Mahou no stage Fancy Lala

English Title: Fancy Lala
Mangaka: Kasuga Rurika
Pub. Date: 1998
# of Vols.: 2

TV Series: 1998 (26 Episodes)

Nine year old Shinohara Miho lives with her older sister, Chisa, father an archaeologist, and mother who works for a TV station. She spends her free time designing clothes and drawing comics, one of note Fancy Lala, a girl of 15 who can sing, dance, and is a star. One day she wanders into a toy store and spies two stuffed dinosaurs, a pink with a dangling star from the long ear, and a blue with a star at the end of his tail. She doesn't know yet they aren't toys, but she replaces them on the shelf and on leaving the store is stopped when the shopkeeper finds them attached to her backpack. A mysterious man comes to her rescue and pays for the two toys. He will pop up every now and then in Miho's days, but she doesn't know why or who he is, only that he knows she will need the two companions. Turns out they are from the "World of Memory of Time" and in exchange for letting them stay with her, they grant her the use of their magic which is based on the ability to control time for a short period. It will let her grow up a little. She'll go on to use her transformation to transform into her creation of Lala and seek to become a star through the help of Yumi, President of Lyrical Productions, a modeling agency.

Besides being a charming and enjoyable series, the images used for growing up are very well done in this show. Some are discussed on other pages of the site, such as Miho's henshin pen. But the series does indeed pull a tight illustration of the genre. For instance, we have 9 year old Miho inside the body of 15 year old Lala, yet while she changes on the outside (after her very first transformation Miho blushes as she peeks inside her blouse, noting she has indeed grown into a woman like she wanted to be), she is a child at heart and acts and reacts thus. For instance, too after peeking and checking her reflection in the mirror, she spends time squatting then standing tall, excited over her change in height. And her first meeting with scouting types on the streets of Harajuku reflects the child mind of Miho and how she perceives strangers (even if she did initially fantasize something completely different before she got there).

Another favorite image is the garden. Miho has what she calls the sky garden, a special place of her own to wander out to and sit under the stars and sky and be alone. The door out to the garden seems to be connected to her bedroom. But a garden itself is a place of nurture and growth, a place for plants and flowers to grow, bloom, and be cultivated. They are also many times quiet places. And as Miho is a little girl who's story will following her own growth, the garden she loves so much as her own, makes a nice symbol for her longing for inner nurturing and bloom. In the first episode it is her "exclusive garden" that Miho wants to go to after transforming to Lala for the first time. She goes out to the star-spilled area and sits in the little swing there. But she chooses to show it to Pigu and Mogu who've just given her the gift of their magic which allowed her her new joy of getting a chance to realize her dream to be older and make in herself the qualities she wishes she had more of. So it is her special gift back to them, that she shares with them her special garden.

A last note on Fancy Lala is that originally it was created as a one shot OVA titled Harbor Light Monogatari Fashion Lala yori. But the story was rewritten years later and made into the TV series discussed here. The series was also heavily inspired by the earlier series Creamy Mami.

Magical Companion
Pigu and Mogu-two dinosaurs/fairies

Magical Phrase
Coming soon...

Magical Items
Magical pen and notebook