TAB: Tom's Anime Blog

Bottle Fairy is a show that lacks many reasons to recommend it. It's not that it's actively bad, it's just that there aren't really many good elements to recommend it.

The basic plot is that four bottle fairies (which easily fit into bottle that are themselves a few inches tall) live with a college student (which they call sensei-san), who helps them learn how to become human. Each of the episodes, except for the last, is themed around a month, and usually deals with the faries misunderstanding the meaning of one of the holidays in that month. It's up to sensei-san or his next-door neighbor, the first grader Tama-chan, to sort them out.

A big problem is that the four main characters are barely distinguishable from each other, except for the one big obvious quirk each has. In most episodes, they do basically exactly the same thing. There are no episodes that focus on any one character, so it's hard to really get to know or like these characters.

Indeed, that's another problem with this series. The only character I actually thought was interesting was Tama-chan. And it's not only that the faries were interesting, the only real problems they had was misunderstanding the human world, which they never interacted with anyway, except for in the last episode. So their misunderstandings of things really don't matter much.

Slice of life shows involving tiny magical beings is a genre that can be done well, as it was in Tiny Snow Fairy Sugar. But to do it, one has to give us a small number of interesting characters, and them make us care about the problems they have. Bottle Fairy fails on both accounts, except maybe for the final episode.

Now, there wasn't anything really bad that made me want to turn the show off... There just wasn't anything good to make me want to turn it on, either.

I consider this series watchable, if just barely.