Trouble Chocolate

Trouble Chocolate
The front cover of the first VHS.
トラブルチョコレート
(Toraburu Chokorēto)
GenreFantasy, Romantic Comedy
Anime television series
Directed byTsuneo Tominaga
Produced byHikaru Kondo
Masakazu Kumabe
Masatoshi Kotaka
Shunsuke Harada
Taro Iwamoto
Written byTsunefumi Harada
Music byMoka
Hiromi Kikuta
Takayuki Nagasawa
Avex
StudioAIC
ROBOT
Hakusensha
Step Visual Corporation
Licensed by
Original networkTV Asahi
Original run October 8, 1999 March 24, 2000
Episodes20
Manga
Trouble Chocolate: The Comic
Illustrated byMorito Kakei
MagazineEtsu
DemographicSeinen
Original runMarch 30, 2000?
Volumes1

Trouble Chocolate (トラブルチョコレート, Toraburu Chokorēto) is a romantic comedy fantasy anime produced by AIC in 1999 and is licensed in the United States by Viz Media. The series features Cacao, a student at Micro-Grand Academy studying magic. One day, while his magic class teacher, Ghana, is performing a spell to summon a tree spirit, Cacao finds and eats some chocolate, which turns out to be 200-year-old magical chocolate. After eating the chocolate he becomes drunk and causes a wreck. During this, he interferes with Ghana's spell, letting the spirit, Hinano, escape. She inhabits the body of a marionette, who then moves in with Cacao.

A second season of 24 episodes was planned but was eventually cancelled.

Subsequent episodes of Trouble Chocolate have little connected storyline. Rather, the show is a parody of other anime. For example, two other characters, Murakata and Deborah, are constantly shown professing their love to each other, set to absurdly explosive special effects and backdrops, as is common (to a lesser extent) in many anime.

The dubbed dialogue in Trouble Chocolate (written by professional comedy writer Pamela Ribon and recorded by The Ocean Group) often bears little or no resemblance to the original script (as heard in Japanese and seen in the subtitles), as opposed to the normal convention of translating the words as directly as the change in lip-sync will allow.