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Today on the Magical Girl Project, I'm sampling two shows with very similar premises from the same era: Risky Safety from 1999 and A Little Snow Fairy Sugar from 2001. Both shows involve miniature apprentice-level Magical Girls who travel to the human world in order to pass a test that will allow them to become fully-fledged magic users, with said test requiring the collection of MacGuffins. Both are also early examples of cutesy-wootsy Magical Girl shows made for a male audience.
A Little Snow Fairy Sugar is about an adorable pink-haired apprentice Season Fairy named Sugar. Season Fairies are in charge of creating weather in the human world; Sugar’s specialty is snow, which she creates by playing a magic flute. After arriving in the human world, Sugar promptly passes out from hunger and is discovered by the muggle heroine, Saga. Saga is a control freak; she likes to have her day all neatly planned out and diligently sticks to her schedule. However, now that ditzy, playful, fish-out-of-water Sugar is staying at her house, you can bet that Saga’s carefully-laid plans are all going out the window. Two of Sugar’s friends quickly join them, Salt the sun fairy and Pepper the wind fairy, and when you add the fact that Saga’s the only human around who can see the fairies, you have a recipe for ~*~wacky hijinks!~*~
Risky Safety is about an adorable apprentice shinigami named Risky who has come to Earth to collect souls. She happens upon the muggle heroine, Moe, who is depressed after being rejected her crush and is longing for death. However, before Risky can make Moe’s wish come true, she’s interrupted by her brain-roommate. See, Risky is sharing a body with an apprentice angel, Safety, and who’s in control of their shared body depends on the overall mood: happy events make Safety come out, sad events make Risky come out. The duo move in with Moe and continue to fight over her soul, with Risky trying to claim it and Safety trying to save it, and when you add the fact that Safety has a magical bow whose arrows can make people fall in love with the first person they see and the first arrow she fires accidentally hits a Pomeranian, you have a recipe for ~*~wacky hijinks!~*~
I was expecting my reaction to A Little Snow Fairy Sugar to being something like “UGH IT’S SO CUTE AND SACCHARINE I’M GONNA BARF.” However I was pleasantly surprised by how un-painful the experience was. Make no mistake, ALSFS has cuteness gushing out of its every twee orifice, but the cuteness has a certain Disney-esque sincerity to it that saves it from being nauseating.
Risky Safety is a more subdued affair, and the sweetness is balanced out by Risky’s more tomboyish, rude, and growly-voiced brand of cute. The quieter tone is complimented by a muted color palette of browns, greys, and creams, in contrast to the more candy-colored ALSFS, although I think Risky Safety is almost too muted, like someone leaned too hard on the desaturate button.
As far as content, both shows are Cute Witch stories at the core, with the added twist of the magical girls being miniaturized and invisible to everyone except their one muggle friend, whose role in the story is consequently expanded. ALSFS tweaks things a bit by having one of the heroine’s posse be a Magical Boy, and adding a couple more Magical Boys later on. Risky Safety is a more interesting twist on the genre due to the sharing-a-body schtick and the fact that the two magical girls are directly at odds with one another, and the evil-ish one is also the slightly more prominent one in the story.
An interesting thing about both shows is that they were among the earliest male-aimed Magical Girl shows on broadcast TV, coming soon after the success of Cardcaptor Sakura and a few years before Nanoha and the height of the moe craze. Also, both shows are almost completely devoid of fanservice and could easily be mistaken for kids’ shows. I don’t know if these two things are related, or how — you’d think the early male-aimed broadcast MG shows would be more fanservice-heavy than later ones because they’d be less assured of success and would want to hedge their bets with lots of attention-grabbing T&A.
Also I’d like to note that even in the short time I was watching and in spite of the size difference between the heroines, ALSFS managed to squeeze in the required Magical Girl LesYay Quota: Sugar really likes to kiss people on the cheek or nose whenever she’s happy, and the first time she does this to Saga, the latter gets all blushy and flustered. A+ effort, ALSFS.
