Bonjour Sweet Love Patisserie
Cute, but lacking nutritional substance just like pastries
Here I am back with another review. This time it is an anime series I watched on Crunchyroll called Bonjour Sweet Love Patisserie. What is it about? What did I think of it? Just keep reading to find out. Though the subtitle should give you some clues what I think.
The Basics
This is a 24-episode anime series based on a mobile game of the same name. The series originally premiered in 2014. Articles released at the time indicated the mobile that the series is based on was still in development. Presumably the game did come out, but I am uncertain since I don’t play Japanese mobile games. If anyone knows for sure, feel free to leave a comment to share.
The episodes are only 5 minutes long, which is super short. You can really binge watch the entire series in just 2 hours. If you were curious enough about the series, you can easily watch in a binge session that isn’t as long as other series people binge watch.
The Premise
The protagonist is a 16-year-old girl named Sayuri Haruno. She attends a culinary academy that specializes in confections. She has dreams of one day starting her own pastry shop. It’s implied in the series that she’s the daughter of a pastry chef. We don’t get a clear look at who her parents are or where their business was.
Through the episodes, we follow Sayuri’s life at the school. She has a best friend named Ran Mochizuki, who is also attending classes and joins in on some of the adventures. Her first project partner is Ryo Kouduki, who is a talented son of successful bakers.
The rest of the cast includes other students including conglomerate heiress, Tsubaki Sannomiya, who is the Queen bee of the class. Also included in the reverse harem of potential love interests are the 20-something years old, handsome professors. Who will Sayuri end up with?
General Thoughts
The premise is pretty basic and straightforward. It’s light-hearted and is a cute romance and friendship type story. It’s also a reverse harem where the female lead has attractive young men in her social circle. They all inevitably have crushes on her and are potential love interests.
It’s a little weird considering only one of the guys is actually a fellow student and would be more appropriate. But fiction is fiction I guess. It might not be bad if the school was university level where all the students are actual adults. You can say what you want about student/teacher relationships, but if they’re all adults it’s less weird.
If I hadn’t mentioned this anime was based on a then upcoming otome game, you’d probably guess as much. The various situations Sayuri is pretty consistent to what you’d get in an otome story.
The thing that annoyed me a lot was the fact each episode is literally 5 minutes. Really it’s probably less than 5 if you took out the opening and closing themes. To be fair, this anime was released as a web series so the short episode run time makes sense. It does make it really annoying to watch as is.
It might be tropey, but I could deal with it better if you gave me at least 20 minutes an episode. Sayuri is a sweet, kind character. It still doesn’t make much sense why these guys are crushing on her with such little screen time with her.
Would you check out this series? Do you have any series you were disappointed after watching or reading it? Leave a comment and let me know!