Nanatsuiro Drops, in short, is a show that comes about when you try to compress the feelings of Cardcaptor Sakura into twelve episodes, while also pitching the age of the characters and target audience up a bit. Is it good? That’s the question on the table, but from the start it’s certainly operating in a clear theme.
The show begins when asocial high school student Masaharu Tsuwabuki is transformed into a mascot plushie. A bizarre teacher seems to recognize his plight and sets him on a mission to get back to his human form by helping a chosen girl (identity initially unknown) gather seven magic star drops, lest he be stuck as a plush rather than a human or (as per current arrangements) a human who turns into a plush at night.
The chosen girl, to whom he cannot reveal his true identity, turns out to be none other than Sumomo Akihime, a kind and klutzy girl who ran into him earlier in the day. Together they retrieve the first star drop with very little fanfare around unlocking (extremely limited and specific, to begin with) mystical powers. Over the next few episodes another drop is collected, and Sumomo’s closest friend brought in to the secret. However, a rival magical girl appears – a blonde loudmouth (by night. By day, she’s the blue-haired mysterious transfer student), gathering the third star drop and declaring herself enemies with Sumomo, however mild that antagonism may be.
In fact, said rival, Yuuki, may help more than she hurts. You see, it seems that gathering the star drops is normally a competition between two magician schools, and Sumomo is only involved because one school’s representative got sick and went home causing her gear to pick a replacement. Yuuki wants a fair competition against an equal, so while she’s very tsun about it she also helps Sumomo learn magic… which doesn’t seem that hard as Sumomo is able to “Monkey see, monkey do” spells at a rate that’s shocking to Yuuki.
We then take something of a detour from collecting star drops to handle romance. At first, Sumomo angsts that Tsuwabuki may like Yuuki (he gets some daytime moments with her). Then, Tsuwabuki worries that Sumomo may like their in-the-magical-know teacher (it turns out she’s comfortable around him because he’s her uncle). Eventually, the manage to get their acts together at the same time and have a mutual confession… of feelings, since Sumomo can’t tell anyone about her night job and if Tsuwabuki tells anyone he turns into a plush he will supposedly be forever incurable.
At the same time, we learn more of Sumomo’s backstory, as her mother was apparently a prodigy magician from the other world who dropped off the radar to marry a man she met while doing her own bout of star drop collection, explaining Sumomo’s power and affinity. This is mostly found out by Yuuki, who idolized Sumomo’s mom.
After Tsuwabuki and Sumomo get together, Yuuki triggers a grand battle for the drops, but in it bites off more than she can chew and ends up at the heart of magical havoc. It’s during the day, so when Sumomo needs Tsuwabuki’s support to overcome everything and save Yuuki, he goes to her. In the process, he leaks that he’s the mascot doll, which results in him turning into a seemingly inanimate plush after the fact.
Well, that sucks! Roll credits! Except, no, there are a whole three more episodes and a show that lives so much in the shadow of Cardcaptor Sakura wasn’t about to go that bleak.
We start with Sumomo (with the help of everyone in the magical know) spending an episode learning a time reversal spell powerful enough to rewind Tsuwabuki’s existence to before he broke the rule of his transformation. It works, but between being out and being rewound he seems to lose about six months, believing it to be May when it’s really November. Seemingly it doesn’t erase his feelings for Sumomo… at first. Her uncle suggests that he’ll likely lose all that to his brain being kind of scrambled like an egg there.
In fact, the trigger is fixing him with the star drops. We get a sad episode where the lovebirds go through all the motions of remembering their romance before Tsuwabuki is forced to forget, only for it to seem to actually hit him once he’s cured of that whole “doll by night” condition with all its weird and specific rules.
Of course, for the final episode, feelings prove harder to erase than information. It’s mostly just long shots of the two being sad while Tsuwabuki tries to slowly put together why exactly he feels like he’s missing something. While Yuuki brews a potion that should magically restore his feelings if he’s dosed with it, Tsuwabuki manages to recapture the emotions (even though not the memories) by a little detective work, and finally meets up with Sumomo so they can confess their feelings and kiss with no supernatural BS baggage and the show can end.
So, that’s the summary – short, isn’t it? Even more than Cardcaptor Sakura this show is about interpersonal drama, not the magical times that are being had. It’s more willing to actually flirt with tragedy than Cardcaptor, but at the same time it’s not really any darker, and technically a lot less happens.
I think the last of those remarks is the biggest problem with the show. In Cardcaptor, Sakura and her rival have to gather a whole deck of Clow Cards, and pretty much address one an episode with its own manifestation and unique theme. Here, we have twelve episodes to capture seven star drops (though it’s clear more than seven are in play by the end), meaning we’re closer to one event per two episodes than one per episode. And the Star Drops don’t have the same unique feel as the Clow Cards – they’re all pretty much golden snitches that like water, and that’s that.
In that, the look and feel of the shows are very similar, with Sumomo clearly owing a lot to Sakura in particular, but the genre is effectively different, with Nanatsuiro Drops being more purely a romantic drama while Cardcaptor Sakura is more of an adventure.
That said, the romantic drama is… weak. Not terrible, mind you, but not exceptionally good either. I kind of understand what Sumomo sees in Tsuwabuki, oddly enough, but I’m a little shaky on why he’s as devoted to her as he is. It’s not a terrible choice – he gets a lot of opportunities to see her being brave and devoted in the early searches for the star drops, but at the same time there just seems to be an arbitrary switch when the show decides it wants to start really doing romance that puts him into love mode. The rivals and distractions are all fake; the couple clearly mutually like each other from pretty early, and the misunderstandings are not as compelling as they could be. And when it goes for actual drama with the dollification and subsequent amnesia plot, it’s a little late to really sell the show as something heavy. It does a not terrible job of that, and I give it some credit that they don’t magically (figuratively or literally) have him get back all the memories rather than just the impressions left on him, but it’s still not something that seems like it would sustain.
Because of this, while the show is passably entertaining, there’s also a good deal of what may be seen as dead air, scenes that start nowhere and go nowhere. They add to the atmosphere, but you can’t help but feel like they could add to a more unique atmosphere, or maybe even do something while building atmosphere.
The end result is an extremely forgettable show. Nanatsuiro Drops had some good moments, and alright character, but it couldn’t distinct itself. It earns a C-, but it’s not really worth dredging out of the murky anime past for a casual viewer.