Melonpanna

Melonpanna first appeared in the TV episode Episode 200, "Melonpanna's Birth", broadcast in 1992.

In the original picture books, her first appearance was in Anpanman Fairy Tale Volume 9: Anpanman and Mao's Castle.

She was created after Jam Oji-san saw a shooting star and felt that for everyone to live happily, kindness was just as necessary as courage.

He then decided to make a new companion, and Melonpanna was born using nectar from the Flower of Love.

Unlike Anpanman, she was born already in a grown form rather than as a baby.

She is also the first female bread character directly associated with the Bread Factory group.

Her official name is usually written simply as Melonpanna, though she is often called Melonpanna-chan by other characters.

In her earliest appearances, even Anpanman and his friends sometimes called her without an honorific.

Voice actor: Mika Kanai

Melonpanna is slightly smaller and more delicately built than both Anpanman and her older sister Rollpanna.

Her head resembles a round melon bread with a sunburst-style surface.

Her face has six crossing lines modeled after the net pattern of a muskmelon.

Among the grid-like sections created by those lines, the two around her eyes are darker in color.

She has a cursive lowercase m on her forehead.

The same m mark also appears on her clothes.

Her eyes are especially distinctive.

Her irises are drawn in two shades of green, similar to medium sea green, with bright highlights that stand out clearly.

She wears green clothes, gloves, a belt, and boots in yellow-green, and a yellow-green cape with an orange lining.

The emblem on her clothing is also yellow-green.

Gender: Female

First TV appearance: Episode 200, "Melonpanna's Birth"

First appearance year: 1992

Melonpanna is a sweet, gentle, and very feminine girl.

According to Jam Oji-san, the bread made for her contains the heart of love and is meant to be kind to everyone.

In her early appearances, she had a pure and almost youngest-child-like presence.

She sometimes treated even Baikinman and his side with kindness when they were not actively causing trouble.

She also had more comedic moments early on.

For example, she would get angry when someone mistakenly called her "Melonpanda."

Later, after Cream Panda appeared and came to look up to her like an older sister, Melonpanna gradually became more calm, dependable, and maternal.

As a result, her clownish or comic role became less prominent.

She is mentally resilient and recovers emotionally quite quickly.

Although she often cries when Rollpanna flies away again, Anpanman and the others usually encourage her and she regains her spirits.

She is very patient with Cream Panda as well.

Even when he behaves selfishly, she responds with kindness and flexibility.

Her everyday life is not fully explained, much like Shokupanman and Currypanman.

Still, she is sometimes shown staying at the Bread Factory, and when she is not helping there, she is often seen playing with flowers and plants in fields.

She occasionally attends school lessons.

Unlike Anpanman, she is shown eating meals on screen, and she has a strong appetite; Usako once compared her to Kabao in that regard.

In the earliest stage of the anime, Melonpanna was more tomboyish and often handled comedic scenes.

She was also terrible at housework.

She once caused a washing machine to overflow.

She also made terrible food by thinking that adding lots of different ingredients would make it taste better, with Baikinman often ending up the victim.

At first, she showed goodwill even to Baikinman if he was not doing anything bad.

She once made a birthday cake with him and even gave him hand-knitted gloves as a Christmas present after one of his misdeeds.

There was also a case where the wind spirit villain later known again as an antagonist helped her once.

When Baikinman protested, the character replied that he was on Melonpanna's side.

However, after Baikinman planted evil in Rollpanna's heart, Melonpanna came to treat him as an enemy.

That event changed her attitude significantly.

Melonpanna can release melon juice from her head.

This juice is one of her most famous abilities and has powerful purifying effects.

It can cleanse mold, dirt, and even evil feelings from others.

When her sister Rollpanna is consumed by her evil side, the melon juice can help restore her good heart.

It also works as a special remedy against characters manipulated by Baikinman.

At one point, she used up all of her melon juice to return Pierrot-kun from his transformed Black Pierrot state back to normal.

Official settings also note that melon juice is her favorite drink.

If she completely runs out of melon juice, she can faint.

Like Anpanman and the others, she loses strength if her face is badly damaged or fouled and may need a face replacement.

However, her face is more durable than Anpanman's.

Mold or getting her whole face wet in a river does not weaken her as severely as it would Anpanman.

In one case, even after mold weakened her, she recovered simply after having the dirt wiped off, though it took time.

In older episodes, she was shown collapsing after her face was smeared with tomato or pie cream.

From the late 1990s onward, stories where she became powerless from facial contamination became much rarer.

She can also recover from ordinary illness by taking medicine.

In one episode, she became bedridden after a bad cold, but medicine restored her.

Melonpanna is not as physically strong as Anpanman or the larger Baikinman machines.

Even so, she is still far stronger than an ordinary person.

Her greatest physical advantage is agility.

She flies faster than Anpanman, and even the sound effect of her flight is different from his.

Because of that speed, she is often the one who rushes back to alert Jam Oji-san and the others when Anpanman is in danger.

She also frequently delivers a newly baked Anpanman face by air.

In direct battle, she usually wins not by overpowering enemies but by taking away their will to fight.

In the early anime, this made her one of the characters Baikinman had particular trouble with.

She achieved what Anpanman could not on first encounters against several opponents, including Baikinman, Baikin Great Demon King, Stone Man, and Black Rollpanna.

These victories came through breaking their fighting spirit rather than physically defeating them.

In films, compared with Shokupanman and Currypanman, she is less often forcibly transformed or immobilized by enemy powers.

She also does not share food in the same way as Anpanman or Currypanman; she neither feeds others pieces of her face nor serves food as part of her usual role.

Melonpanna's signature move is Melomelo Punch.

As the name suggests, it makes the target become lovestruck, dazed, or emotionally softened, causing them to lose the will to fight.

Its effect is unusual and non-lethal.

Rather than blasting enemies away, it works like a mysterious emotional debuff.

It can even soften strong metals and other hard materials.

It has also been used to make wood or bamboo easier to move and to break cages in rescue situations.

In "Cream Panda and the Firefly Prince," she used it to free imprisoned firefly princesses from a cage.

It has also restored characters affected by the influence of an iron-frame machine, which surprised Melonpanna herself.

The exact duration of the effect is intentionally vague.

According to an official portal site Q&A, it lasts about as long as the feeling of becoming "melomelo" when meeting someone you love or eating something delicious.

It can affect people regardless of gender.

She has even used it not in battle, but simply to cheer up a depressed Kabin-chan.

In early books, the move was sometimes called Melon Punch instead.

Because the attack lacks raw force, it is sometimes dodged and is therefore occasionally used as a surprise move.

She can also combine attacks with Anpanman and others to perform Double Punch or Triple Punch techniques.

Still, one comic example showed her being reduced to tears when Melonpanko, who disliked Melomelo Punch, struck her with a crying attack.

Although durable by bread-character standards, Melonpanna still has notable weaknesses.

If her face is seriously damaged, her strength drops and she may require replacement.

She is also frequently captured, taken hostage, kidnapped, or confined by Baikinman, much like Batako-san.

When this happens and the heroes lose heart, she often cries out, "Help me, Rollpanna!"

Sometimes she even calls for Rollpanna silently in her heart.

Her dependence on her sister in moments of fear is a recurring trait.

Anpanman

Melonpanna is often described as Anpanman's younger companion or younger-sister figure.

However, she does not call him "big brother" directly.

In her debut, she told the older heroes, "Please take care of me from now on, big brothers!"

Currypanman was embarrassed by this.

She often supports Anpanman in crises by flying back to the Bread Factory and fetching a new face.

Whenever he is suddenly defeated or involved in an accident, she is often the first to volunteer to notify Jam Oji-san.

Rollpanna

Rollpanna is Melonpanna's older sister, though Rollpanna was actually created later.

Melonpanna wanted an older sister, and that wish led to Rollpanna being made as her sister.

Rollpanna was created using the sincerity grass that Melonpanna discovered by chance, along with Melonpanna's own melon juice.

Melonpanna loves Rollpanna deeply and wishes they could someday live together forever.

She often thinks about her, misses her, and worries over her.

Whenever Rollpanna regains herself from evil influence, Melonpanna's melon juice is often a key factor.

Cream Panda

Cream Panda looks up to Melonpanna and calls her his older sister.

The two occasionally quarrel, but they are basically very close.

His arrival helped define Melonpanna's more mature and caring side.

From then on, she increasingly acted with the warmth of a dependable elder sister.

Baikinman

Melonpanna once treated Baikinman with surprising kindness when he was not committing obvious evil.

Over time, especially because of his role in corrupting Rollpanna, her view of him hardened.

Even so, he remained one of the characters most susceptible to her unusual style of defeating opponents.

In the early period, she was one of the heroes he found particularly troublesome.

Melonpanna quickly became a popular character after her debut.

She soon settled into the core cast as one of the series' heroines.

Her popularity was strong enough that newspaper readers sent in requests asking for her to appear more often on television.

In theatrical films, she has one of the highest numbers of major roles after Anpanman himself.

She often forms deep bonds with guest characters in the movies, such as Nossy, Lilica, Marin, Kabo-chan, and Kana.

Since the fifth film, she has appeared in every main theatrical feature.

She first entered the film continuity in the fifth movie.

Guest characters from the first four films later met her in the sixth movie's paired screening.

The creator Takashi Yanase reportedly had never eaten melon bread before he began designing Melonpanna.

He said he had to try melon bread repeatedly and work through many ideas before finalizing her character.

In the Cheerful Anpanman series, her earliest version was called Melonpanko.

She was born in a form already similar to her present appearance and has never had a baby-form transformation.

She was mistaken for a panda before Cream Panda ever was.

That mix-up became one of her early running jokes.

Although she is a bread character born from the Bread Factory in broad terms, the anime depicts her birth on the airship Anpanman-go.

Despite this origin, she is not shown living at the Bread Factory all the time and sometimes simply appears from elsewhere in the morning.