16-year-old Sora runs away to be a circus performer in Kaleido Star.

Kaleido Star V.1, Welcome to the Kaleido Stage! V.2, All Things Great and Small. V.3, Great Expectations. V.4, Fall From Grace. V.5, Masquerade. V.6, Reach for the Brass Ring!
TV series (51 episodes), 2003-04. Director: Junichi Sato. Vol.1 & 4, five episodes/125 minutes; vols.2, 3, 5 & 6, four episodes/100 minutes. Price & format: DVD bilingual $29.98. Distributor: A.D.V. Films.

This young-teen soap opera (age-rated 12+) adapts the adolescent sports-romance formula to a modern circus setting. Kaleido Stage is an acrobatic troupe mixing the styles of the Cirque du Soleil and Las Vegas spectaculars, in which the players perform costumed balletic theater choreographed for trapeze and high-wire staging. Sora Naegino, a 16-year-old Japanese girl who has always idolized Kaleido Stage, comes to a glamorized pastiche of Sarasota, Florida (“Circus Capital of the World”) to join it. Her luggage is stolen by a snatch-&-run thief, and her fantastically exaggerated pursuit of him through the city (which unfortunately gives a misleading initial impression that this will be a slapstick “magical little girl” series) just happens to be seen by Kaleido Stage’s owner Kalos. She arrives just too late for the annual auditions, but Kalos takes a chance and hires her anyway.

Episode #2 introduces the melodrama, although there is a continued attempt to also cater to the magical little girl market by giving Sora an elfin Tarot-reading guardian angel, “Fool, the Spirit of the Stage,” who only she can see. Sora’s hyper-enthusiastic joy at being accepted is quickly dampened by the rest of the troupe. Most laugh at her naïveté for not realizing that natural athletic talent is useless without years of specialized acrobatic training. Kaleido Stage’s workaholic main star, Layla Hamilton, wants her fired as a frivolous dilettante. Sora throws herself into training and, episode by episode, gradually makes friends (fellow performers Anna and Mia, and shy but handsome Ken, Kalos’ teen stage manager) or at least earns grudging respect for her hard work and learning from her mistakes.

Each episode provides Sora an important lesson in perseverance, using initiative, conquering fears, teamwork rather than grandstanding, learning to get along with those who refuse your friendship, and seeing the real people beneath hyped theatrical stardom. Somehow she also finds time to help others with their personal problems such as reuniting estranged daughters and fathers or dealing with stage romances. Then, just when Sora has won her first starring role, an unscrupulous enemy of Kaleido Stage employs legal maneuvers to take it away from Kalos and replace the troupe with his own performers. Everyone is traumatized, but even though Sora realizes she is completely out of her depth, she refuses to give up!

This is actually just the first-season story arc (26 episodes) of the 51-episode TV series (April 3, 2003 through March 27, 2004), which is all that A.D.V. Films has announced so far. Kaleido Star is the first traditional girls’ anime series by Gonzo Digimation, best known for specializing in sci-fi action-adventure anime with lots of CGI. This series looks like Gonzo is expanding into attractive but clearly less-expensive 2D animation (although the closing credits are top-heavy with work done by Korean subcontracting studio G&G Entertainment), with the CGI mostly limited to adding sparkle to the acrobatic spectacles. Show-biz backstage melodrama has been a popular theme in women’s romances for a long time, but (unless I missed something) this is its first anime presentation imported to America.