Anime / Jewelpet Twinkle☆

Twinkle, twinkle, magical charm, winkle winkle, Jewel Flash!

Jewelpet Twinkle is the second entry in the Jewelpet anime series.

Akari Sakura is on her way to start her sixth grade at the Winston Academy, when she meets the magical talking rabbit Ruby. Ruby wants Akari to come with her to Jewel Land and study together with her at the Magic Academy. Akari at first refuses, but after they come to understand each other, she decides to accept. And so begins the tale of this shy girl's self improvement, as she struggles through her magical studies in order to gather 12 Jewel Stones, which will allow her to compete in the Jewel Star Grand Prix, the winner of which is granted three wishes.

At the Magic Academy, Akari makes many friends, such as boisterous idol singer-wannabe Miria and distant academical genius Sara. Back in the human world, her heart is set on the mysterious Yuuma Jinnai. She also confronts Jewel Land's dark history through an elusive student who for some reason greatly resembles Yuuma.

It's the only Jewelpet season so far to get a sequel, which comes in the form of an OVA, released in the Summer of 2013.

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Tropes:

• Ad-Break Double-Take: In episode 15, Tour announcing the first round of the Jewelpet sweets-making competition and its house theme comes right before the commercial break. At the beginning of the second half of the episode, Tour's dialogue is repeated.

• Attack Deflector: In episode 24, Diana uses a spell on Akari and her gang that turns them into clowns and makes them float in the air. An unimpressed Ruby uses a spell on Diana to turn her into a duck, but Diana uses a mirror to deflect the spell and Ruby gets turned into a duck herself.
• Bait-and-Switch Credits: The opening from the series makes you think that Peridot, Milky and Luna are important characters, but they have only maybe two episodes where they have any sort of relevancy to the plot, and other episodes they just appear for gags. The OVA opening is worse; it features characters that weren't very important to the series in the first place, and don't appear at all in the OVA (Hilde, Sagan, the French sisters).
• Balloon-Bursting Bird: In episode 45, Labra is sent to Akari's school to inform Yuuma that Akari has something to give him on the school rooftop. Labra floats to her destination with balloons tied around her, but some birds pass by and pop them all.
• Banana Peel: In episode 32, Tata magically makes a bunch of banana peels appear on the race track so that the other competitors slip on them. Dian uses a magic spell to blow the peels towards Tata, and he ends up slipping on one himself and loses the race as a result.
  Tata: Mukii! This is so bitter-damon!
  Miria: Just what you get for playing dirty!
• Batman in My Basement: Subverted. Akari tries to hide Ruby, but the latter simply ignores her and reveals herself to Monica when she walks in the room. At least she's smart enough to act like an Earth rabbit.

• Birthday Episode: Episode 17 (Akari) and episode 30 (her mother).
• Bittersweet Ending: Akari manages to save Alma from the Battest and reunite her with her family, including her revived mother, and wins the Jewel Star Grand Prix. However, she has to leave Jewel Land forever, which means that she won't see the friends she made there, human or Jewelpet, again in the near-future.
• Borrowed Catchphrase: In episode 44, Miria befriends Angelina after beating her at a Jewelstar Grand Prix event. The latter's Jewelpet, Amelie, as well as Miria's Jewelpets Garnet and Sango, all say Amelie's catchphrase "Okay, please applause!" and are immediately met with applause from the audience.
• Breather Episode:
  • Episode 39 is more solemn than usual for this trope. It's a quiet and poignant Christmas episode with no action and almost no comedy, which takes place right after the second arc with Alma and before going back to collecting Jewel Stones.
  • And the episode right after that, 40, has a humorous plot about keeping Rald hidden while he's in the human world.
  • Episode 45, a silly Valentine's Day episode set between matches of the Jewel Star Grand Prix.
• Brought Down to Normal: It's demonstrated in episode 10 that it's impossible to use magic during a new moon. But at the end they do, out of sheer force of will and rage at Moldavite.
• Cerebus Syndrome: The moment when Twinkle becomes really dark is Alma revealing herself in episode 23.

• Clap Your Hands If You Believe: Visualizing what you want to achieve with a spell as you cast it plays a big part in making it work.
• Conveniently Seated: Yuuma, the mysterious boy Akari likes, gets the ever-popular back-row seat by the window, with Akari next to him.
• Costume Porn: The characters' mage outfits are full of details and frills.
• Creating Life Is Bad: The act of someone who's not Jewelina creating Jewelpets is taboo, but the one time this occurs it ends up subverted. Alma created Diana. Diana came out a roguish My Master, Right or Wrong type instead of the usual Always Lawful Good Jewelpet, but she isn't really evil.
• Credits Running Sequence: The ED has Akari, Miria and Sara walking and running with their Jewelpets at their side.
• Darker and Edgier: Twinkle is way, way darker than the anime's first season, and most of the seasons that came after it as well. It has issues of parental abandonment and neglect as one of its most recurring themes. Just about everyone in the main cast has problems with their families. The villain is someone who's fated to die an early death due to her powers, and who's been forcefully separated from her family. And characters actually die (at least, for a significant period of time, whereas in other seasons they come back to life the very next episode).
• Dénouement Episode:
  • Episode 39 serves this function to the second Alma arc, being an episode dedicated to Akari and Yuuma's relationship development after he stopped being out of the loop during the arc.
  • Since Akari defeats the villain and becomes Jewel Star in the penultimate episode, the last one, 52, serves as this, showing how the fates of the characters are settled.
• Diabolus ex Machina: At the end, Ruby decides to go on a journey to find the Flower of Happiness, a journey that she might not be able to return from for a long time (like, decades), meaning she won't be able to visit Akari. This was never mentioned or foreshadowed in the rest of the show, making it seem like an excuse to pile on the angst for the ending.
• Dysfunction Junction: Most of the cast has a lot of personal issues, mostly having to do with their family life.
• Evil Is Not a Toy: Alma thought the Battest was controlable because of her phenomenal powers. Too bad for her that the Battest is a book encasing all the Dark Magic in the world. It ends up possessing her and almost causing the end of the world, twice (she learned her lesson the first time, but the Battest didn't leave her body).
• Evil Living Flames: In episode 4, Miria controls too many light seeds at the same time and they bounce all over the classroom. Two of them leave through the window and turn into big green flames that increase in size with every object they consume.
• Extranormal Institute: All the magic schools in Jewel Land.
• Eyelid Pull Taunt: Ruby and Diana do this to each other in an episode.
• Fatal Flaw: Overcoming each character's flaws is often very important to the plot, and also how they earn their Jewel Stone in many occasions.
  • Akari's shyness and inferiority complex, especially towards her sister.
  • Miria's selfishness and reckless attitude, which quite often brings trouble to her friends and Jewel Academy.
  • Sara's loneliness and isolationism, which hampered her great potential. Also her phobia against mushrooms.
  • Leon's overprotective tendencies towards his friends leads to him being unable to completely trust them.
  • Nicola's hubris, also his mommy issues.
  • Alma's loneliness, shortsightedness, and inability to understand others, which attracted Dark Magic and during final arc, possessing her.

• Feud Episode: In episode 19, Nicola says Titana can't do anything without him and they fight over it; the rest of the episode is them being mad and Ruby and Akari trying to get them to make up. They do at the end after a flashback to their first meeting.
• Fighting Spirit: Akari and Miria have these materialize in their fight in episode 48. They are implied to be embodiments of their dreams.
• Flight of Romance: Akari takes Yuuma flying through Jewel Land in the Christmas episode.
• Forgotten Birthday: Happens in episode 17, when Akari sees that her family went off to work without saying anything to her and decides to celebrate it with Ruby, Labra and Peridot. Then she comes home and turns out her family threw a Surprise Party.

• Golden Snitch: The last competition in the sports festival is worth a trillion points, rendering everything before it moot. Ruby wins it, beating Dian who had easily taken the lead in the previous rounds.
• Gotta Catch Them All: Everyone needs to get 12 Jewel Stones to advance through the grades and go to the Jewel Star Grand Prix.
• Graduate from the Story: The final episode features the graduation of the students of the Magic Academy, putting a lot of emphasis in Akari having to seperate from all the friends she made there.
• Hiccup Hijinks: Episode 6 is about Labra getting the hiccups and Moldavite using magical items, ordered through the mail catalogue, that supposedly scare the sufferer out of it.
• Hufflepuff House: The nameless schools that Hilde and Sagan hail from.
• Human-Focused Adaptation: This season is one of those which pays more attention to the humans' character development than the Jewelpets.

• Incredible Shrinking Man: One of Sara's experiments in episode 5 causes Akari and Ruby to shrink. They get blown away in a storm and Sara needs to find them.
• Inexplicably Identical Individuals: The five headmasters judging the Jewelstar Grand Prix events alongside Moldavite are all palette-swapped Moldavites with different prominent emotions (one is always angry and one is always embarrassed, for example).
• Interdimensional Travel Device: The Jewel Pods are devices with the power to transport their wielders between Jewel Land and Earth.
• Interspecies Romance: Labra, a bear Jewelpet, develops a crush on the human boy Yuuma after meeting him.
• Involuntary Dance: A spell called "Twinkle Twinkle Samba". It's used in episode 41 to appease two warring factions of mushrooms.
• It Was with You All Along: At the end of the second Alma arc, in episode 38, Akari and her classmates have lost all their Jewel Stones in re-sealing the Battest. They're all on the verge of tears, until the Jewelpets and Jewelina tell them that the true essence of their Jewel Stones was inside their hearts all along. Akari and co. recall all the good and bad times they went through to get them and they materialize again.
• Kimodameshi: Episode 10 is about Tour creating an event where the students have to explore the magic school to find its seven mysteries. All of them are made up... except for one, that being a mysterious second Sulfur appearing and guiding the students.
• The Last Title: Episode 50 is titled "The Last Spell Doki☆Doki!"
• Love Potion: In episode 45, Ruby and Labra try to slip one into the sweets Akari made for Yuuma, only for them to land in the hands of five boys who proceed to chase Akari around school.
• Lucky Charms Title: The star after it, as you can see.
• Lunacy: Jewel Land's moon has influence on the magic that the Jewelpets practice; it's shown that it's impossible to use magic during a full moon.
• Magic A Is Magic A: This season has strict rules concerning how magic works. It actually has words and phrases that are necessary to conjure any spell. This contrasts with the other seasons, where they simply chant their very generic Magical Incantation to do anything, hoping it will do what they want (most of the time, it didn't).
• Magical Incantation: ''Twinkle Twinkle Magical Charm! Winkle Winkle Jewel Flash!''. Substitute Twinkle Twinkle with Guria Guria for the boys.
• Mind over Matter: The Rangula (or Langura) spell is for moving objects around.

• Mistaken for Romance: In episode 33, a rumor about Yuuma and Monica being in love with each other is brought to Akari's attention. Akari, who has a crush on Yuuma and is Monica's younger sister, begins to believe the rumor is true when she sees the two in the library together and is heartbroken, which drains the power from Ruby's Jewelcharm and thus bars her from entering the Jewelland. Thankfully, the rumor is just that, and Akari gains the confidence to admit her feelings to Yuuma after learning this.
• Multinational Team: The Magic Academy students - Akari (Japanese), Miria (American), Sara (Indian), Nicola (Russian) and Leon (Austrian).

• Noodle Incident: The end of episode 5, where Sara experiments on Miria. We never know what exactly happens, but it does sour the relationship between them until they resolve their differences in episode 21.
• No Romantic Resolution: Akari / Yuuma (while they do love each other, they're too shy to do anything about it, despite the fact that they've actually confessed to each other; not even the OVA solves it).
• One-Eyed Shot: Episode 32 features a scene of Ruby's left eye blinking as it zooms in closer and closer to reveal a shot of the Solar System.
• Pepper Sneeze: In episode 46, Kaiya uses magic to create a big pepper sprinkler and use it to make Akari and Ruby sneeze. Akari and Ruby, who are pretending to be a cloud to catch a sleeping Flora, wind up plummeting to the ground after sneezing.
• Polar Opposite Twins: Yuuma and Alma; the former is calm, reasonable and polite, while the latter is aggressive, impatient and confrontational.
• Real-Place Background: Hayama, which is where Akari lives, is faithfully recreated in the show.
• Reflective Eyes: In episode 30, Akari works hard on a manga she intends as a gift for her mother on her birthday. Right when she is about to present the gift, though, her mother gets a call and has to leave to take care of photos of Monika for a magazine; as Akari stares in disbelief, about to cry, a close-up of her eye displays a reflection of Monika and their mother.
• Rope Bridge: In episode 6, one of Headmaster Moldavite's "Stop-Hiccup-kun" magic items sends everyone onto a rope bridge in the middle of nowhere. Ruby and Tour have fun bouncing on it, leading to them breaking the bridge and making everyone fall.
• Running Gag: Ryl throwing Ruby into the air and Akari having to catch her; Moldavite demanding for someone to sing karaoke with him and his other antics which get him severely punished by Halite.
• Scenery Porn: Jewel Land uses very bright and strong colors, and looks absolutely stunning at night.
• School Festival: Episodes 32 (sports) and 40 (New Year's).
• The Seven Mysteries: Used in episode 10 of Twinkle. Most turn out to be some antic of Moldavite's, although the last one is for real.
• Shipper on Deck: Ruby ships Yuuma and Akari; later Miria and Sara as well; and Alma in the OVA.
  • Akari ships Albiana with her pet chimera because she mistakenly believes the chimera is her lover under a curse.
• Ship Tease:
  • The scene where Leon compliments Sara (ignore for a moment that it was Miria in Sara's body; Leon didn't know that) for cleaning up nicely reeks of this.
  • Leon's first focus episode has him briefly flirt with Akari.
• Special Edition Title: In the final episode, the characters all sing the theme song and end credits song together.
• Status Quo Is God: Akari and Yuuma eventually become aware of their feelings for each other, but are seemingly forever incapable of ever becoming a couple. The most obvious example of this is when Yuuma confesses to Akari and she just plain didn't hear it because she was so entranced by him. Opening of the OVA heavily implies that they already become a couple though.
• Super-Deformed: In the end credits sequence, the human characters appear with bigger heads and less detailed arms and legs compared to in the actual show.
• Talking in Your Sleep: Labra does it in episode 38, with her dream being about her with Akari's crush Yuuma. In the real world, she ends up kissing Ruby instead.
  Labra: [lips puckered] I wuv you-labu!
  Ruby: Akari-chan, save me!
  Labra: [has Ruby cornered] Yuuuma-kuuuuun~!
• Theme Naming: In episode 34, Headmaster Moldavite orders an item through the magic mail-order that is a floating scale with two little girls flying on it who help people make decisions. The girls are named Ten-chan and Pin-chan, whose names combine to form "tenpin" (Japanese for "scale").
• There Can Only Be One: Only one person may win the Jewel Star Grand Prix and have 3 wishes come true.
• They Call Me MISTER Tibbs!: In episode 4, Miria insists that Akari, being of a lower grade at the magical academy than her, refer to her as "Miria-senpai". By the end of the episode, she changes her mind and says Akari can just call her Miria.
• Three Plus Two: The main human cast, composed of three girls and two boys which can form a group of five. The plot spends a lot more time on the girls than the boys (which is justified since it's a shoujo anime).
• Three Wishes: Anyone who wins the Jewelstar Grand-Prix and becomes the Jewelstar will be granted any three wishes they make.
• Thundering Herd: In episode 34, literally everyone in the Jewelland is pulled into a feud between Ten-chan and Pin-chan trying to decide which one is cuter, with the total amounts for both sides being a tie of 99 to 99. Headmaster Moldavite settling the feud by picking Jolly-chan and Merry-chan (the ladies who host the mail-order service he likes) sends everyone into a fit of rage, resulting in the headmaster being chased by a mob with a dust cloud under them as they run after him.
• Time Travel Episode: In episode 14, Miria is tired of her mother being too busy at her job to attend her audition and uses a forbidden spell to open a time-travel gate in the school and change the past so that her mom never got to sing.
• Tome of Eldritch Lore: The Battest.
• The Tooth Hurts: In episode 6, the gang is stranded on a boat in the middle of the ocean and being pursued by a shark. The boat is turned into a stronger metallic one via a magic spell by Sara and Sapphie right as the shark bites it, breaking all its teeth and making it swim away in pain.
• Tournament Arc: The Jewel Star Grand Prix, of course, from episode 42 to the end.

• Translator Microbes: Translator dragées, shown in the very first episode. Ruby takes one to speak to Akari. Jewel Land's language is apparently a non-issue in the other seasons.
• Two-Teacher School: Halite and Sulfur make up the entire teaching body in the Magic Academy, apparently.
• Unfortunate Name: Twinkle is spelled "Tinkle" in hiragana, but the Roman alphabet spelling is definitely "Twinkle", which doesn't change the fact that you can find it under both titles in the English speaking community. Either way, anime watchers had a lark.
• Valentine's Day Episodes: Episode 45.
• Verbal Tic: The episode titles all end with "doki doki".
• Voices Are Mental: In episode 21, Miria and Sara swap voices along with their bodies after an accident involving Headmaster Moldavite mixing their potions.
• Welcome Episode: Starts out this way, with Akari joining the established students at the Magic Academy.
• Wham Episode: Episode 50. Diana dies in a Heroic Sacrifice and Alma unleashes the Battest in the Grand Prix.
• "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: The end features this. Miria finally wins an auditon to become a singer, Sara meets with her parents after all these years, Leon competes at the Olympics and later becomes a politician, Nicola wins the Junior Piano Championships and gets the respect he deserves from his mom, Yuuma, Alma and Fealina are reunited and now live in the human world together, and Akari has become a more confident person who looks forward to the future. Meanwhile, Ruby goes travelling to find the Flower of Happiness.
  • Sequel Hook: Ruby's journey and promise to someday come back to Akari. While an OVA sequel eventually got released, it doesn't conclude this plot point.
• Wizarding School: The Magic Academy that Akari attends is the only featured one, but there are plenty of others attended by her rivals.
• Year Inside, Hour Outside: Jewel Land's time goes by much faster than the human world's, so when Akari teleports to Jewel Land, the human world seems to stop.
  • Narnia Time: However, one end-episode segment explains that even so, 1 year in Jewel Land = 1 year in the human world. This is to avoid the plot hole of Alma and Yuuma being the same age, but it ends up not making much sense.
• You Can Talk?: In the first episode, Ruby ventures into the human world to find a human partner to study at the magic school in Jewelland with her. When she finds the human girl Akari, Ruby eats candies that make her able to communicate with her and asks for her name. Akari gives her name, and then freaks out since Ruby is a rabbit.
  Akari: The rabbit is talking!

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