A Little Snow Fairy Sugar (ちっちゃな雪使いシュガー, Chitchana Yukitsukai Shugā) is a Japanese anime series developed by J.C.Staff.
Originally serialized in the shōnen manga magazine Dragon Junior, the individual chapters were published in three tankōbon volumes by Kadokawa Shoten.
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.
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.
Haruka Aoi took this idea and came up with the concept of a fantasy town where Season Faries lived and traveled the world to control the weather.
Aoi originally envisioned her as a quiet and calm girl, but she was eventually changed into the more assertive and organization obsessed character seen in the final version.
[2] 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.
Returning to Japan, he attempted to capture the "atmosphere" of the region, using pastel colors and aiming to make the art feel "comfortable.
[6] For the vocal tracks, sound director Yota Tsuruoka notes that the most difficult issue was dealing with the scenes where the faeries 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.
Directed by Shinichiro Kimura and written by Yasunori Yamada, the series ran for 24 episodes until its conclusion on March 26, 2002.
He called the series a "well-written show for children that adults can enjoy just as much" and said it is a "heartwarming childhood tale" which is engaging and smart, calling it a rare children's program that "doesn't insult kids' intelligence," but criticized Sugar for being "too sweet" which would delight those who like kawaii culture while hard for others to stomach.
[9] Carlo Santos of Anime News Network reviewed the DVD collection, released in 2009, describing as a "relic" from the early 2000s without any gimmicks, describing it is a "heartwarming children's series with an infusion of magic" but criticizing it as starting off "incredibly weak" with pacing that is lackluster, while Saga's dealings with the fairies "never quite reach[es] full comedy potential."
He further argued that the series found its pushing in the sixth episode when Saga kicks Sugar out of her house, the soul and heart of the series from episodes nine to twelve which "turns out to be the most in-depth exploration of the characters yet," but criticized the show's visuals for not translating well into an animated form, with "cheap animation shortcuts" which didn't impact the music, including good themes song, and ended by saying that the series has "a quality that seems to have gone missing from the industry as of late" by being one of the "last few honest anime shows.