Underplayed Gems

Trouble Chocolate (1999)

Trouble Chocolate poster
Original title
トラブルチョコレート
Genre
fantasy anime and manga, romantic comedy anime and manga, Comedy, Romance, Sci-Fi
Country
Japan
Length
1 season, 20 episodes
Rating
9.0 of 10 from 1 voters
Elsewhere
IMDb
The 3D catalogue: film cases on wooden shelves, with the cat sitting at the counter next to its greeting.

The catalogue in 3D

The film shelves have a room of their own that you can walk around in. The cat behind the counter is the AI Catbot, and they pick real films from the same catalogue when you tell them what you feel like watching. Nothing is for sale, here or in there. Go in from here and this series is already out on the counter, with more like it waiting on the shelf next to it.

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How it feels

A magic student named Cacao eats enchanted chocolate and accidentally frees a tree spirit named Hinano. Hinano takes over a marionette and moves in with Cacao while the show parodies other anime.

zanysillychaoticparodicnonsensicalplayfulfast-pacedgoofy

What happens

Trouble Chocolate (トラブルチョコレート, Toraburu Chokorēto) is a romantic comedy fantasy anime produced by AIC in 1999 and is licensed in the United States by Viz Media. The series features Cacao, a student at Micro-Grand Academy studying magic. One day, while his magic class teacher, Ghana, is performing a spell to summon a tree spirit, Cacao finds and eats some chocolate, which turns out to be 200-year-old magical chocolate. After eating the chocolate he becomes drunk and causes a wreck. During this, he interferes with Ghana's spell, letting the spirit, Hinano, escape. She inhabits the body of a marionette, who then moves in with Cacao. A second season of 24 episodes was planned but was eventually cancelled. Subsequent episodes of Trouble Chocolate have little connected storyline. Rather, the show is a parody of other anime. For example, two other characters, Murakata and Deborah, are constantly shown professing their love to each other, set to absurdly explosive special effects and backdrops, as is common (to a lesser extent) in many anime. The dubbed dialogue in Trouble Chocolate (written by professional comedy writer Pamela Ribon and recorded by The Ocean Group) often bears little or no resemblance to the original script (as heard in Japanese and seen in the subtitles), as opposed to the normal convention of translating the words as directly as the change in lip-sync will allow. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

More like this

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