life line by line

Sora’s training in the Angel Act continues while everyone else start preparations for the newest play, Swam Lake, which will highlight the act as the finale. Sora’s newest training challenge isn’t going anywhere but a walk to clear her mind lead her to meet one of her idols and find insight into completing the latest training regime.

Who would have thought Sora’d have a dog to thank for giving her newfound confidence?

Leon continues Sora’s harsh training in the Angel Act. The next challenge has Sora working on balancing with one leg on a log in water while trying not to make any ripples doing so. Just like the previous training sessions in the Angel Act, the newest one has Sora going through feats no normal person would go through. Predictably Sora is giving 200% but just not able to do it yet.

The Kaleido Stage, meanwhile, has announced their next production which will be Swam Lake starring Leon and Sora. This only puts the pressure on Sora more as much as she tries to get the training right, it just doesn’t happen. Some good advice by Fool lead Sora to take a day off from training to clear her head while walking around the city. She accidentally bumps into a seeing eye dog and its trainer only to find out the trainer, Donna Walker, is a friend of Kalos.

The two head to the training center for seeing eye dogs where Sora finds out Donna actually knows of her thanks to Kalos. Sora realizes that Donna Walker is *the* Donna Walker of Alice in Wonderland fame that Kaleido Stage performed in the past; the same show that got both Sora and Layla interested in performing. Sora and the audience then learns a little bit about training dogs and why Donna quit Kaleido Stage. Sora gets to “test drive” Love (the seeing eye dog Donna was training) where she gains new insight about trust and the true meaning of the Angel Act.

Donna only helps to further confirm some of Sora’s newfound knowledge and wishes her luck in creating the conflict-free stage. Armed with new determination thanks to Donna and Love, Sora masters the basis of the Balance-On-One-Leg-No-Ripples training to the cheers of the Sora-gumi.

Pretty slow episode overall but it was a good chance for Sora to seek out what the Angel Act is all about. Also bringing in an ex-Kaleido Stage performer to help lead Sora on was a nice treat and a good way to bluff out this mostly training-filler episode.

Just a random final note, especially for you seiyuu fans like myself. I thought Donna Walker’s seiyuu sounded vaguely familiar and a quick search showed she’s voiced by Rica Fukami. Who’s Rica Fukami you ask? Well one of her more famous roles was Sailor Venus/Minako Aino of Sailor Moon. That was when I realized that Kaleido Star got four out of the five main original mahou shoujos’ seiyuus to be on the series. Aya Hisakawa (Ami Mizuno/Sailor Mercury) as Sarah, Emi Shinohara (Makoto Kino/Sailor Jupiter) as Sora’s mom, and Kotono Mitsuishi (Usagi Tsukino/Sailor Moon) as Kathy. I wonder if it’s just purely coincidentally or…? Pretty interesting nonetheless.