this is a fluffy, gentle and cute show with lots of manic humour, which is just the sort of relaxing stuff I’m looking for at the moment. Plus it has music that sounds just like Postman Pat, which HAS to be a bonus in anyone’s book.

Final thoughts
CUUUUUUUUUUUTE! That’s the only word to sum up PitaTen. With that many ‘u’s. Cute, cute, cute and a little teeny bit of angst – more in the manga, apparently. Cute as Bottle Fairy, but with more of a storyline, it’s perfect for putting on when you need a break and want to watch something that will make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

Kotaro is a normal little schoolboy, other than the fact that he lost his mother in a car accident several years earlier. Bizarrely, his seiyuu was also stately, feminine Shinkuu in Rozen Maiden. He goes to school with his friends Ayanokoji and the teeny, adorable, cat-ear-wearing Koboshi, who even more bizarrely is played by Alphonse Elric’s seiyuu. I can hear the similarity between Al and Hotaru from Gakuen Alice, but hyperactive, squeaky Koboshi-chan? Quelle surprise!

But I digress…

One day, Kotaro opens the door to see that he has a new neighbour, the ever-cheerful, klutzy, loud but always adorable Misha, who soon turns out to be an angel-in-training, and not a very good one at all. She becomes obsessed with Kotaro and begins to follow him everywhere, but soon they become fast friends. Add to this spoilt brat Hiroshi, known as Dai-chan, his tomboyish sister Kaoru, a soft-spoken girl called Shia who has a bad-tempered talking cat called Nyaa and is about the nicest person in the world (thus the worst demon-in-training possible) and a tangled mess of unrequited loves and you get a silly, high-energy comedy show that works a formula, but works it well.

It isn’t clever and it isn’t original, but the characters all look totally adorable, the jokes are simple and funny and the characters have just enough depth for them to be a pleasure to watch. It won’t change anyone’s life, but just for a few hours, it’s sure to bring some happiness.

(Originally written 27.8.05)

ちっちゃな雪使いシュガー / Chiccha-na Yuki tsukai Shugā / Little Snow Fairy Sugar

It’s undisputable. Even with such incredibly cute series as Bottle Fairy and PitaTen as competition, Little Snow Fairy Sugar takes the crown as sweetest anime show I’ve ever seen.

Saga is a girl with a painful past. She’s lived with her Grandmother since her mother’s death, and learned to cope with her loss in two ways: by playing her mother’s piano, which the music shop has for sale but which is out of the means of just about anyone in her small European town, and by making sure her life is run on a tight schedule, with no time to sit and dwell on the past. One day, she finds a tiny fairy girl unconscious in the road. Saga revives this little curiosity by feeding her a waffle, only to discover that the diminutive girl has a very, very big personality.

Sugar is an extremely energetic, childlike snow fairy. She is only little, and in training in the human world to become a fully-fledged snow fairy by finding ‘twinkles’, though she and the other trainees don’t know exactly what these ‘twinkles’ are. She is delighted that Saga can see her, since fairies are invisible to most humans, and liked the waffle so much that ‘waffo!’ becomes her general exclamation of delight (since it sounds a lot like ‘wahoo’ in Japanese pronunciation – VERY cute!). Saga, however, is not so thrilled. Her schedules are thrown into disarray, Sugar’s boundless energy grates on her, and she gets into embarrassing situations because she’s the only one who can see the fairy. However, before long, she begins to feel more affectionate and even motherly towards the little fairy and her two best friends, the quiet and feminine Pepper and the typically boisterous boy Salt.

Yes, all the fairies are named after condiments and herbs. There are also the mischievous duo Basil and Cinnamon, plus senior fairies Ginger and Turmeric (which actually makes a very nice name!).

The series revolves around the fairies attempting to find out what a twinkle is, and the ups and downs of Saga and Sugar’s relationship. Everything is very sweet, alternately being fluffy and adorable and pulling gently at the heartstrings.

It must be said that there is nothing very original here. The characters are all right out of anime stock, and the various storylines are oft-rehashed cutesy fare. The most obvious comparison is PitaTen, where very similar characters appear, a human and a non-human bond, and the drama comes when the non-humans must return to their own worlds – and that’s not even mentioning the fact that Koge-Donbo was behind the character designs of both series (but as far as I know had no input in the actual story of Sugar). However, stock characters and typical storylines become overused because they work, and startling originality isn’t the name of the game here. It’s about taking a familiar story and doing it damn well. And that’s what we have here.

Like several other of my favourite anime, the show works well by taking hackneyed ideas and then developing them extremely well. This can be in little touches, as when the focus moves briefly to Salt, who begins to have doubts about whether he really does want to be a sun fairy, or in the bigger storylines, such as when Sugar and Saga fall out because Sugar tried to write a sorry note to Saga and used her mother’s musical score as paper. The charm is in the details: the little hints of deeper emotions than the ones on the surface, the genuine emotions.

It is also a beautiful show to watch. The characters are, as expected from Koge-Donbo, incredibly cute, and, when it comes to the fairies, their clothes are imaginative and witty, tied in with their fairy jobs. Special mention must be made of the town and general culture, which is broadly north-central European in that typical anime way, but wonderfully realised, giving a fairy-tale sense to the aesthetic even with such typical anime character designs.

Little Snow Fairy Sugar thrives on using tried-and-tested anime themes, but doing them very well, with each episode packed with more cuteness than an entire forest full of early Disney animals – and rather less creepy, too.

(originally written 29.11.05)