November 17, 2007

Little Princess Sara - 02


Whoa… seriously…. I expected this series to take the same path as Les Miserables and Perrine, where the first season would be used to quietly introduce the different characters and settings, especially since Perrine has been a rather quiet series while Perrine and her mother have been travelling through Easter Europe.

And then Sara comes, and already delivers such a powerful episode, so early in the series, where Sara has to say goodbye to her father. She really is something different from your usual spoiled child, and the bond between her and her father is huge. This probably is due to the loss of her mother, which made a major impact on the two of them.

The majority of the episode is filled with Sara, trying to find Emily. It becomes even clearer that she’s got a lot of imagination, and sortof lives in her own world. And because she’s so innocent, she probably also gets her way. It’d be interesting to see in the future episodes when she doesn’t. The head of the school she’s in already suspects that she’ll cause huge amounts of troubles when that happens, though she looks more like someone who hides her sadness, like this episode showed how both Ralph and Sara refused to cry in front of each other. One thing’s for sure, though: the people in the school are going to have to get used to Sara’s strange personality.

October 26, 2007

Little Princess Sara - 01


After Ayatsuri Sakon finished, nearly two years after I originally started blogging it, I’ve been searching for another anime to blog once every month or so. In the end, I decided to support Live-eviL, C1-Anime and Minor ja Nai in their attempt to revive interest for the World Masterpiece Theatre-production Little Princess Sara. Les Miserables has been turning into a true masterpiece by now, and the few episodes I’ve seen of Perrine Monogatari have been really good as well.

Little Princess Sara is also special, in the way that it’s based on the same story that Soukou no Strain was based on, though obviously the writers of the latter took a lot of artistic liberties by placing a story that originally happened in England, about a century and a half ago into a science-fiction setting. It’s also notable that Sara’s original last name is now Crewe, instead of the Werec, which later changes into Crewe in Soukou no Strain. Ralph also isn’t her brother, but her father, surprisingly. I also don’t think that Ralph is going to kill Sara’s precious friends in this one. ^^;

The thing that did remain the same, though is Sara’s huge respect for Ralph, but that’s naturally obvious, since her mother died when she was four, and he’s been taking care of her ever since. He’s also incredibly rich, and he’s been giving her whatever she wanted, hence the title of this series: Little Princess. Because of that, the Sara of Little Princess is rather spoiled, but I wouldn’t call her arrogant. She doesn’t fit in the stereotype that has been set by anime that the rich kids have to be the cocky bastards who look down on everyone at all. Instead, she’s incredibly innocent. Her father probably has been protecting her from everything harmful, but yet she tries to please everyone, and she looks incredibly naive as well. I’m not sure whether we’re supposed to hate her or like her at this point, but that probably will become clearer in the next episode.

This first episode was actually quite similar to the first episode of Les Miserables as well, if you ignore the fact that Fantine was incredibly poor and Ralph is incredibly rich. Ralph has been coming from India, and he’s about to get back, leaving his daughter in a local prestigious school in the middle of London. The rest of the episode basically focused on Sara, spending her last few moments with her father. Another interesting detail is that in the next episode, Sara will be purchasing Emily, making another link to both Soukou no Strain and Les Miserables.