Next-up in the category of underrated gems: Fancy Lala, a charming mahou shoujo from the late nineties. It’s understandable why not many people are interested in it: the premise advertises a girl who coincidentally meets up with two miniature dinosaurs, who give her the power to grow up and become an idol so that she can meet up with the guy she admires. It’s not exactly a premise that screams “Watch me!!”, and you really need to watch this series in order to understand its strengths. Fancy Lala is a definite recommendation for those who like slice-of-life dramas; it feels like a cross between Kamichu and Full Moon wo Sagashite, grabbing the best from both.

And really, this isn’t necessarily a series about idols; the premise would also have worked with construction-workers (although the end-result would probably end up a lot more GAR that way). In contrast to a series like Full Moon wo Sagashite, where the growing up was just a tool to get to the idol-part of the premise, Fancy Lala uses being an idol just as a tool to get to the growing up-part. The essence of this series is that it’s a look at adult problems through the eyes of a child, and there is so much potential for such a premise.

Basically, all of the good things in this series can be traced back to one thing: the awesome character of Miho. I gave the characters a rating of 10 for a good reason: she is an incredibly strong lead character for a girl of only ten years old. She’s able to carry both the weight of being an idol and the weight of the series and yet she remains an innocent child. We get to know her through and through, and it’s because of her that the major theme of adult problems works out so well.

The creators also make use of a lot of subtle drama, where nothing important is said, but you can see from the characters’ expressions that a lot is going on inside their mind. It’s because of this that this series never vetures into the world of cheese and melodrama, an oh so common pitfall of shoujo-series (and any other genre for that matter, I guess). This is such a genuine series, and you can feel that the characters are feeling down because of the problems they face, instead of acting down because of the creators’ wishes. Miho’s voice-actress also does a very admirable job: children in this series really do sound like children, rather than squeaky 30-year old voice-actresses.

And also let me say this specifically: Fancy Lala has the downright best ending of any mahou shoujo I’ve ever seen, and perhaps it’s also got my favourite ending of any shoujo-series for that matter. It’s a true example where realism works so much better than cheesy Deus ex Machina because creators are too afraid to kill off characters in the fear to upset said characters’ fans. Fancy Lala’s final two episodes are something that should happen in nearly every single mahou shoujo-series, and yet none I’ve seen so far even dared to address its topics.

But yeah, this really is a series about Miho. Apart from that, it doesn’t have much else to sell, as shown by the premise: the reason why Miho got her magical powers is just pure coincidence, we never get any concrete explanation of where those dinosaurs came from. In addition to growing up, Miho also somehow becomes incredibly proficient in singing, posing and acting, without any practice whatsoever. These things are going to make it a bit difficult to care about the characters in the beginning, though at least the series makes up for it with quite an accurate portrayal of the local idol-scene once it gets going.

Obviously, if you’re not into slice of life, you’re not going to like this series, but nonetheless it’s an incredibly genuine shoujo series with some adult themes. It’s got a wonderful lead character. And sure, the animation looks a bit outdated for those of you who are only used to series from the last four years, but nonetheless the character-art is very expressive, and tries to convey even the smallest of emotions, and it looks great in my opinion. Simply said: Miho Rocks.

Short Synopsis: Celestial Beings visit Kataron in an attempt to team up.
Highlights: Well, let’s hope Saji has learned his lesson now…
Overall Enjoyment Value: 7,5/10 (Good)
Overall, I liked this episode quite a bit as it continued to push the plot forward, although I do have a large complaint about the way it ended. It just reminded me too much of Code Geass, in which the creators just too often tried to evoke sympathy by creating an as large bloodbath as possible. The big problem is that the lead characters that were so morally unambiguous in the first season turned into the clichéd “heroes of justice”.

In the first season, there were some evil parties, but no party was pure good. Everyone was in it for his or her own ideals and agendas, and especially the split world into three equally powerful parties made up for a lot of interesting politics, where the viewer got the chance to side for a lot of differently possible parties. Unfortunately, they’ve now merged together into one big glob of a country where only the characters from the first season seem to feel any sympathy.

It’s not a complete disaster, but this series really NEEDS to do something to prevent A-LAWS from turning into your stereotyped evil empire that needs to be defeated. The top-decision makers are the biggest problem, I think. They just aren’t fleshed out as well as the people fro the first season. It’s a shame, we’ve got a series with some wonderful characters across the scale of good and evil, and now they have to take orders from pure evil people.

Gundam Wing had the same in its middle part, and it managed to pull through when said organization fell apart. That’s what I hope that this series is going to do as well: just let the evil empire do its stuff for a while, and then around the episode 13-mark make it fall apart with a big bang. I mentioned this before, but the most important thing that this series needs to do is to give each of its characters an identity: a unique role that’s going to create a lot of different parties one could side with.

Strangely enough, I was more annoyed with Louise than with Saji in this episode. Saji’s behaviour felt natural: we already know that he’s struggling between every different party, and he’s not exactly someone who can keep a secret. However, it seems that Louise didn’t enter the army to grow, but rather to take revenge on the Gundams for her hand.

Speaking of stereotypes… what was up with Ali al Sarshes? Has he spent four years getting more and more insane or something? I would have preferred a less direct scene.

Short Synopsis: A teacher is bugged by an overprotective guardian.
Highlights: You have to love the messages of this series.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8/10 (Excellent)
Oh, how I love this series, although for a completely different reason when compared to the other seasons. The first season had some really nice stories in its repertoire about people who were pushed to the limits. The second season then started to move to lighter reasons to want to send someone to hell, and here the third season comes and it instead focuses on the darker side of being a teenager. Anime has a real tendency to overglorify teenagers, and I believe that this series has a very strong message against that, with the “Kids these days”-themes.

This episode already started to deviate from the usual formula. What we have here is a teacher, where one of her students has an incredibly overprotective aunt, who makes a fuzz over the slightest thing that happens to her niece, and makes whatever effort she can to make in order to make the teacher’s life miserable. In the end, it turns out that that student had been setting up her aunt against the teacher, just for fun. She figured that her teacher was a grown-up, so she’d just be fine, even though she had to deal with her aunt.

It’s strange. When you look at the themes, it almost seems like this series has been written by a bunch of old guys who downright hate everything about teenagers, and yet they make some very good points. Teenagers these days do cause a lot of unnecessary trouble for others and don’t even seem to understand what they did wrong, and even though the teacher’s method was a bit extreme, it was the perfect one to teach her a lesson she won’t soon forget.

Another point this series is trying to make is about the ease at which people are willing to send others to hell. It’s not just a sign of that people are losing faith in these “fictional” places as heaven or hell, but also at how they fail to look at the distant future (a very recent topic, with the economy, and huge amounts of people who failed to pay their mortgage). It’s a conservative series, and yet it’s also the series that’s got the most actual topics. It’s the first anime I’ve seen that included the Vista-cursor, it’s got IPods, as compared to most other series, which are still stuck in Windows 98.