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Kaleido Star

Japanese anime television series

Manuscripts, fine bindings, an engraving plate and preserved performance ephemera
Arts and lettersInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 20, 2026
Entity authorityQ539284 ↗
Source-derived summary

Kaleido Star (カレイドスター, Kareido Sutā) is a Japanese anime television series produced by Gonzo. It was created by Junichi Sato, who also directed the first season, and written by Reiko Yoshida. Kaleido Star: New Wings was directed by Yoshimasa Hiraike. Three original video animations have been produced, as well as a manga series and a novel. The series follows Sora Naegino, a young Japanese girl, who travels to the United States to fulfill her dream of performing at the world-famous Kaleido Stage.

Plot

First season

Sora Naegino is a young Japanese girl with great acrobatic talent who travels to Cape Mery (a mix of Los Angeles and San Francisco), California to participate in auditions for the Kaleido Stage, a world-famous circus which has mesmerized her since childhood. However, she runs into difficulties as soon as she arrives. She gets lost on her way to the Stage, is leered at by a mysterious stranger, and has her bag stolen by a thief. Employing her acrobatic skills, Sora chases down the criminal. A kind police officer takes her to Kaleido Stage, only to discover she had missed her audition, an event upon which her idol Layla Hamilton advises her to return to Japan.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Kaleido Star” is japanese anime television series. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Kaleido, Star and Japanese, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA productive route into publication, performance and collection histories when the underlying object or edition remains clearly identified. The current 201-word lead offers orientation but no explicit four-digit date, so chronology should not be assumed. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. For this dossier, Kaleido, Star and Japanese is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “japanese anime television series” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q539284. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference.

Critical limits

Later fame can flatten the distinction between original context, subsequent adaptation and institutional collecting history. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Separate the work, its editions or performances, and its later reception. Catalogue records, publication histories and object files often preserve different parts of that story.

Best used for
  • Identifying works and editions
  • Tracing reception history
  • Finding collection records
Verify next

The original object or edition, catalogue raisonné, performance record, rights file and holding institution.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Kaleido Star”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Kaleido Star primary sources, Kaleido Star archive and Kaleido research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Kaleido Star”?
  2. Which edition, object, performance or recording is being described?
  3. Where is authorship, date or provenance documented?
Subject index

Search terms from this dossier

Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Kaleido Star” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.