Sugar Sugar Rune

Sugar Sugar Rune is wholesome, comedic, sweet magical girl fun.

The magical world is an interesting place, along with its customs which led to the story's plot. The human world is just as colorful. I love the way it integrates the humans and witches. The story may seem typical for a shoujo magical girl series, but it's done really well and has pretty unique ideas to make them more exciting. Furthermore, it can be funny, dramatic, and romantic.

The characters are also fun to watch. Chocolat is a great lead and her antics are hilarious. Vanilla is a great foil to Chocolat and their mentor is fun. ... The supporting cast and antagonists are also entertaining.

The artwork is really nice and fantastical. The animation has great magical girl elements and the OST is decent.

Sugar Sugar Rune is an enjoyable watch if you're into fantasy, magical girls, and shoujo.

It's rare that I find a magical girl anime this side of Cardcaptor Sakura that has a clear appreciation and understanding of what made older shoujo media captivating. It delves into some fascinating intensities, raising a lot of serious ideas that i see many more adult oriented anime painfully fumble and so I appreciate it a lot in that way. Understandably for a kids anime, but also unfortunately, it does not go very far with most of them outside of its character explorations.

Sugar Sugar Rune's greatest strength is in its 2 lead characters. Chocolat and Vanilla are social aliens, brought into a world with norms ... and customs that they don't understand which they often have to figure out for themselves. They are far from being "normies" and so they have to learn how to interact with a world where they aren't "normal". What is monumentally important though is that the story never uses this to mock them to put them down, while their misfit behavior sometimes leads to silly outcomes it is always with an eye towards sympathy and understanding.

Chocolat is a boisterous girl whose emotionally blunt and direct personality irritates and distresses her peers, and critically the story shows how this frustrates her and how she responds to it. She wishes that everyone would be more emotionally honest in the way that comes naturally for her. Her growth is in learning how to accept that it's not something that comes easily to everyone but that it's also healthy for her to push others to come out of their shells when she can. It is a consistent compromise of her adapting to the world and making the world better with her disruptive atypical perspective.

Vanilla is in many ways her counterpart. Growing up as a princess she has been conditioned towards obedience and an expectation of success. She struggles to connect with others outside of her friendship with Chocolat, often falling back on reactive politeness and timidness to get through social situations and to coast through her given tasks. As the story progresses it explores how this sort of persistent isolation and avoidance can cultivate insecurity and smouldering resentment within someone who from the outside seems emotionally temperate. Vanilla's growth is in confronting her assumptions about herself and her place in the world that she's taken for granted her whole life.

While Sugar Sugar Rune has some strong foundations, its presentation is middling. The animation is often passable as to not be distracting but a lot of the dialogue and interactions feel stilted giving a sense that characters don't regard each others presence properly, it's a common problem with middling and lower budget animation. I feel ambivalent towards the visuals in general, it's clearly evoking a sense of older shoujo media in its character features but this clashes with the bright color pallet of the anime. It's not really a big deal and it didn't bother me much.

I don't have much to say about the more serious overarching themes or plot points because not much is done with them. It is interesting to see an anime for kids try to say something about, like, state violence and the maintenance of a permanent underclass, they sure never tried for that in Doremi. It just kind of falls apart by the end when the nature of the antagonizing force is effectively overwritten to not be much different from a Precure villian. And that's fine, whatever, my enjoyment of a magical girl anime wasn't riding on its how it lays out a comprehensive understanding of power dynamics and class consciousness. Would have been cool tho.

Ultimately, I like a lot of what Sugar Sugar Rune accomplishes with it's characters and I appreciate the breadth of its ideas and themes for a children's anime. It is a show that I think someone who has engaged with a decent amount of magical girl anime and is somewhat compelled by my recounts of its lead characters will find a worthwhile experience. I had a lot of fun and some intrigue throughout my watch and I'm glad I stuck with it to the end.

Summary: I watched it and hated it, but I suppose that being a 26-year-old introverted girl who has seen a lot of much better anime has a lot to do with my profound lack of enjoyment of Sugar Sugar Rune. I wish I could say I would recommend it to at least 8 to 12-year-old girls but honestly I can’t say I would: this will be a negative review. Anyone who’s interested in the show’s positive points, please look elsewhere.

So, Sugar Sugar Rune. I somehow missed the Sailor Moon craze when I was still a small kid so I actually don’t have a lot of ... background in mahou shoujo, which I attempted to remedy by picking up this show. The reviews were pretty good, promising a surprisingly nuanced, slightly dark twist upon the genre so often accused of being rife with overblown drama, too much saccharine and self-righteousness. I was instantly attracted by the series’ premise: two young witches who are childhood friends vying to become the next heiress to the Magical Kingdom’s throne. Both have their own sets of strengths and weaknesses, ultimately challenging and completing each other in the new and unfamiliar Human World. Will their friendship endure under the pressure to compete, especially when a mysterious bishounen is thrown into play?

The biggest disappointment for me will have to be the wasted character potential, translating into wasted plot potential. Ostensibly we have two main characters who balance each other out, and around whose interactions, trials and tribulations I expected the show to be built. First, we have Chocolat Meilleure, an extraverted, bright, spirited, feisty young girl. She is strong and fearless, and while she may be a bit stubborn, brash and strong-headed, she always means well and she’s not afraid to admit her mistakes. She is very open and spontaneous which helps her to make friends, and to those friends that she makes she is fiercely loyal. Her temper and foul mouth are considered to be good qualities in the witch society and a lot of show’s plot revolves around how that clashes with what’s considered good behavior among normal humans.

Her opponent-cum-best friend is Vanilla Mieux, a lovely, nurturing, gentle and kind girl. She’s introverted, shy, and scares easily, but she makes up for it by being very studious, hard-working and smart, and while her timid demeanor made her unpopular back in Magical World, she has the chance to blossom now that she’s in the Human Realm. Thus, the show had an excellent chance to show how two very different people can walk towards the same goal each in their own way, relying each on their own strengths of character, and still be friends, working together despite all that divides them. “Being friends with someone who isn’t like you isn’t only possible, it’s exciting and opens a lot of possibilities and manners of thinking before you if you’re open-minded and want to make it work”. “If you believe in yourself, work-hard and embrace what makes you unique, you can achieve anything you want”. I thought Sugar Sugar Rune would be about this, or at least something in a similar vein. Welp, forgive me for having high expectations.

The penultimate quest that drives the plot of this 51-episode series, the mystery of who’s going to ascend the Magical World’s throne proves to be solved in the very first episode. Just by watching the opening and looking at the mid-episode commercial break screens can you accurately say who’s going to be the next queen by the end of the show, roll credits, everybody can go home now. From the very beginning of the show it’s just “Chocolat!” over and over again. My question is: why bother with the pretense of having two main characters, if you’re not going to give the other one equal attention, screentime or development, or any meaningful role at all? Right off the bat you see Vanilla fulfilling just three functions, and those three won’t change at all during the course of the series: a) damsel in distress, b) Chocolat’s caretaker and cheerleader, c) a background off of which Chocolat’s character is constructed and supposed to shine that much brighter. That is to say, the show’s true heroine is Chocolate, and to rub it in we have Vanilla. They are supposed to be these childhood friends with an indestructible bond who complete each other and balance out each other’s flaws but all I have seen is codependence and Chocolat mooching off Vanilla’s goodwill and support.

I won’t lie: I have major issues with the brattish character of Chocolat, how they pit her against the gentle Vanilla and every step of the way tell us “Vanilla is okay, but Chocolate is the real star”. They aren’t subtle about it in the least, even their surnames speak volumes: while Vanilla’s means “better” in French, Chocolat’s of course, is the superlative “best”. It seems a bit like a misguided attempt at feminism in the deeply patriarchal Japanese society – choosing a strong and confident girl as the main character above the meek and domestic one is certainly far from traditional and I would applaud it if not for the fact that Chocolat doesn’t have much going for her besides being the not-your-run-of-the-mill magical girl character. She’s brave and strong, okay, I get that and I admire that, but she’s also ridiculously stupid, clueless, annoyingly rude and if not for the help of her friends she would’ve been dead or disqualified ten times over. She’s the focus of the story from day one, and while you would initially sympathize with her because she unwittingly antagonizes everyone in the Human World with her brashness, isn’t good with studies and has no parents or backing in contrast to the well-mannered and well-read Vanilla whose mother is the reigning queen and who enjoyed the life as a princess up until now, you quickly come to realize that Chocolat’s the over-privileged one here. Girls idolize her, boys adore her for being a great pal and occasionally swoon over her tsundere-ness, she has a loving family of aunt, uncle and grandfather, she is super-popular in the Magical World, she has two loyal knights who have been in love with her since back when they were kids (who worship the ground she walks upon and whom she strings along just like that), the mysterious bishounen is head over heels for her and everyone, including Vanilla’s mom queen Candy never shut up about how her courage and strength are exactly what they need in a future queen. Not to mention it turns out that she has some kind of super-special power to purify evil and her supposedly deceased mom is actually very much alive.

Vanilla, for her part, has been shunned for her meekness in the Magical World for as long as she remembers, never had any friends besides Chocolat, and while the Human Realm seems to be the place where she can finally be herself and be appreciated for that, it turns out that all the girls hate her guts, and while she seems to do well among the boys, no recurring character of any importance seems to care about her. She has two boys who are shown to be smitten with her, but they are so unimportant we never even get to know their names. She finally seems to get a chance towards more agency and character development near the end of the series with the short-lived Ogre Princess arc, where she decides to quit being on the sidelines and take Chocolat on, embracing her dark side, but even there she’s relegated to being mysterious bishounen Pierre’s second choice and the victim of his machinations. No one seems too worried about her when she crosses over to the dark side, no one makes any persistent attempts to get her to change her mind besides Chocolat. If anything, all the other characters either tell Chocolat she needs to focus on the becoming the queen instead of trying to get Vanilla back, or they want to help Chocolat, but just because they can’t bear to watch her being sad, not because they actually give a damn about Vanilla. She ends up being “rescued” by Chocolat from being the Ogre Princess which is very ironic because it was something that she chose for herself, for the first time in the series. The power of friendship prevails, so to speak, which again would be great if they actually showed us why or how the two girls became friends in the first place and what makes them so irreplaceable to each other, but all we get is “they are and have always been BFFs, just because”. Oh-kay.

Sugar Sugar Rune is profoundly underwhelming because it flirts with so many interesting themes and then dumps them. The Ogres are the apparent main antagonists, but wait… They aren’t actually that bad, they’re just misunderstood and wrongly oppressed so they have no choice but to fight back? Nah, well, it’s all true but they’re still evil, because damn, we need someone to be a baddie! The witches have hearts, the very essences of their being that they must under no circumstances give away lest they die on the spot? Oh, it turns out that the Ogres can implant black hearts of envy and hate into the witches which let them harness the humans’ negative emotions too, which they normally can’t do AND they get an extra spare heart! Cool, right? Well, turns out it isn’t because the black heart will fight with the witch’s original heart and cause her a great deal of pain. So, the black hearts that represent the negative emotions are supposed to hurt witches, but unless someone sticks the actual thing into their breasts, they can feel sadness, anxiety, jealousy et cetera just fine without any complications or pain. And can I just say one thing about the series’ main love story? When was it exactly that our brazen heroine started falling for the gallant Pierre? Well, kids, it all happened that day when *drum roll* he ate soup with carrots to impress her, and he HATES carrots. Is that super romantic or what?

With ridiculous, filler-laden plot, two-dimensional characters, lackluster animation and entirely forgettable music, Sugar Sugar Rune is just meh. It might have an interesting premise and a pleasing aesthetic, but with its only message being “you gotta be strong and brave, because if you are nothing else really matters and everyone will suddenly start loving you” it just doesn’t do it for me, as I don’t think it will for anyone with half a brain. It’s just frustrating to watch.