Fancy Lala
| TV episode summaries
| Hitoshi Doi
The girl, Shinohara Miho, sits up on her bed and rubs her wrist; he pulled it too strong. She walks down stairs and there is a draft of a comic "Fancy Lala."
At the breakfast table, the girl's mother, Mamiko, tells her sister, Chisa, to prepare the dinner that night as she will be late. Miho explains her dream to her sister... no, she insists it was not a dream. But Chisa isn't interested and rushes off to school with an embarrassed smile for Miho's compliment on her new uniform. Her father is barely in time to see Miho before she leaves home for her school as well.
A boy rushes out from the house next door. The boy, Yoshida Tarou, catches up with Miho and speaks to her. It is the beginning of a new school year and they are expecting to be in new classes. He wonders which class she will be in. Miho, who's been running to make sure she isn't late, suddenly stops; she has found the two monsters she saw in the dream. But apparently they are invisible to Tarou.
In the front yard of the school, Miho checks the notice board to see which class she is in. Before she finds the answer, her best friend, Akiru, comes to her to tell they are in the same class again. Miho's joy is cut short as also sees the name of Tarou in the class.
In the new class (3rd Grade, ie 8-9 years old), the home-room teacher introduces himself with a joke which impresses no one. Then he asks all the pupils to introduce themselves. While the other pupils [the pretty girl, Nozaki Anna, seems as though she may become a major character] are doing this, Miho indulges herself by imagining that she gives such a wonderful introduction she immediately becomes a popular figure in the class. But in reality, she is too shy and does not know what to say. Help though comes from an unexpected direction. The teacher cuts in to say, "Don't you have a sister?" He started his teaching career in the school and her sister was in his class. She must remember him as an incompetent teacher, who was so uptight not to be able to introduce himself properly.
On her way home from the school, she drops in at an art shop to buy screentones [^o^;;]. In the shop, two voices whisper. "She must be the girl." "Why?" "I don't know." Miho hears it and looks around to find two dinosaurs dolls on the shelf. She reaches and examines one for a battery without success. She puts it back and walk off from the shop when the clerk stops her shop-lifting. The two dolls are clinging to her bag!
Eye-catcher
Miho denies the charge and tries to get rid of the dolls. The clerk insists that she should buy them, otherwise he will call her parents. "No, you need them." Surprisingly the strange man in her dream is in the shop. He pays the money, trying to settle the issue. But Miho is even keener to clear her name, "I'm not a shop-lifter!!" "I know that." His voice answers but his figure is nowhere to be seen in the shop. Somehow he is already out of the shop and walking away.
Miho runs back to her house, where she remembers the guy was in her dream. Her imagination goes wild depicting him as a scout who wants her to be a star in the future. Her eyes stop on the two dolls; "What weird dinosaurs..." "We are not weird dinosaurs!" Miho thinks she heard the dinosaur's voice but cannot confirm it as Chisa shouts at her to her prepare the dinner.
At the dinner table, Mamiko tells the girls she will be away for a few days from tomorrow for a filming trip. "You will be alright without me, won't you?" Miho tries to assure her by saying she made the 'hiyayakko' on the table ['hiyayakko' is chilled tofu, one of the easiest Japanese dishes (it would be very difficult to get wrong)]. Asked by her, the two girls go up to call their father. He is an archaeologist and has been pondering about a scar he has hound on a dinosaur skull, "It looks like one made by a sharp tool."
Chisa watches a TV program which has her favourite idol, Aikawa Hiroya, in. She asks her mother, who planned the drama, if he is as cool in reality. Mamiko's very emphatic answer pleases Chisa.
Miho is up in her room drawing her comic. Beside her the "whisper" goes on until Miho is finally sure the dolls are chatting. "Weren't you speaking?" She doesn't get an answer but is still convinced she heard them. "All right. I'll throw you away with the garbage tomorrow!" This warning scares the dolls enough; they start to explain about themselves to Miho. They (Pigu and Mogu) are a kind of fairy and have strayed into this world from their "World Of Memory Of Time." They ask Miho to let them stay here until they can go back to their own world. They will give her magic power in return! Miho gets excited over the word. "Magic!? You mean, the one you do like this, you'll become like this?" Mogu is not altogether sure if they can fulfill her expectation. All they can do is control a very short period of time. They produce a pen and sketchbook.
Downstairs, Chisa is sleeping in front of a TV set, on which an advertisement gets interrupted with an image of the prehistoric village. [This TV commercial is a parody of a real ad for a brand of toothpaste. Another parody of the same ad appears in Episode 1 of Pretty Sammy (TV)]
Miho is told to draw clothes on the sketchbook. She will be in trouble if she grows up in the clothes she is wearing now. With a spell 'Dabu-Dabu', the sketch becomes a real thing! ['dabu-dabu' is a word to express clothes (or shoes etc) being too big] After changing into the clothes, she is handed the pen. Mogu tells her the spell to initiate the magic. "Listening to the memory of time, grow up elegantly to Fancy Lala!" Having checked she has really grown up [*^_^*], she is really pleased with the outcome of the magic. Feeling happy, she wants to go up to "Garden in the Sky."
It is small but a beautiful balcony only for her. She introduces herself to the fairies. Perhaps because her mother works in a TV station, she wants to work in media or be a manga artist when she grows up. Looking up at a wonderful starry sky and then at her new magic pen, she wonders how she will use her magic. [This shot was enough for me to determine to buy the soundtrack CD.]
Fancy Lala
| TV episode summaries
| Hitoshi Doi