Are you tired of convoluted plots involving love hexagons, dark pasts, and the fate of mankind? Do you yearn for the days when characters were easy to understand and color-coded according to personality? Do you just want to kick back for 12 minutes and watch something that brings warm fuzzies to your heart? Then get yourself a Bottle Fairy.
Bottle Fairy deals with four tiny fairies and their quest to become human by learning about social concepts. With the help of their beloved Sensei-san, the high school/grad student who takes care of them, and Tama-chan, the genki first-grader who lives next door, their wish just might come true. However, being the naive little fairies that they are, they always get things mixed up, taking words for their literal meaning or taking concepts to extremes. But by the end of the day, these misconceptions are cleared up, bringing them one step closer to understanding what it's like to be human.
This is the premise for a hypnotically cute, 13-episode series, with each episode lasting 12 minutes, or half the time of a typical anime episode. As you might have guessed, the plot isn't particularly strong. Where did Sensei-san find these fairies? Where did these fairies come from? And what are Sensei-san and Tama-chan's real names? The characters aren't too deep either, with the hyperactive Kururu, the timid Chiriri, the cool, tomboyish Sarara, and the silly Hororo (who reminds me of Osaka from Azumanga). But why bother with all these details? The point of this series is to watch in amusement as these fairies perform cute, funny scenes month after month (or episode after episode) to get a sense of such social concepts as marriage (with the help of a puppet strongly resembling Rock Lee from Naruto), having fun in the summer (where they try in vain to make use of their swimsuits), and celebrating the New Year properly.
For such a narrow premise, Bottle Fairy pulls it off very well. The artwork is top-notch, although there are scenes (besides the ending of each episode) whose sole purpose is to let you stare at the kawaiiness at each fairy via a slow-panning still-frame. The ending is also pretty amusing, and while it's not exactly the ending I expected, it's the kind of ending you would expect from a series like this. The characters do have stock personalities (and yes, the fairies really are color-coded!), but you won't feel like you're missing anything. And the length of each episode is perfect - 24 minutes of pointless cuteness would be too much for anyone to sit through. One small problem I noticed was that most of the fairies' misconceptions were cultural in nature, so viewers might have some trouble if the English translation ae sloppy.
Overall, Bottle Fairy is a solid, family-friendly series I would recommend to anyone who wants to recall their childhood days about discovering the world around them. Plus it's so damn cute!
