Bottle Fairy Funbook: Tokumi Yuiko Illustrations

Artbook Review

I have decided that I would do something a little bit different this weekend and rather than review anime or video games, I would go through my small collection of artbooks and pick out a couple of them to review at random. These will include ones currently available to the English-language market such as titles from Udon Entertainment, while others will be imported and/or out of print releases. These are all designed to be mini-reviews and not the length you may have seen in my review of the Persona Design Compendiums for example.

The second installment in this artbook review series is based on the 2003 anime series Bottle Fairy, which was in fact once upon a time available to international audiences as a hybrid dubbed title. The series was originally created by Yuiko Tokumi and featured her illustrations in the ending sequence although the 13 episode season itself was produced by Xebec and directed by Yoshiaki Iwasaki who has quite a sizable number of staff roles under their belt.

What is the series about you ask? It is a comedy series following four fairies (Kururu, Chiriri, Sarara and Hororo) who reside inside a bottle with their human “Sensei”. Each of the episodes is based around a particular month of the year – where the fairies attempt to become acquainted with the human world, often to elaborate / comical / over-exaggerated effect. Overall it ended up being some light-hearted fun for all-ages, and highlights quite a bit in regards to Japanese holidays /events.

Given the more child-friendly nature of the series there is no “eroge” content in this book and while you may be able to get some light fanservice out of this book if you looked hard enough, for the most part it features the characters of the series in a plethora of different costumes and settings.

Coming in at around 144-pages in length this artbook is a tad bigger than the last one I reviewed. The first third of the book is split up into five separate “chapters”, each detailing one of the four fairies as well as a fifth fairy (Rere) who is exclusive to the artbook and has no particular season corresponding to her while the other four do. Each of these character-oriented chapters start off with a brief short-story willed with plenty of artwork (Usually six or seven pages worth) followed by several pages of artwork based on the respective character – and occasionally pulling in the other fairies. Yuiko Tokumi certainly managed to capture my attention with the short-stories and their design in particular, while aside from that you do get a good selection of artwork as well.

The second third of the book is dedicated to “Illustrations” alone, and generally has a whole fairy focus if not including most of them in each piece of artwork. This includes full-page / double-page spreads, small images of the fairies representing each season in a more chibified style and prints of all the artwork used in the thirteen ending sequences produced for the anime series. Another notable highlight is a selection of 64 different “Oboro” designs, a stuffed toy who was enchanted to fly around during the anime series as a recurring character. All the artwork in these two sections have been designed to be as creative and cute as possible, something I think the artist has pulled off rather nicely.
The final albeit smallest third of the book is dedicated to a section to Tama-chan, the next door neighbor to the fairies and often the source of many misleading and outlandish ideas that the fairies build upon themselves with their imaginations. This section only features a couple of cross-overs with the Bottle Fairies, but is pretty much of the same direction as the previous two chapters – cute characters in costumes.

I haven’t enthused about this in a while, but one particular highlight of this book was the dust jacket, which was made with a similar material that I commented on for Broccoli Book’s 2007 release of Koge-Donbo’s Kon Kon Kokon (See review of this out-of-print manga HERE) and felt a little bit more professionally made than the plasticky then what seems to be used in most books – irrespective of type. The variety of artwork was also great and the layout was of a good quality although a few pages felt a bit too cluttered or the artwork would have been better bigger than (in one case) putting eight pieces of artwork on one page. Also, while the pages did seem a bit lighter than what I would have expected from some of the images, the print quality is also great with no noticeable printing errors.

Overall, while this is a hard to find artbook nowadays, I was left pretty impressed with what I got.

Bottle Fairy Funbook: Tokumi Yuiko Illustrations was published I believe by Enterbrain back in early-2007 for a listed price of 2,600 yen. Given its age I believe it is currently very hard to find, but if you are a fan of the Bottle Fairy series or after a cute artbook, this may be up your alley.


Review Score

Content: A
Design:
B
Extras:
A
Personal Opinion: 
A-

Final Score: B-

This review is currently being transitioned over to the new review system.


Sam
Sam
Founder of The Otaku's Study. I have been exploring this labyrinth of fandom these last fifteen years, and still nowhere close to the exit yet. Probably searching for a long time to come.

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