Fancy Lala, Vol. 2: Sharing the Spotlight (1998)
Review by Dindrane
Film:
DVD:

Written by Tomomichi Mochizuki
Directed by Tomomichi Mochizuki and Takahiro Omori
Art Direction by Akira Miyazaki

Features:

• Textless Opening
  
• Text Interview
  
• English and Japanese audio
  
• English subtitles
  

Dindrane's Anime Warnings:

• What’s with the kitten abuse on a kid’s show? Or any show?
• More cutesiness than a bourgeois first-born
• Small concern with age-appropriate character behavior

Rating: 3+

Anamorphic: N/A

My Advice: Buy it if you have young daughters into lots of pink. Skip it otherwise.

In this volume of Fancy Lala, Miho as Lala is carving a place for herself as a model and pop idol. She goes on her first location shoot and has to deal with a rather snotty, but much more famous, fellow idol--a girl Miho’s mother knew as a child and who seems to have two personalities. Miho learns more about the potential and limitations of her magic pen, as well as of herself.

The characters develop further in this disc. Miho as Lala must cope with the arrival of a rival for stardom, especially given that Miki seems to love Miho, but hate Lala. Could it be that people are actually complex and can have motivations unlike Our Heroine? In any case, it’s good to see that Miho can grow and learn, without relying too much on her faery dinosaur companions for advice.

It is still a bit odd to see Lala coping with typical teenage situations, as well as her burgeoning stardom, when Lala is really a nine-year-old in a fifteen-year-old body. While the people around Lala inside the series are often charmed by her naiveté, viewers may find it a bit disturbing to see a child’s mind in a teenager’s body being presented as even a mild sex symbol and love interest. In kind of a reverse Lolita, it brings to mind all kinds of misogynistic “simple-minded woman” themes. I assume that is not at all what the creators intended, but hopefully these issues will either be addressed or resolved as the series continues.

The audio and video were both fine in general. I might wish the audio was a bit more varied, but all dialogue is crisp and clear. The art is quite good; the colors are bright enough to fascinate the target audience, but interesting enough not to bore their parents silly as they watch with their children.

The features are also quite enjoyable. There’s a very long text interview with Akemi Takada and the rest of the creative staff. It would have been nice had this interview been presented in smaller bites; it gets a bit repetitive paging through page after page of block text. I’m not sure many members of the target audience will bother, and it’s a shame to lose this valuable and fascinating information to a formatting issue. The textless ending is a gift to those of us who like the art of this series.

This is a fluffy kind of fun. If you’re fond of rags-to-riches sorts of stories, fashion shows, or think that the ingénue is the perfect woman, then you’ll probably enjoy it. It also serves as a nice break from the blood-and-guts brand of drivel; pink, after all, isn’t any sillier than cliché war movies or yet another many-women-love-one-incompetent-male tale, even if it’s less to your taste. I just hope that Fancy Lala picks up on the energy and fun of Cardcaptors or the adventure of something like Inu-Yasha.