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A Little Snow Fairy Sugar
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The opening title screen of A Little Snow Fairy Sugar.

Opening Theme Song

"Sugar Baby Love" performed by Yoko Ishida

Ending Theme Song

"Snow Flower" performed by Maria Yamamoto

Episodes

24

Studio

J.C.Staff, TBS

Licensed by

Geneon Entertainment (formerly), Sentai Filmworks (current)

Network

TBS

Genre

Fantasy, slice-of-life, comedy, drama

"There are fairies who have a mission to create snowfall. Did you know? Because they can make it snow, they're called Snow Fairies, I'm told."

— A Little Snow Fairy Sugar, episode 1 prologue

Welcome![]

Welcome to the A Little Snow Fairy Sugar wiki! Here you will find out information all about the A Little Snow Fairy Sugar franchise.

About[]

A Little Snow Fairy Sugar (ちっちゃな雪使いシュガー) is a Japanese anime series developed by J.C.Staff. It premiered in Japan on TBS on October 2, 2001 and ran for 24 episodes until its conclusion March 26, 2002. A two-episode OVA Special was also released for the series, which takes place after the main series' conclusion, often simply considered episodes 25 and 26. The series was licensed for North America by Geneon [Pioneer] Entertainment, but after the closure of Geneon, its DVD releases went out of print. As of 2009, Sentai Filmworks has acquired the license.

A related manga series based on the anime, written and illustrated by Botan Hanayashiki under the name "BH Snow+Clinic", was also released, spanning 14 chapters. Originally serialized in Dragon Junior, the individual chapters were published in three tankōbon volumes by Kadokawa Shoten.

Story[]

The story is based around 11-year-old Saga Bergman, a young girl in a small German town called Muhlenberg (based on the real town of Rothenburg ob der Tauber, Germany).

Saga lives with her grandmother Regina and works in a coffee shop when not in school. Saga is extremely structured and plans her life down to the minute. One day, she notices a tiny creature in a fluffy outfit that appears to be starving. She offers it a waffle, which helps revive the tiny creature. Saga learns that this tiny creature is Sugar, an apprentice season fairy. Sugar explains that season fairies alter the weather by playing a magical musical instrument, and her specialty is snow, which she creates by playing the piccolo.

Sugar is joined by two more apprentice season fairies, Salt, an outgoing male fairy who plays the trumpet to make the sun shine more brightly, and Pepper, a quiet and caring female fairy who plays the harp to make the wind blow. All three apprentices are shocked at the realization that Saga can see them, since humans are not supposed to be able to see season fairies. Pepper speculates that exceptional humans might be able to see them, which is the best possible explanation. Sugar tells Saga that the three have been sent to Earth to train as full-fledged season fairies, and to do that, they must find 'Twinkles'.

Sugar moves into Saga's bedroom and sets up residence, much to the consternation of the super-structured Saga. Saga is a well-meaning, intelligent and highly-organized girl who feels compelled to look after the childish, loud and irresponsible Sugar, who is incapable of looking after herself.

The story is complicated further with the arrival of three adult season fairies—Turmeric, a cloud fairy; Ginger, a rain fairy; and the Elder, the leader of the season fairies—and two more apprentices—Cinnamon, an ice fairy, and Basil, a thunder fairy.

With the highly disruptive presence of Sugar, Saga's life goes haywire. Her friends Norma and Anne think that she is losing her mind, and her teacher, Miss Hanna, is worried that her best student is acting strangely. Not at all concerned with her strange behavior is Greta, an egotistical rich girl who considers Saga to be her rival, and Phil, a goofy inventor who keeps trying to persuade Saga to help him with his experiments, if he is not already busy building and trying out his latest device.

Production[]

Concept and Character Development[]

The initial concept for A Little Snow Fairy Sugar began with the producers at TBS deciding that they wanted to have a series about a little fairy. Haruka Aoi took this idea and came up with the concept of a fantasy town where Season Fairies lived and traveled the world to control the weather. Together with Aoi, Yasunori Yamada, who was responsible for the series structure, a representative from Kadokawa Shoten, and series director Shinichiro Kimura did the final framework for the series was hammered out.[1]

Kimura focused on telling a story that focuses on the relationship between Sugar and Saga, while not fully explaining some things to viewers. In particular, he notes that the series never really explains what the "Twinkles" are that the fairies are searching for because he felt viewers should draw their own conclusions, and that the story's purpose was to show how friendships are formed and how they result in people growing as human beings.

The character of Sugar started with the basic idea that the main character of the series would be a snow fairy. When trying to think of a name, Yamada associated snow with white, which he said reminded him of "sugar", giving the snow fairy its name. With that name decided, he decided that all of the other fairies would also have the names of condiments. Initially, the story was going to be set in the fairy world, with no humans at all, however, as they worked on fleshing out the story, the character of Saga was introduced. Aoi originally envisioned Saga as a quiet and calm girl, but she was eventually changed into the more assertive and organization obsessed character seen in the final version. Yamada notes that Kimura was responsible for turning the story into a more positive and cheerful one than the original concept might have resulted in. Yamada felt the character of Greta was a key character, particularly towards the series. He notes that he and other staff members adored her as they felt she was a "good girl and a lovable character". Aoi was initially surprised to find that Sugar ended up being more tomboyish than he had originally planned, but after watching the completed series, he decided that it made her cute. He felt the completed series was a "great mixture of scenario, characters, music, background and voice acting."

The visual designs for the characters began with conceptual designs by Koge-Donbo. As the series was an original work and not based on a manga (though a later adaptation to manga was made), she was unsure on what the final appearances for the characters would be like. Character designer Keiko Kawashima notes that this made it confusing for him to follow the designs at first. He initially designed Saga with a more youthful appearance, but in discussing the character with Kimura, it was decided that she should have a more mature appearance that would be clearly distinctive from the appearances of the fairies.

In animating the series, full-digital animation is used. Because of the fairies smaller size and movements, they would initially be drawn the same size as humans, then shrunk down when needed for scenes with humans. This allowed the animators to give the characters more detailed and realistic movements.

Setting and Music[]

In designing the setting for the series, art director Shichiro Kobayashi was sent to Germany to search for locations. Though initially reluctant to go, as he felt reference materials would be enough, Kobayashi notes that it ended up being a valuable experience as he was able to better capture the Europeans' aesthetic sense and the "tastefulness" that permeates the towns and houses. Returning to Japan, he attempted to capture the "atmosphere" of the region, using pastel colors and aiming to make the art feel "comfortable."

The series' music began with Pioneer requesting that it be romantic feeling, using piano and strings, which pleased music director Nobuyoshi Mitsumune, who had been working with the medium in his previous project. Wanting to also do something different, Mitsumune initially considered using elements from the rock and dance genres, but after seeing the conceptual art and reading the series scripts, he revisited his vision and decided to go with something more orthodox that better matched the inspiration he felt from the series.

For the vocal tracks, sound director Yota Tsuruoka notes that the most difficult issue was dealing with the scenes where the fairies and humans would be having separate, unrelated conversations at the same time. He decided not to just have the tracks recorded separately for combining in the editing stage, but instead had the voice actors actually perform the scenes as written, with each group doing their conversations at the same time just as it occurs on screen.

Maria Yamamoto, who performed the ending theme, "Snow Flower", was originally going to be Sugar's voice actress. The song is sung in Sugar's point of view, so this would have made sense, as most songs of a series tend to have the actor of a main character be the vocalist. However, Sugar's voice was changed over to Tomoko Kawakami before the series aired. [2]

Reference list[]

External links[]

Official Japanese Website

Wikipedia: A Little Snow Fairy Sugar

w:c:Animanga:A Little Snow Fairy Sugar

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Wiki created October 14, 2011

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