Pascoite gets bored and reviews anime, vol. 27 · 10:33pm Feb 22nd, 2022
Way too busy last week, so I took it off. Featured series this week are one I'll wager you've heard of and one you haven't: Little Witch Academia and Maria Watches Over Us, after the break, plus the extra reviews cover a very popular series and venture into the exciting "the" part of the alphabet. "The" series are always interesting, aren't they? Maybe. Bit of a long one today, as I went through a large number of the extras to make up for most not being very good, and I had a lot to say about one of the features.
Little Witch Academia strikes me as an amalgamation of lots of other things. In aesthetic, the art style reminds me of My Hero Academia with a little Soul Eater thrown in. A lot of the plot, setting, and atmosphere are basically an anime take on Harry Potter, which I also said about a movie in a recent blog. A whole lot about the plot won't surprise anyone, that is except for one thing. At least I didn't see it coming, but I'm not real sharp about that kind of thing.
So, we start with main character Atsuko (Akko for short), who's on her way to attend a witch academy, though she barely has any information about where it is or what special considerations it takes to make the trip. Seems like the school would be more proactive about that, especially since it comes out over the course of the show that attendance has been declining for years, and the general reputation of magic is suffering, as people think it's irrelevant in an age where technology can accomplish the same things.
Akko has to appeal to the first two willing classmates she can find to even get access to the school, which leads them all to crash and get into trouble before they ever arrive. One of them, Lotte, is a small, bookish sort (more literary than studious, though she's far from a poor student), and the other, Sucy, is a delight from the word go. She's fascinated by things like poisons and death, and she has a morbid streak a mile wide. I'll go ahead and say the series strikes a tone appropriate for a somewhat young audience, so it will be on the upbeat, happy side, but hey, you're reading this on a site for an upbeat, happy pony show, so that shouldn't be an issue. Of course these three end up roommates.
Akko was inspired to study magic in the first place because she loved the magic she saw as a little girl when she would attend the flashy performances of a witch known as Shiny Chariot. She was such a fan that she obsessively collected cards about her and memorized every bit of info she could. She's hoping that she can become the showman Shiny Chariot was and maybe even meet her, though she hasn't been seen in years. But while waylaid with Lotte and Sucy before entering the school, Akko finds a wand she recognizes as Chariot's. And it works for her.
The rest of the show will hit all the beats you expect, where Akko and crew go to class and gain additional abilities, and more side characters are introduced. That's really where this show shines. The characters are all great. I could list a dozen off the top of my head that I really liked, and in that vein of being aimed at a younger audience, nobody's ever irredeemable. It's another of those shows I've touted in the past that throws a relatively large number of characters at you pretty quickly but makes them all immediately likable and memorable. Akko even quickly gains a rival, at least according to Akko, and in a refreshing play on the trope, this girl, Diana Cavendish, is almost immediately shown to be a good person at heart.
There's an additional plot arc, which will supply the main conflict for the series, of Akko trying to figure out all the secrets of Chariot's wand that she now possesses, with the help of a sympathetic faculty member, Professor Ursula, who takes on the role of Akko's mentor. Well, not so much takes it on as gets ordered to by the headmistress, though she would have wanted to anyway. What's also not so surprising is that Akko is pretty inept at magic, and she barely improves, making me wonder how she got admitted to the school in the first place. This also ties in with the school wanting to repair magic's image in the larger world, and some political goings-on that have various effects on specific characters, plus a shady figure trying to take advantage of it.
And then there's the twist. There's a big reveal, but one that had been heavily foreshadowed since very early on, and even before they started letting on, it was pretty obvious it would turn out that way. However, when even the character who needs to know finally learns the secret, there's an additional twist thrown in that I thought was very well done.
Sweet story, great characterization (Constance is best witch, and how appropriate that the show ends with a little gem from her), good art, good music. An easy recommendation. My only complaint was that they glossed over how Chariot had originally lost her wand such that Akko could have found it. I thought they would have made a plot point that she'd given it up, ran out of time in the task she was trying to complete with it, or been judged unworthy of it for some reason, but it just gets ignored.
The show was originally pitched by concept, and an example episode was made as a short film, which has the same title as the series. It could reasonably slot in as a bonus episode sometime during the series, though the series did go a different direction on a couple of the plot points. Then before the series premiered, another short film was made, this one double length, called Little Witch Academia: The Enchanted Parade. It also could easily slot in as a bonus episode during the early to middle part of the series, and I'd recommend watching them after the series, or at least partway into it, to avoid some minor spoilers.
Rating: very good.
25 episodes + 2 short films, relevant genres: fantasy, coming of age.
Maria Watches Over Us is a series that is hard to discuss, because by its nature, it's a bit unfocused a lot of the time. Seasons 1, 3, and 4 all had that same title, but season 2 had a subtitle for some reason (Maria Watches Over Us: Spring). Season 3 was also different, as it was only 5 episodes (whereas the other seasons were 13), it was an OVA, and the episodes were double length.
Now that the administrative stuff is out of the way, let me address the elephant in the room: yes, the Maria in the title refers to the Virgin Mary, and the translation of the title into English sometimes uses that. It's also sometimes translated as Maria is Watching, which is a tad... creepy. But I digress. Now I need to tell you why the series is worth watching even if the title alone immediately turns you off.
Look, I know religion is a trigger for a lot of people, and they wouldn't be willing to give this a chance even if the content had nothing to do with it. Others would be okay as long as it was kept to a minimum, and really, that's pretty much where it is. I mean... do you really expect a mainstream anime to deal with Catholicism that seriously? There just wouldn't be the market for it, especially on its home turf. Plus there's a reason that "anime doesn't understand how Catholicism works" is a TV Tropes page, though that usually hews toward priests and nuns putting on battle gear after hours to destroy demons and vampires. It is kind of odd to me that religions like Christianity, Judaism, and Islam would tend to turn people off more than ones like Buddhism or Shintoism, though I expect that probably has something to do with the former group having a lot to do with proselytizing and converting. For instance, there are lots of Shinto aspects that turn up a lot in anime, like visiting shrines or keeping a display to honor loved ones who have died, and I've never heard of anyone being offended by those, though I'll grant those practices are almost uniformly treated as something on the more casual side. There's only one minor plot point that involves religion at all (one which I was pleased to see them deal with accurately), so that just leaves the few inevitable background things: of course there's a statue of Mary in the garden, of course there's a chapel on campus, of course the girls carry rosary beads, but it's rare any of that gains prominence, and for the beads in particular, for a secular usage. I found it refreshing as well (maybe for different reasons than most people would) that the only time a character is seen praying for something, it doesn't miraculously happen as a result. Real Catholic schools run the gamut from "anyone can attend, and the most religion you're obligated to encounter is rather secular coursework on the history and philosophy of various religions" to "students are expected to be practicing Catholics and required to attend Mass." Odds are most students at a Catholic school would be Catholic anyway, but sometimes non-religious parents choose them because they provide the best education locally. It's kind of vague where on that spectrum the Lilian Girls' Academy in this series falls, and that vagueness alone would tend to say it's toward the relaxed end.
Two things drew me to try this series out. One, I was curious how accurately they would depict the religion in this case, since it's a more slice-of-life show that wouldn't have those kind of demon-hunting aspects you normally get. And two, I'd never watched something that leans on the more intense side of the yuri genre before, so I wanted to try one of those out, plus I was interested to see how that would intersect with the Catholicism angle. On the offhand chance someone doesn't know that terminology, yaoi (which I've mentioned before but didn't define) deals with very intimate relationships between male characters, and yuri for females. Intimate doesn't necessarily mean romantic, though it often does. I'd seen a couple other series that I would say were yuri as a secondary genre, but none where it was the main one.
So now that I've bored half of you to tears, what is the series actually about? The main character, Yumi, is a girl attending a private Catholic all-female academy that runs from at least kindergarten (possibly even from preschool, I forget) through college, though only a minority of students attend for the entire span. The 4 seasons start a bit into Yumi's first year of high school and end near the conclusion of her second (like most schools in Japan, high school is grades 10-12). I forget about this as well, but I don't think she went there prior to high school. Second-year students are encouraged, but not required, to find a first-year student they're especially compatible with and become a mentor to her, which is formalized by granting her the title of petite soeur ("little sister"—the series makes heavy use of French terminology) and giving her a rosary as a symbol of their bond, in the aforementioned secular use of them.
The three elected members of the student council will usually be third-years, they are granted the title of Roses, and whoever their little sisters are will be regarded as their likely (but not guaranteed, since it is by election) successors the next year. One such Rose's little sister, Sachiko, is the only one of the junior Roses who hasn't taken on a little sister of her own, and under pressure, she impulsively asks Yumi after having encountered her precisely once before, just to get the Roses off her back about it. However, she'd seemed to have a special connection with Yumi: she'd normally chastise an underclassman for having an untidy uniform, but the first time she set eyes on Yumi, Sachiko instead inexplicably took it upon herself to calmly retie the messy knot in Yumi's scarf while smiling at her.
At first, this makes it seem like students choose sisters through rather haphazard means, and it had me in a mind of crap like The Bachelor, where they assume if you cram a small number of people together, surely true love will result. The series also so focused just on the sister relationships trailing down from the three Roses that it made it seem like the rest of the student body didn't really do it that much, but thankfully, the final season does come through and imply how common it is, and that for the most part, the choices of little sister are carefully considered.
So then the first season takes on more or less a slice of life feel. Some drama does creep up, and it's of the overblown, manufactured type, where simple misunderstandings lead to needlessly hurt feelings, but let it be said that's far from unrealistic where high school kids are involved. There's not a lot of overarching plot yet, though Sachiko's character development makes her interesting: she has several crippling fears she's working on, namely men, crowds, and heights, and Yumi tries to help her work through those. For her part, Yumi is just an adorable cinnamon roll, naive, trusting, always assuming the best out of everyone, even to a fault. That is, she ends up causing a lot of her own problems as a result.
A boys' school nearby figures into the show as well, and Yumi's brother attends there. While they make a point of saying Yumi is older, all indications are that they're in the same year of school. They never explicitly call them twins, though it's used as a plot device multiple times that they look very similar, and it's certainly possible they could be just under a year different in age and still in the same grade.
Season 2 moves on to Yumi's second year a bit of the way in, and it introduces a new character Touko, who will be important the rest of the way. It's not going to surprise anyone to learn there's a drawn-out conflict over who Yumi will now choose to be her little sister, and she finds herself in much the same situation as Sachiko did when they became sisters. That's where the series takes on its strongest plot thread, and fortunately, that runs through the end of the series. Though they do still deal with the evolving relationship between Sachiko and Yumi (season 3 episode 3 was a particularly good example of this, as there's both an important development in that relationship plus another rather compelling character introduced as a rival to Touko). All of this is on the friendship side of yuri; while you could easily read romantic feelings into a lot of it if you wanted to, only one of them (from long ago, even, and for very minor characters) is explicitly said to be.
It's so easy to be in Yumi's corner that the show really did keep my interest while she tried to navigate through the give-and-take of her friendship with Sachiko and deal with the pain of figuring out whom she should ask to be her little sister. My main complaint is that it becomes obvious well before the end who that will be, and the other character disappointingly just sort of never shows up again, plus while it's clear the culmination of that will happen, you don't actually get to see it. Yes, a fair amount of this gets played for easy feels, and while I can fall prey to that at times, I'm still aware enough to see that for what it is. Still, a lot of what's here is authentic, it's touching to see the characters grow, and now that I'm finished with it, I find myself missing it. It's a cute, sweet show. It also makes some of the most extensive use of Japanese cultural references I've seen, yet it's also the best I've seen at the subtitles explaining them so you understand it all. I waffled on whether to call this show good or very good, but given how much it's stuck with me, I'll allow myself to be tempted into bumping it up, though that's colored more than normal by personal taste.
Two last caveats I think I should touch on, though. First, I know it's also a turn-off for some people to see a sympathetic treatment of well-to-do characters. A fair number of the main ones come from rich families (which realistically wouldn't be unusual at a private school), and while Yumi's family certainly isn't aristocratic, they also live in a single-family home of decent size, which would seem to place them at least as upper-middle class. And second, it does sometimes rely on something I've seen reviewers refer to as "piling on," where someone is given tragic circumstances well beyond what's needed for the plot to work, or they'll grossly overestimate how some secret they have will change people's opinion of them. I think in general, yuri or yaoi stuff is very prone to wandering into wish fulfullment, since if you're into those kinds of relationships on principle, then it's easy to get sucked into the character's predicament and wish you could be the person that someone else was so utterly devoted to. I kind of came at it from a different angle: I'm a character junkie, so the result was similar, but that I can get way too invested in wanting things to work out for the character's sake. For that matter, it's odd that there's a stark difference in maturity level between Yumi's class and the older ones, and that remains constant, as none of them change over the course of the series, though that's a common thing in anime, I suppose.
The art was rather good, and the music was great, especially if you like classical music (some famous pieces get used directly, while a lot of it is original), including a couple of very nice singing performances by the VAs. Something about the aesthetic of the commercial cuts and the private school setting gave me Revolutionary Girl Utena vibes, though the plots are only similar insofar as they involve developing interpersonal relationships, and Maria has none of the surrealist elements. I particularly loved the closing theme from the first 2 seasons, as I used to be a rather good classical saxophonist, and it makes me miss the days of playing like that. It's something I could have easily played well, it's a pretty melody, and I keep promising myself I'll get back into practice one of these days...
As a final note, it threw a wrench in the works that I had a hard time finding the final season. The main site I use for some reason dropped the subtitles after the final season's first episode, leaving me no way to know what the characters were saying, but I eventually found another site that had it intact.
Rating: very good.
Maria-sama ga Miteru, 44 episodes, relevant genres: slice of life, drama, yuri.
Then there's a companion series to it called Maria-sama ni wa Naisho, which alternately gets translated as "keep it secret from Maria" or "don't tell Maria." It's divided up over each season as 7, 6, 5, and 11 episodes, each ranging anywhere from about 45 to 90 seconds long. They're chibi versions of the characters, and it's one of those where they're treated as actors performing the series such that we get to see staged outtakes of scenes from those seasons or alternate takes on them. It's cute enough for what it is, and it's worth watching if you liked the main series. The ones from seasons 3 and 4 were the most reliably funny. I had the same problem where the season 4 ones lost the subtitles, and I couldn't find them to watch elsewhere, though you can get the gist of quick-hit humor well enough just by watching. Furthermore, when I was watching the main series on my usual site, a second copy of this one's first episode got mistakenly posted in place of the original's season 4 episode 2, so even sans subtitles, that episode isn't there.
Rating: good, but doesn't stand alone without watching the main series.
29 episodes, relevant genres: slice of life, comedy.
Sword Art Online (25 episodes), Sword Art Online II (24 episodes), Sword Art Online: Alicization (47 episodes)—there were also a couple of movies made, which I haven't seen. This falls into a couple of categories. One, something I only watched that much of because it was on Toonami between two other shows I wanted to watch, and two, it could have been a good show if they knew when to quit. A high school boy named Kirito is one of the pilot users selected to play an online fantasy game of a new type, where your body basically goes to sleep and your consciousness is transferred into the game. Time does run faster in the game. After going on some adventures mostly by keeping to himself, Kirito does start to collect an entourage of friends as more people are admitted to wider releases of the game. Various groups form factions, some of them unsavory, but it's just a game, right? Well, at some point, the users figure out they can no longer leave the game, and the only way to do so is to beat it. Problem number two: the safeguards in the game have been disabled, so if you die in the game, you die for real. Realistically, this prompts lots of different reactions: wanting to huddle in town—the one place where safeguards are still active—going out to try leveling up, and actively attacking people on some... misguided sense that it's not real, I guess? The first 16 episodes deal with Kirito's band fighting their way through the game, finding out who's behind it all, and winning. If it stopped there, I probably would have found it interesting. But even worse than Bleach, it just kept tacking on more and more plotlines. The reason behind the game being that way was stupid, and was the first of many incursions into the world of sexual assault that pervade the series, which I just didn't care for. And yet another application of "girl in love with her brother, but after drawing it out for many episodes, they're not actually biologically related, so it's okay!" The sequels just have the same groups of people repeatedly getting back into games that they can't leave or that have implications in the real world. How do they keep falling for the same thing? Plus the romance angle was always forced, and it turns into a harem anime more than once. The Alicization sequel brought up an interesting question of AIs being developed within these games, and it had what to me were the most compelling characters, but it never goes anywhere with that question. I was hoping to see some exploration of whether such things were alive, but it did little more than pay some lip service to that aspect while just concluding the action plot. There's another movie due out soon, and I suspect there will be more sequels, but whether or not I watch them, I can't see them changing my opinion, so I'll go ahead and cover what I've seen. Art was good, music was fine. Rating: decent, relevant genres: action, adventure, fantasy, romance, sci-fi.
The Animatrix (movie)—this is an anthology of short tales from The Matrix universe, and I had thought it was something like Batman: Gotham Knight where different animation studios are invited to contribute, but it was just one. Like any anthology, the stories in it are likely to be hit or miss, depending on the viewer. Overall, it was a nice exploration of this world, but it's not going to draw any conclusions. They're mostly slice of life things or stories that exist just to execute a twist. The art was mostly pretty good, the music was average. Not really a lot to say about it. If you liked The Matrix and you like anime, then it's worth watching. Rating: decent, relevant genres: action, thriller, sci-fi, slice of life.
The Prince of Tennis (Tenisu no Ojisama, 178 episodes + 43 OVAs)—and there are still more of these coming out, but like Sword Art Online, I have no interest in continuing to follow it. Of those 178 episodes, I probably only saw a dozen or two. Toonami carried it for a short while. I just didn't find it the least bit interesting. The main character Ryoma is a tennis prodigy, but he's such a sulky loner that it's hard to root for him. Episodes just have him encountering and taking on opponents who have quirky skills, which is pretty much fabrication, as that doesn't happen in real tennis. If you like a Yu-Gi-Oh! type of application to tennis, where each person has traps they set and moves they spring, then you might enjoy this for its strategy aspect, but I found it far too divorced from reality for a subject that would seem to be grounded in it to enjoy it. Art was fine, and I don't remember the music at all. Rating: meh, relevant genres: sports, strategy, drama.
The Promised Neverland (Yakusoku no Nebarando, 23 episodes)—jeez, I keep going back to Sword Art Online this week. Neverland is yet another series that was rich with promise at the beginning and utterly squandered it. In this case, I think there's some truth to the manga just wanting to be done with it and rushing the ending. Some kids at an orphanage have a pretty happy life and are getting a good education. The best students earn the highest prestige for being adopted, but the worse ones need not despair: once they turn 12, they'll be adopted anyway, if they hadn't earned their way out by then. The three top kids soon find evidence that all is not as it seems, though. Some clues seemingly hidden in books, some odd behaviors, some patterns arising in the activities they do. Then they find confirmation, and a battle of wits begins. It was a rather stark twist, and it becomes a pretty enjoyable strategy show at that point, up until an effective cliffhanger for the season 1 finale. Then season 2 happened. It was dumb, filled with incredible leaps of logic, stupid world-building, and constant plot convenience. The first season is well worth watching. My recommendation is to stop there and imagine your own ending, since you'll almost certainly come up with a better one. Art was very good, music was average. Rating: very good for season 1, but decent overall, relevant genres: dark, drama, thriller, strategy.
The SoulTaker (13 episodes + 3 OVAs)—I haven't seen the OVAs. A young man named Kyosuke is stabbed in the heart by his adoptive mother, which results in him coming back from the dead with supernatural powers and the ability to transform into a demon creature. In trying to track down why, he learns that her intentions may have been good, there's an organization trying to hunt him down to control and study him, and he has a twin sister whose soul seems to be split into pieces and dispersed. It wasn't terrible, but it never grabbed me much, and it's been so long since I've seen it that I couldn't really say why. It just felt like the plot was overblown and the characters were underdeveloped. Art was average, and I don't remember the music. Rating: meh, relevant genres: dark, mystery, thriller, drama.
The Super Milk-Chan Show (14 episodes), OH! Super Milk Chan (12 episodes)—this reminded me a lot of Powerpuff Girls, but as an absurdist comedy/parody of it. Milk is a 5-year-old girl who keeps getting asked to save the city from various disasters, and it's just random humor, so there's no point in trying to do a plot summary. It was amusing enough, and if that sounds like your bag, then give it a shot. The funniest part to me was Milk constantly shouting, "You dumbass!" at everyone. At 26 total episodes, it probably does overstay its welcome somewhat. Music and art were both what you'd expect from a series like this. Rating: decent, relevant genres: comedy, random, surreal.
Seen any of these? Did I convince you to try any of them? I'd like to hear about it in the comments.
Last 10:
vol. 17 here
vol. 18 here
vol. 19 here
vol. 20 here
vol. 21 here
vol. 22 here
vol. 23 here
vol. 24 here
vol. 25 here
vol. 26 here
Maria sounds interesting.
I think we got Animatrix and Half-Price Books and watched it exactly once. That was enough.
I’ve been hesitant to engage Sword Art and after reading this, I probably won’t unless I run out of everything else, including Bleach. And I won’t.
The Super Milk-Chan Show was something I enjoyed, especially the interactions with “The President” and yes it is very repetitive which is some of the charm if you can call it that: regardless of what happens, we’ll all go out and get sushi or something.
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Yes, that's a good description of Milk-Chan. She might complete the mission, she might not. But everyone turns out fine anyway. He is the president of everything, after all. If you can turn off your brain and enjoy the madness, it's fun enough.
I liked Maria a lot more than I was expecting to, and I haven't seen anything quite like it before, but it may be that it feels more distinct to me because I haven't seen any other full-bore yuri friendshipping series before. I shall have to look up a few more and see.
Not unlike a substantial portion of Space Dandy. Have you
freebasedwatched any Bobobo-Bo Bo-Bobo yet?That description of SAO just makes me think of .hack//sign. <.< That was isekai before isekai was a thing.
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Yes, I covered Bobobo-Bo Bo-Bobo way back in vol. 7, coincidentally the one where I also reviewed Bleach, since you brought that one up too. Space Dandy was a different kind of humor for me, plus it had a penchant for springing a really serious episode on you every so often.
Yeah you hit the nail on the head with The Promised Neverland. It probably dropped the ball harder between seasons than any series I'm aware of besides Game of Thrones.
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It does seem to share a lot of genes with .hack//SIGN, but I made the mistake of trying to get into that one when it was on some cable channel, already well into the run, so I just didn't have the context for what was happening and why. I quickly got bored with it. I might have also just hit a lull in it too; whereas SAO more consistently has action, the few episodes of .hack//SIGN I saw were almost entirely people sitting around and talking.
One I've been enjoying recently:
Is Toradora. It's apparently 15 years old but newly released on Netflix, so I guess you'll get to it next time or the time after if you've seen it...
Mike
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I have seen it, and it'll come up in the next blog or two. I'll go ahead and say it's one of my favorites of the high school romance genre, though I thought the epilogue was pretty dumb.
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It was a big deal when I was in college, but to be honest, I remember nothing about it save that the video game was very bad.
Oooh Little Witch Academia! Just consistently great writing all throughout. And yeah, while the overarching plot had a few holes here and there, the tone carried it through them. Watched it over the course of a good six months or so with a friend, and reached the finale in 2020, where it turns out I really needed the dose of just pure unflitered optimism and joy it ended on. Low-key brought me to tears, great show.
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I had a lot of fun with it, and Akko's definitely one of those characters with infectious optimism. Have you seen the two short films? The first one was pretty good, similar to a standard episode, but The Enchanted Parade was very good. Plus Constance continues being best witch in it.