Save Me! Lollipop - Reviews

Story

Main character Nina accidentally swallows the 'crystal pearl', an item necessary in order for trainee magicians to pass their test. She comes under attack from various wizard candidates as a result, but fortunately, two of them choose to stay by her side and protect her until the test's time limit is up.

The majority of the series was slapstick comedy – when Nina wasn't arguing and/or falling in love with her guardians Zero and Ichii, the three of them were 'battling' against whichever incompetent duo appeared to try and kidnap her and the pearl that week. It had its moments early on, but got repetitive VERY quickly, and overall felt like it was aimed at a younger audience

We had a beach episode and a hotsprings episode. There was a body-swap episode. The romance was cliché, and went nowhere. It just felt like the show stuck to every overused trope in the book. Nothing sticks out in my mind as remotely original. At least it made sense and ended on a vaguely satisfying note, I guess?

Characters

As with the plot, the main characters were seriously lacking in originality. Zero was your strong, argumentative but nice on the inside guy, while Ichii was friendly, gentlemanly, but slightly mysterious. Bizarrely, they seemed to swap personalities in the flashback episode that looked at how they first met. Nina was the most generic shoujo series lead ever, there's honestly nothing worth commenting on.

The first few side characters were much better – I actually liked San and Forte, their botched attempts at capturing Nina, their master-servant relationship, Forte's reluctant cross-dressing, the lot. The episode that focused on their past was by far the best in the series. Ichii's deceptively young, obnoxious fiancée Rokka was amusing as well, and I didn't mind her partner Gou.

Unfortunately, every other side-character introduced after them were inferior clones, that seemed to get worse and worse with each generation. Did we really need another fiancée, and two more otokonoko characters? Surely the point of introducing new rivals is supposed to be to add variation?

Animation and Sound

The animation seems pretty low-quality for its time, which was 10 years ago. Mostly standard 2D animation, but with a lot of static pans and off-model characters. The fight scenes did not look great, but thankfully they were never the main focus of the series. The CG used for the snake in the first episode was laughably bad, I'm glad they didn't use it again after that (outside of the budget-looking explosion effects).

Character designs were nice for Nina, and most of the side characters; main male duo looked as boring as their personalities.

The most positive thing in this series, for me, was the music. The OP and ED themes, while not the kinds of music I'd listen to outside of the series itself, were cute, catchy, and suited the series well. The insert themes were also fine.

I don't usually comment on voice acting, because 99% of the time it sounds fine to me. In Mamotte! Lollipop, a lot of the characters sounded bored. That didn't help combat my own growing feelings of boredom.

Overall

Generic, repetitive, below-average production values for its time. Hard to justify wasting your time on it 10 years later. But then, I'm not the target audience.

Anime in 200 Words: Save Me! Lollipop

Premise: A magical object is dropped into the human world and a defenseless girl eats it. Many young wizards come to get the object, with or without concern for her life. Two boys decide to defend her.

Characters: Nina is a bubbly airhead, Zero is hot-headed, and Ichi is sensitive. The main three were all fine with me; I grew to care about all of them. The supporting cast did get annoying at times, but you’ll have that.

Audience: Shoujo fans. A love triangle, wacky hijinks, and a band of friends who stand against evil: like it? Come on in!

 Magic: There is no central means of using magic in this show; each mage has his or her own specialty. Save Me! Lollipop doesn’t take a logical approach to magic, instead favoring the whimsical “anything is possible” approach. If you appreciate complicated and well-developed magic systems, this isn’t your show.

 Overall: Save Me! Lollipop is a light, sugary show that balances relationships and magic. It’s not terribly deep, but spells like Air Fish should provide a laugh or two. For a feel good shoujo anime, Save Me! Lollipop is a pretty good choice.

Okay well, you can probably tell that i LOVE this anime. It's kinda short, 13 episodes, but it's real good. I love it of course, because of the supernatural powers, and how the guys (Zero and Ichii) want to protect Nina, from all the other sorcerer examinies. It's pretty funny, romantic, action, and a lot of other stuff. I recommend it to anyone, unless your only into that whole blood fighting thing.

Story: Mamotte Lollipop could have been really, really good. But its misleading, predictable story and repetitiveness stopped it from being the best of the best. Sure, its a nice show for pre-teen girls but anyone older who can tell apart a good story from a bad one will NOT like this. Episode one of this anime admitedlly WAS very good. After the first episode I had high hopes for this series, but being able to only manage 5 more episodes I was very let-down by Mamotte Lollipop for several reasons.

Problem One: All the episodes had exactly the same thing happening again and again and again. In every episode Nina would get into trouble, all would look lost then Zero and Ichii would come to save Nina in record-time. It was infuriating to watch every single scenario go on multiple times whats so over-used in lots of other anime like this.

Problem Two: This anime is classed as mahou-shoujo. And gues what? ITS NOT MAHOU-SHOUJO!!! The only reason I wanted to watch this was because I thought I'd see some girls transforming into magical superheroes fighting evil and annoying people with their sayings and long transformation scenes. But this was NOT a magical-girl series. Nina was not a superheroine. None of the characters were. Granted, Zero, Ichii, Rokka and the rest of the gang could used magic, but there was no transforming, only 3 second scenes where Zero and Ichii would be surrounded by green light then zap flames out of their hands or something to kill any aliens after Nina. Mamotte Lollipop is a fantasy show, and thats it.

Despite this, some aspects of the story kept me going, not for long, but they did help. The love-triangle of Nina, Ichii and Zero made me tempted to keep watching, but just looking up on Wikipedia who ends up with whom satisfied me enough that I didn't want to bother watching anymore of the show.

Animtion: Animation in Mamotte! Lollipop really is the typical girly anime show look. Not amazing by any standards, but close up it can look fairly well done.

Sound: I cannot remember any sound in this, it was not memorable except for the opening. Music was just unnoticeable normality in this show.

Characters: Although Nina was not an annoying character in the normal sense of a character like her, her unbelievable knack of getting into trouble from the simplest things did frustrate me. Ignoring that, she still wasn't that much of a likeable character either, I found her...bland.

Zero was more interesting, but predictable. Many a shonen protagonist is exactly like Zero, so many in fact that I could read him like an open book when he was meant to be somewhat of a mystery.

Ichii was a good character, if portrayed as a little too perfect.

Rokka and Forte are the most interesting characters out of the bunch. Rokka was funny and oddly endearing to me, whilst it was amusing to watch Forte, seeing him try to work out exactly who he is sexually X3 the poor guy is the most feminine character I'd ever seen.

Overall:  Pre-teen girls will like, anyone else won't. The story is just too abominable for people of any higher intellect.

I was kind of upset with the cliffhanger this anime ended on. It didn't have any episodes after to show what happened to their dragon familiar thing, which was a bit disappointing. Despite this, though, this anime really made the tears come rolling down my cheeks!