Wayback Series - Sugar Sugar Rune

It's time to have some Chocolat à la folie* this Holiday Season.

With the big anticipation of the finale of Go! Princess Precure in January, and the much-awaited premiere of Maho Tsukai Precure (or I should say Maho Girls Precure), in which the theme is witches. I am going to talk about this one, with the theme of witches. Boy, did I wrote that one on Christmas, well no matter. I am going to talk about the magical one called Sugar Sugar Rune.

Sugar Sugar Rune was a mahou shoujo anime. With some incredible combined elements of drama, romance and tragicomedy (a literary genre that blends the aspects of both comic and tragic forms), this one is based on a manga by Moyoco Anno, and is published on August 2004 to to April 2007 with a total of eight volumes on Kodansha's Nakayoshi magazine, while Udon Entertainment published the manga in English. On July 2nd 2005, the anime adaptation of the manga produced by Studio Pierrot and Satelight, is premiered on TV Tokyo until June 24th, 2006 with a grand total of 51 episodes. At about ten years ago in 2005, the manga won the coveted Kodansha Manga Award in the Children's category. One of my favorite ending themes for this anime is called 'Date☆Date', in which is performed by the seiyuus of Chocolat and Vanilla, and it's pretty catchy through your ears.

The story of the anime was indeed a magic time. The future queen in the Magical World is chosen by selecting two young witches and sending them to Earth, and they have one mission in toll for the two: to compete to capture the hearts of some young boys (girl magnet competition much? Oh well.). The objective here is to whoever collected the most hearts by the end of the competition will be crowned queen. The Queen Candidates of this generation are Chocolat Meilleure and Vanilla Mieux; both are best friends, polar opposites, and believe it or not, they are the daughters of the former competitor (Cinnamon Meilleure) and the current queen (Queen Candy). Both are aided by Rockin' Robin, a pop idol witch and a assigned mentor and guardian, as well as Duke (a frog) and Blanca (a mouse), their two animal familiars. So the two girls have to deal with one more problem than just competing for hearts at school. A mysterious boy named Pierre Tempête de Neige, and he is sometimes weird for his cool and mysterious behavior. Pierre is resembling Glace, the evil king, and he had one option in his mind: to go after Chocolat. And now it was come down to this, for now as they both trapped within their two goals. The girls must fight their way, and thus retaining their friendship in which no magic can possibly defeat.

Now for the voice actors. Marika Matsumoto, who is voicing Chocolat, is known for roles in Fafner of the Azure (as Maya Tomi), Paradise Kiss (as Miwako Sakurada), Un-Go (as Kazamori Sasa), and her famous role in Final Fantasy X, which she played as Rikku. Vanilla's seiyuu, Juri Ihata, is known for roles in Najica Blitz Tactics (as Humaritt ZZZ "Lila"), Daigunder (as Haruka), and some specials in Alien Nine (as Yuri Otani). The witches' guardian and the pop witch idol, Rockin' Robin, is voiced by Kenjiro Tsuda. Well, Tsuda is known for his incredible roles in Baka and Test - Summon the Beasts (as Shin Fukuhara), Free! (as Seijuro Mikoshiba), the Hakuoki series (as Chikage Kazama), and Anti-Magic Academy: The 35th Test Platoon (as Hayato Kurogane). Duke (aka the red and black-striped frog, but actually the uncle of Chocolat) is voiced by Yuuchi Yasoda, but he had a role in Bikkuriman 2000 where he voices the Pinzoroid. Blanca (aka the mouse and Vanilla's familiar) is voiced by Chisa Yokoyama, who is known for such roles in Galaxy Fraulein Yuna (as Yuna Kagurazaka), Cho Mashin Eiyuuden Wataru (as Doruku), Mobile Suit Gundam Wing (as Lucrezia Noin), and the Sakura Wars series (as Sakura Shinguji). Pierre (aka the mysterious boy) is voiced by Hiroki Konishi, but believe it or not, he is known for voicing Ooji Karasuma in School Rumble.

Other voice actors that are starred on this anime were Sumi Shimamoto, Ayaka Saito, Naoya Iwahashi, Ryohei Kimura, Sakiko Uran, and Takeshi Maeda.

Time to do some magic with Sugar Sugar Rune! And to all of you, Merry Christmas!!

* - French for 'Chocolate to Madness'.