| Trouble Chocolate | |
| Ja Kanji: | トラブルチョコレート |
| Ja Romaji: | Toraburu Chokorēto |
| Genre: | Fantasy, Romantic Comedy |
| Type: | tv series |
| Director: | Tsuneo Tominaga |
| Producer: | Hikaru Kondo Masakazu Kumabe Masatoshi Kotaka Shunsuke Harada Taro Iwamoto |
| Music: | Moka Hiromi Kikuta Takayuki Nagasawa Avex |
| Studio: | AIC ROBOT Hakusensha Step Visual Corporation |
| Network: | TV Asahi |
| First: | October 8, 1999 |
| Last: | March 24, 2000 |
| Episodes: | 20 |
| Type: | manga |
| Trouble Chocolate: The Comic | |
| Illustrator: | Morito Kakei |
| Demographic: | Seinen |
| Magazine: | Etsu |
| First: | March 30, 2000 |
| Last: | ? |
| Volumes: | 1 |
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.
"Cacao woke up to find a girl sleeping next to him. Unable to remember what had happened on his own and didn't get enough needed answers from Hinano, he went to school to ask his friends what had happened. He finally got the explanation of events from Prof. Ghana in term Cacao joined his wizardry class."
| No. | Title | Original airdate |
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THEM Anime Reviews gave Trouble Chocolate two stars, saying that it's "At best, worth a rental, but only if you've seen everything else at Blockbuster".[1]
Mania.com gave the first North American Trouble Chocolate DVD a B+ for audio, a B for video, a B+ for packaging, a C for its menu and a B for its extras.[2]
digitallyOBSESSED! gave the first North American Trouble Chocolate DVD a B for style, a B− for substance, a B+ for image transfer, a B+ for audio transfer and a D for extras.[3]