Strawberry Marshmallow

Nobue Ito was just your ordinary sixteen year old girl, going to high school with her friends, enjoying her fleeting youth while looking excitedly towards the future... About four years ago. Now, at the tender age of 20, she’s commuting to university while living at home with her parents, wistful for the youth she took for granted. On the one hand, she’s living a privileged, comfortable life, wanting for nothing but a steady supply of cigarettes that, in such a tough job market, she can only barely afford. On the other hand, her social life is almost non-existent, as the only people she regularly hangs out with anymore are her responsible, stalwart twelve year old sister Chika and her gaggle of pre-pubescent friends. This includes the bookish space cadet Matsuri, the neighborhood troublemaker Miu, and Ana, a pretentious white girl who’s having trouble fitting in. With no other prospects to occupy her time, Nobue has become the defacto babysitter for these four, as well as mentor, referee, and even occasional antagonist, as she bears witness to the trials, whimsies and adventures that she’s grown out of, as she protects these four precious marshmallows.

For Strawberry Marshmallow, we’re returning to studio Daume, which I have to say is one of the odder anime studios I’ve ever dived into. I’ve reviewed a few of their titles before, but suffice to say, when you put Le Portrait de Petit Cossette, Please Twins and Shiki right next to each other, they look absolutely nothing like each other, nor do they look anything like Strawberry Marshmallow. It’s hard to say anything definitive about a studio that’s been dead since 2011, but from what I can tell, they probably were the type of studio that gave their directors the freedom and resources to achieve whatever their visions might have been, for better or worse of course. Because of that, I guess it shouldn’t be surprising that the director’s name is a lot more telling. Strawberry Marshmallow was directed by Takuya Sato, a man whose name has been attached in some way or another to some huge titles. Not only did he perform storyboard, screenplay and series composition work on shows like Trigun, Serial Experiments Lain and Princess Tutu, but he’s done almost nothing but work as lead director ever since his 2011 effort on a little known indie title called motherfucking Steins;Gate.

Strawberry Marshmallow wasn’t his first lead directing job... It was his second, after NieA 7... But his resume up to that point reads like someone who’s taking as many jobs as he can to absorb as much information as he can, and it shows in the final product, because Strawberry Marshmallow is incredibly well directed. It doesn’t look like it had a massive budget to work with, but the material also wasn’t too demanding, as it’s a slice of life show with a lot of dialogue, so it really doesn’t feel like they ever had to cut any serious corners with the animation, and as a result, the movement of the characters always feels articulate and seamless. The color palette is very soft and water-colory... Bright, but in a way that never stands out, lending it an aesthetic that’s consistently easy on the eyes, especially in the way it translates to nearly every single background environment that’s ever featured on screen. It’s a very warm, welcoming aesthetic, able to tug at your nostalgia without ever feeling manipulative or dishonest in its attempts.

The character designs seem fairly common at first... Bodies that are more or less anatomically feasible, with cartoonishly round faces for the sake of their enhanced range of expression, hairstyles that are distinctive and yet simplistic enough to seem realistic... But there are two details that set Strawberry Marshmallow’s cast apart from similar ensembles. First, simple enough, this is one of the rare shows where characters wear different things every day, and they even take this a step further than usual by not assigning the characters any school uniform... This is practically unheard of when you think about just how much money a production company can save by sticking to one or two outfit designs through a show’s run time. The other detail is in the characters’ height. You can tell a lot about the intentions of an anime based on how tall their child characters are... The smaller they are, the harder you’re being manipulated, with one example being the twelve year olds who look like six year olds in Your Lie in April... But despite most of the main cast being eleven to twelve years old in this, they’re all designed at a realistic height.

The english dub was an early Geneon effort, and they turned to their Blue Water group for this one. All in all, there were only about a dozen people in the cast, five in the main cast, with the rest taking multiple characters apiece out of the side cast. For the five featured stars, Geneon made an interesting decision here, choosing to cast actual child actors as the four pre-pubescent leads, and for child actors, they all portray their characters in a pretty spot-on manner. Kylie Beaven is especially noteworthy for her ultra-precious take on the slow Matsuri, which is kind of a shame, because she and Wendy Morrison(Chika) never really stuck to voice acting after this show. Katie Rowan did a fine job capturing Ana’s highborn melancholy, and she managed to land a few decent jobs up to 2012, including the lead role in Full Moon wo Sagashite. Caitlynne Medrek only had to be bratty as Miu, but she still found ways to make the character complex, so it makes sense that she’s been working steadily even as late as last year.

Finally, Carol Anne Day has just a deep and rough enough voice to round out the cast as the long suffering, but still perfectly game for anything, Nobue. It’s a really strong dub over-all, despite the mistakes you open yourself up to whenever you hire the underage for acting jobs, but there is one thing kind of wrong with it. Ana Coppola’s entire gimmick is that she’s an English girl by birth, but has spent so much time in Japan that she doesn’t remember English very well, and the dub gets around this by having people speak English with really thick Japanese accents whenever someone’s using it, and just regular English the rest of the time, and it’s a competent enough idea, but actually listening to these scenes play out in the original Japanese is hilarious. The original sub does over-all have a stronger comedic edge than the dub, but scenes where Ana is struggling between English and Japanese are the only times in the series that I go out of my way to switch back to the sub. Other than that, you really can’t go wrong in either track, so my recommendation is split.

So, true story, Strawberry Marshmallow has been on my back burner for longer than any other anime I’ve ever reviewed. When I originally started to compile everything I’d reviewed into the sacred list, I was somewhere around the seventies, and as part of my future projections, I had Strawberry Marshmallow marked as like, I don’t know, 84? I even had its theoretical release scheduled for the second Saturday of November, but nope, it never wound up happening. I killed my blog and quit reviewing without ever touching on this anime. When I came back in 2021, I thought “Okay, this time, this time definitely,” but after I rewatched it, I realized I had nothing too important or interesting to say about it, so I just dropped it. Well now we’re in 2023, I’m slowly approaching my 200th review, and there is nothing that’s going to stop me from reviewing this anime... Even though it’s still just as simple and plotless as it always was. Honestly, forget the plot, I don’t even think this show has a premise. Maybe it’s like Azumanga Daioh, and its whole identity is the premise, living on name recognition alone.

And that’s when it hit me... Instead of just listing all of the show’s qualities verbatim, why not just do what I do best, and make a bunch of obnoxious references and comparisons? I can’t change who I am, might as well reap the benefits off of it. I’ve already thrown some shade at one popular anime, as anyone who has already downvoted this review is well aware, so I might as well take things back to Lucky Star, which I reviewed back in the days of my old blog. In that piece, I made some choice comments about the effectiveness of the comedy, and comments I still stand by. Specifically, I said that the core of Lucky Star’s humor was the adversarial relationship between Konata and Kagami, and that the farther removed from them the series got, the less funny it became, resulting in an entire secondary cast that struggled to uphold the magic of those that came before them. Luckily, Strawberry Marshmallow doesn’t have that problem.

There are only five main characters in Strawberry Marshmallow, and while there are a decent amount of side characters, none of them ever overstay their welcome. There are a couple of running gag characters... An old man whose favorite peaceful safe havens keep getting ruined by rambunctious kids, and a boy in Ana and Matsuri’s class who keeps getting punished for increasingly ridiculous reasons... But aside from them, every side character we ever meet gets exactly the right amount of screen time to interact with someone in the main cast for a story or a set of gags, before collecting their check and being instantly forgotten. I guess that sounds kind of harsh, but it’s more than excusable when you take into account just how much chemistry the main cast has, and how almost all of them... With the possible exception of Ana and Chika... Have unique dynamics with each other. In Lucky Star, when Konata and Kagami aren’t there to provide a punchline, Tsukasa and Miyuki get stuck going around in circles of airheaded conversation. In Strawberry Marshmallow, when Chika isn’t around to make straight man remarks, and Miu isn’t stirring up trouble, Matsuri and Ana are just fine on their own, being funny with their mutual English lessons. And each of these kids has an equally compelling dynamic with Nobue.

In my review of Listen to Me Girls, I am Your Father(God I hate that title) I had a lot to complain about, but one of my more specific remarks was that the family in the series didn’t feel realistic because, among other things, there was no conflict. You had four whole people sharing a small one bedroom apartment(or was it a studio?) and yet the only challenges they faced were of the time and money variety. Yeah, no, sorry, families fight. Siblings feel realistic when there’s a casual layer of annoyance and hatred that’s only been numbed by years of resignation to the inevitable, stretched out over a much thicker layer of love and loyalty. Chika and Nobue feel like actual, real life sisters, getting on each others’ nerves while still depending on each other in a way that suggests years of history that the series barely scratches the surface of. Not only do the two of them feel that way, but there’s also a very realistic dynamic stretching out across Chika’s friend group. I mentioned earlier that Chika and Ana don’t really have much of a dynamic, and that’s not a mistake.. The only reason the two of them hang out is because they’re both Matsuri’s friends, and you know what? In real life, sometimes it do be like that.

All of that under consideration, there are two qualities about this show that are stronger than anything else, and the first one is the character Miu. While she’s by no means the main character of the series, she is arguably the most popular, and even kind of the de facto mascot. She’s the most common character in the show’s merchandise, with Ana as a distant second, and she was even the focal point of the show’s one and only AMV Hell appearance. Miu might seem like an insufferable character at first glance, but it’s characters like her who keep the plotless slice of life series alive. What would Azumanga Daioh be without Tomo? Would South Park still be around without Cartman? There’s a reason Bart has always been the most popular Simpson. While the rest of the main cast is fine on their own, and there’s plenty of comedy to be enjoyed between them, Miu is automatically the most interesting part of any story she’s in, and she’s really good at keeping these stories alive. There’s only one storyline where she ever goes too far, to the point that the other girls start to feel guilty, and she does manage to cause actual consequential trouble for Nobue, but let’s be real, Nobue could have also handled herself a lot better. Besides, that diner would have gotten boring if it featured in more than one episode.

The other quality that this series thrives on is just how wholesome it is. Strawberry Marshmallow is a laid back, innocent series where you spend twelve straight episodes watching four preteen girls and their adult supervisor live out their daily lives, and yet at no point does it ever feel voyeuristic or creepy... Except on the rare occasions where a joke is made about Nobue being a pervert, and while most of these could be interpreted as misunderstandings being made at Nobue’s expense, I’d be lying if I said she never crosses a line or two. Seeing her leer at Ana in the bath and refuse to look away when asked is a little skin-crawling, not gonna lie, but still, moments like these are few and far between, and there aren’t nearly enough red flags to ruin an otherwise relatable and likeable character. Granted, there’s also the eyecatch artwork... Eyecatches, by the way, are the title cards that show up at the halfway marks of most anime episodes... Which are focused on the little girls hips, including a shot where one of them is wearing jeans that are just oh so suggestively unbuttoned, which is something nobody fucking asked for. Nobody worth listening to, anyway.

And finally, one more comparison I’d like to make, Lilo and Stitch. Yes, I know, that’s not an anime, but it is popularly considered a good example of how to write child characters, as children are more than just burdens, bundles of joy, or McGuffins. Children, especially those at the age of Chika and her friends, are intellectual beings with complex interests and personalities. The fact that Ana enjoys Japanese festivals and culture, and is knowledgeable about Sumo Wrestling, ties in perfectly with her language and heritage conflict. The fact that Matsuri is a fan of Harry Potter... Yes, the actual Harry Potter, not a copyright dodging reskin... Tells us loads about her that we never see. Chika’s obsessive studying is suggestive of the example her sister set for her, and there’s plenty of evidence suggesting Miu is either somewhat neglected at home, or just starved for attention for other reasons. All of this feeds into the comedic and unexpectedly dramatic sides of the series, and I’d have to give away some serious spoilers to support this, but the comedic timing is absolutely pitch perfect. It’s hard to recommend plotless slice of life shows to people, as you can never tell what anybody’s going to find boring, but I think there’s a good chance you’ll enjoy this one.

Strawberry Marshmallow was originally available from Geneon Entertainment, which basically means it was expensive as all hell from the moment it was released, and the company dying in the mid-2000s only made it even more difficult to find at a reasonable price. That was, until a few years ago, when Sentai filmworks rescued and released it on a far more affordable and accessible Blu-ray/DVD format. They also released a separate DVD/Blu-ray for the various OVA episodes, but I’d exercise caution going into those, as they do get pretty creepy and fanservicey. The original manga has been out of print ever since Tokyopop went under, and apparently there’s a visual novel for the PS4 that’s never been translated or released stateside.

The main reason Strawberry Marshmallow is difficult to talk about, and took me so damn long to review, is just that it’s a very simple show. There are no real complex themes in it, and while there is a decent degree of depth to the characters themselves, everything else about this series is honestly pretty shallow and straight forward. Luckily, while there might not be much beneath the surface, it has a pretty damn enjoyable surface. With only a few small exceptions here and there, this series is perfectly wholesome and safe for the youngest viewers, but with more than enough of an edge to it’s humor to keep adults entertained as well. With little to no technological or pop culture references, it's also perfectly timeless and accessable. It’s well produced, pleasant to look at, and it carries an ambiance of nostalgia and warmth that’s sure to comfort the soul of even the most cynical viewer, even if it isn’t quite the emotional powerhouse some people might be looking for.

I give Strawberry Marshmallow an 8/10.