Tag: anime

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch BANG DREAM YUME∞MITA – Episode 4

Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime.

For the BanG Dream Yumemita column, new entries will be posted either on each Thursday an episode airs, or as soon as possible during the week thereafter.

It’s an interesting move to make the first “regular” episode of BanG Dream! Yumemita as much about Ritsu and Viola as any of the girls in the actual main band, but it does make sense. Ritsu is our little lost lamb. We get further confirmation in this episode that she is, mainly, a victim under Viola’s thumb and, accordingly, Viola gets to do her whole evil vizier regime up and down the entire episode. She’s the real star of the show here, and I think she’d be thrilled to hear me say that, because in this episode we get some indication of why she does what she does.

As I said in the first impressions article, it’s fairly rare for an anime in this genre to have an out-and-out antagonist. But there are some logical extrapolations you can make from how the music industry works—especially the very online digital space that Mugendai Mewtype work in—to craft a compelling villain. Viola’s is just that she’s a complete fucking clout shark. Viola wants big views, she wants the number to go up, and she wants the attention on her specifically. Much of this episode details the brief history of the LaLaLaLaGirls, her previous group with Ritsu and Arale. (There are two other girls but, bluntly, they don’t matter. One of them is literally named “A-ko.” The only thing you need to know is that one of them was the group’s center.) This is also scaffolded with the very specific way that she wants to tailor herself for her audience. In the context of the LaGirls’ group dynamic, she’s the imouto, the cute little sister that everyone’s supposed to want to dote on. She’s pretty insistent about this from the word “go” and is all the more so when the LaGirls actually get signed to a proper agency. The contrast between this and how much of a complete snake-in-the-grass she actually is is both obvious and absolutely delicious. This is a real kind of person! I think anyone who’s on the internet enough has tangled with at least one person who puts up a paper-thin façade of obnoxiously twee cutesiness to hide an inner core of jealousy and venom. I’m not the first person who’s made jokes about Viola posting Google Docs, and I surely won’t be the last.

You know this girl runs the absolute gnarliest antiship blog you’ve ever seen in your life.

The villain cred-building reaches its apex during the episode’s climactic story beat. Where we actually see the real conversations that Viola clip-mined for the edited-together “erea01” video from the premiere. I have to admit, I actually assumed myself that Arale really was being that blunt—I didn’t think she was being mean, mind you, but it’s not crazy for someone so forthright to occasionally stick her foot in her mouth—but no, even that much isn’t true! Viola straight up “Coolsville Sucks!”‘d her. Of course, when the video actually hits the group’s page and the consequences roll in, she plays ignorant and makes with the crocodile tears, all while being absolutely thrilled just offscreen.

Did I mention that the only way she even could do any of this is that cameras were set up to film the LaGirls hanging out together basically whenever they were around each other? And that earlier in the episode, the previous center of the LaGirls mysteriously and suddenly resigns, almost as if Viola had a bunch of dirt on her too and was jealous that she wasn’t the main focus of attention on the group? (She’s definitely the main focus of her new group. Which, incidentally, the other two girls in that band seem to be just fine with Viola’s open displays of domineering behavior toward Ritsu. Birds of a feather, one supposes!)

In any case, the video results in Arale being outed from the LaGirls, and Ritsu, in a moment that seems to really haunt her, does not do anything to help or offer support. After all, Ritsu’s image within the group is that of the perfect model student, and model students, as Viola is keen to remind her, don’t associate with troublemakers. (Never mind of course that Viola is the one causing the problems. To her, the image matters much more than the reality of the situation.) The episode ends with Ritsu once again meeting Arale by chance back in the present, and attempting to apologize. But Arale, who seems understandably hurt by Ritsu’s lack of support back then, smacks her outstretched hand away. This is not something that’s going to be resolved quite that easily, it seems.

There’s more I haven’t gone into here, of course.. Yuno, for example, seems to have a hunch that something is up with Arale (she saw her and Ritsu meet up in one of last week’s episodes, so she knows something is going on) and is doing a bit of investigating near the episode’s start. The preview for next week also seems to imply that the full band might be in the same place as Viola next week, which would certainly be interesting. Viola, it must be pointed out, is obviously being set up to either undergo some sort of comeuppance or one hell of a redemption arc. I think both options are interesting, although she’s so fun as the gleefully evil fame glutton that I’d almost prefer the former. We shall see what the weeks ahead bring us.

I’m going to be keeping these Yumemita writeups pretty casual. I love the show so far, but that has more to do with it being extremely fun to watch than me necessarily thinking I have a ton of deep insightsTM to offer, so I will be keeping things breezy. See you next week, Girl Band Fans.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: Blood in the Lilyfields in I WANT TO LOVE YOU TILL YOUR DYING DAY

Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.

In the grand scheme of all of the anime that have premiered (or have yet to premiere) in the Summer 2026 anime season, my most anticipated show wasn’t the new Kyoto Animation series, ScienceSARU’s take on Ghost in the Shell, the new BanG Dream anime, or anything of the sort. No, I saw that title, and the little bit of atmospheric teasing built up by its first trailer, and—despite knowing nothing at all about the manga it’s based on other than that it’s generally well-liked—knew that it was going to be this. This was my called shot, I’ve been saying for months that this is going to be the premiere of the season; forget whatever hyped-up sequel you have in your mind, the A-O-T-S is I Want To Love You Till Your Dying Day.

Does the actual premiere live up to those predictions? Well, to be perfectly honest, no. Not really. But, I do still think it’s a good premiere. And before I get into why, let’s talk about what this thing actually is first.

Looked at through a certain lens, Dying Day is not terribly different from any of a vast number of ‘magic school’ anime that have existed over the past 15 years. Our protagonist attends an academy that teaches its students how to effectively wield the arcane talents they are born with. The most immediate difference is one of tone; the school of Dying Day is a misty, floodlight gray, and we open in medias res, one of the students having just been killed in a recent “operation.” This school, you see, trains its students not for careers or for their own enrichment, but as soldiers in a war. Young girls and boys learn to conjure magic primarily as a weapon, summoning small, dagger-like wooden wands to do so. The emotional timbre in this opening is more Madoka Magica than Harry Potter, in other words.

Our protagonist is the dead girl’s roommate. In a relatively straightforward move for this show, she’s behind everyone else in her class in terms of talent. Her name is Totsuki Sheena [Takahashi Rie], and she spends most of this episode’s opening minutes wondering why. Why is everyone so blasé about the death of her roommate? Is this how this is all really supposed to be? Flashing back to conversations with that late roommate, Sheena remembers being told she was lucky for being as weak as she was. That her weakness was a privilege that exempted her from thinking about the war. And that night, as she’s continuing to ponder all this, she runs quite unexpectedly into a girl a good bit younger than herself, who is absolutely drenched in blood. Not her own blood, either.

This is Kagari Mimi [Hidaka Rina]. Mimi, who eagerly gobbles up the riceballs that Sheena offers her, is the key to the other half of this show’s tonal space and, I suspect, will be central to whatever it decides to do long-term. (I use that vague phrasing because to be honest, this episode is slow and setup-heavy enough that I don’t really know what that is yet.) Mimi is a few years younger than Sheena and, when she enrolls in Sheena’s class the next day and is announced to be Sheena’s new roommate, the classroom is abuzz with gossip. The other girls (and the boys, too) whisper that Mimi might be that Mimi, a girl who the staff supposedly keep on retainer as some kind of invincible superweapon. In introducing all this, Dying Day does a peculiar little waltz where it tiptoes back into the foggy duskiness of its opening minutes and a goofier sensibility more willing to embrace light novel clichés. In the former camp you have Sheena and Mimi’s wanderings around the school at night, and the funeral for Sheena’s former roommate where Sheena chucks a rabbit into her empty coffin. (The school’s soldiers, we’re told, dissolve instantly upon death. If they were captured, their foes—who we know almost nothing about at this juncture—might “learn things” from their corpses.) In the latter camp, you have everyone’s gleeful fangirling over how cute Mimi is, and one particular detail of the setting; the school’s soldiers (or at least the girls) can kiss each other to use “healing magic.” Essentially, Fate/stay Night‘s “mana transfer” but in slightly less H-game terms. It’s an uneasy dance, but Dying Day largely makes it work.

One of those kisses ends the episode. After witnessing another pair of girls do it, Mimi unexpectedly kisses Sheena when the latter is unable to sleep that night due to stomach problems that, it seems a fair guess, are caused by stress. Sheena narrates that this little problematically age-gapped kiss tastes faintly of soap and, of course, blood…and that’s where the episode ends! Aside from a few minor details (such as a very chummy couple who seem like they’re going to be our main supporting cast) I have really left out very little. It’s a slow, buildup-heavy first episode that is big on atmosphere and raising questions in the mind of its audience. Honestly? Partly because of that uneasy yoyoing between moods, I suspect Dying Day will probably be relegated to cult favorite at best. And even on a technical level it isn’t a perfect premiere. (There are a few obvious visual shortcuts, in particular the use of CGI for some distance models, a general sign of a show that is trying its hardest but isn’t necessarily the most resource-rich production. They’re the only real ding to the otherwise excellent atmosphere.) Still, if you like sapphic overtones so heavy that “overtone” is honestly not the right word anymore and a curious, mysterious atmosphere, I really do think this is worth checking out. Anime of the year? No, not in a year with legitimate masterpieces in this space like Shiboyugi and Kamiina Botan. Of the season? Even then, probably not. But, it is worthwhile in its own right, in a time where everything is rushing to grab your attention as quickly as possible, something taking the slow path shouldn’t be underestimated.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Mini First Impressions: GROW UP SHOW, GOODBYE LARA, & SPARKS OF TOMORROW

Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.

Another season, another roundup post for the stuff I didn’t quite have enough to say about to do a full post on. Let’s get into it.

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Goodbye, Lara – I am only passingly familiar with the original The Little Mermaid story. Like a lot of Americans, I could tell you a lot more about the Disney version (although it’s been a long time since I’ve seen even that). This…may or may not matter to appreciating Goodbye, Lara in the long-term. But I bring it up because the anime’s opening episode takes an interesting approach to its classic source material.

Goodbye, Lara is not an adaptation of The Little Mermaid. Instead, it’s an original story that uses the original tale as, essentially, a prologue. (I am reminded, vaguely, of the old Peter & The Starcatchers series of young adult novels and their relationship to the original Peter Pan.) It’s hard to make many strong claims about what the series will “be like” in terms of actual narrative because of this, as the story here is that prologue. With some reworked framing, the fundamentals of a mermaid princess—Lara [Hishikawa Hana, who it is honestly great to hear around in a main role again], this time around—fascinated by the human world are the same. The main deviation, as far as I’m aware, being that Lara’s father Rowan actually contextualizes contact with (or even speaking out in favor of) humans as a “sin.” Something about them, he says, corrupts a mermaid’s inner light. This seems like a moral framing at first, but events late in the episode suggest it may be something more fundamental than that. In any case, Lara nonetheless develops a fixation on humans early on, even keeping a collection of various artifacts that fall into the sea over the years, dolls, jewelry, glasses, and so on, as she grows up in the 1770s. She is, eventually, tempted by the words of a delightfully cackle-cackle muahaha villain-ass villain, the sea-witch, Grace [Fukami Rica], exiled from her father’s kingdom.

Of course, she offers Lara a potion that will turn her human. And of course, as we all likely know, this potion has a catch; she has to find true love before it wears off, or she’ll dissolve into foam.

And she does! She falls for a prince of the surface world, and they have a lovely time together right up until the potion starts wearing off and she changes back into a mermaid before his very eyes. In doing so, she finds out that the human/mermaid animosity is mutual, and she fizzles into ocean spray, tears in her eyes.

Grace, watching from a magic mirror, is unimpressed by this, dismissing her tragic ending as boring. (Which, hey, seems a touch disrespectful, since I think that’s how the original book ends? But, then, she is the villain here, so maybe it’s fine.) Which would be an odd note to end on, but of course, Lara isn’t truly dead. Via some magical means, she is resurrected inside of a giant seashell, and is shocked to find her father’s kingdom in ruins. This, if the magic mirrors that she consults to learn the kingdom’s fate can be trusted, is because of her own actions. Lara merely making contact with the surface world was somehow enough to “corrupt” the inner light of not just the mermaids themselves but the land in which they lived. (It’s around here that this starts to feel a bit like commentary on pollution, but it’s really too early to say for sure.)

Grace contacts her again, telling her that, if she’s willing, she might be able to save the kingdom and revive her family (who are not dead per se, but merely in the same kind of stasis that Lara herself seemed to be up until her resurrection). Without any other choice, Lara agrees, and is promptly rocketed back to the human world on a beautifully-animated jet of water.

She finds it quite different from her last go-around, because—small detail—her resurrection took about 200 years and change, and it’s now 2026. The episode ends with her falling from the sky into the waiting arms of a young girl named Otsu Mari [Kawaishi Nana], who does the only logical thing and puts on the boxing gloves she’s carrying to parry the incoming mermaid with a solid left hook. You know, just to prove that she’s no casual.

No but really, why did she do that?

Suffice to say that all of this is just endlessly interesting. How did Lara merely making contact with a human mess up the mermaid kingdom so badly? Why is Grace so hellbent on seeing her try again when the kingdom’s ruin seems to have been her goal in the first place? Why does the girl that Lara falls onto after being blown out of the water have boxing gloves? No, seriously, how on earth does boxing of all things factor into this story? A good premiere leaves you asking questions, and a great premiere does so with style. Goodbye, Lara, as you can probably guess, is by my estimation a great premiere. Good enough to stand out in a season that hasn’t been short on those and isn’t going to let up with them anytime soon. Koide Takushi, directing here, was previously the animation director on the Revue Starlight movie. So this series, with its sea-deep colors and bold, immediately-iconic character designs, was probably always destined to look good. But the premiere promises that Goodbye, Lara will be more than a mere return to form for Kinema Citrus, it could very well be truly great in its own right.

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Grow Up Show – What we have here is a classic “girls passionate about some performing art”-style slice of life series from A-1 Pictures and their relatively new subsidiary Psyde Kick. It’s an original with no prior source material, which is always neat, and Grow Up Show lacks even the public domain roots of Goodbye, Lara. Unfortunately, it’s also the first premiere of the season that I just really did not care for at all.

Grow Up Show‘s premise—that lead Tsurumaki Mizuka [Hirohashi Ryou]is roped into working for the traveling Sunflower Circus after her deadbeat dad, a legendary circus performer himself, essentially sold her to them for 40,000 yen—is precisely the kind of wacky plot motor you’d expect in a show that’s this zany. (And we’re clearly supposed to think that her dad is a terrible person for doing this, even that tone in mind, to be clear.) Accordingly, Grow Up Show is pretty silly, and it makes sure you know that by having Mizuka pull all kinds of wacky faces and such. On top of that, the show is passingly cute, so those who don’t need much more out of their anime than those two things will be satisfied here. However, it’s also pretty cloying in a way I found immediately obnoxious and which did not really let up over the course of its premiere. Mizuka herself is hardly the world’s most compelling protagonist. She’s a grumpy sourpuss who isn’t at all thrilled to be drafted into doing circus work due to its association with her asshole dad. Unfortunately, that’s probably the second most common type of lead for this sort of thing after the completely played-straight “bundle of joy and passion” type, so that isn’t terribly interesting, and is less so because we’re obviously setting up a turnaround narrative here where, by the end of the show, she’ll actually love the circus and maybe even come to reconnect with her estranged father. (If this doesn’t happen, feel free to come back after the finale and call me a fool in the comments section, but, come on.) Beyond that, the only truly noteworthy thing about her is that she’s really flexible. Definitely helpful for a circus acrobat, but not exactly the sort of thing that leads to a character brimming with personality on its own.

The other characters are an unfortunate combination of rote, annoying, and interchangeable, and more than once while they had their little exchanges I found my eyes glazing over. Most of them have one obvious personality trait, if that, few distinguishing physical characteristics, and even the voice actresses seem to largely phone it in, so none of them sound particularly distinct either. The show attempts to make an exception to this nondescriptness with Kawasumi Ouka [Kurosaki Shiori in what is, admittedly, apparently her first major role], a character set up as Mizuka’s partner in the circus’ acrobatic shows. But the two don’t really get any memorable interactions in their time together here. Even when actually practicing one of those acrobatic routines, the attempt to establish chemistry between them just feels very paint-by-numbers. In fact, all of that, the ultra-simple character dynamics, the gimmicky core hook (not a lot of anime about circus acrobatics admittedly, it’s, what, this and Kaleido Star?), and plausibly-deniable girl x girl fanservice, Grow Up Show feels like a slice of life anime from a decade ago, and not in a good way. Even the art style, a poor stab at middle-of-the-last-decade generic moe, feels symptomatic of this. Likewise, the animation, while competent, isn’t particularly compelling either. Perhaps I just don’t have enough appreciation of the inherent beauty of bodies in motion or whatever, but, it did not speak to me despite its technical proficiency.

The real nail in the coffin, though, at least for me, came in the episode’s second half, where Mizuka watches the Sunflower Circus girls’ performances and is asked to critique them. It is a tragic fact that, if any narrative attempts to speak on the arts themselves, it will often do so through a character. In doing this, it then hands idiots with blogs like myself endless ammo, because it’s so easy to fling comments made by these characters back at the narrative itself. But, being complete easy-mode for critics doesn’t actually make it wrong, and I was not happy to realize that the admittedly-lazy buzz of “aha, it’s like the show is talking about itself” was the most engagement I was going to get out of the episode. I am not exaggerating when I say I had to really struggle to not completely check out for everything afterward.

Maybe I’m being mean, and yes, sure, it is technically possible that this series will somehow pick up later in its run and I’ll look like a fool for writing it off, but I truly doubt it. In an anime season that is this packed, both with excellent things that have already premiered (including specifically those about young girls in the performing arts) and things that are about to, it’s hard to imagine anyone wanting to stick with this for a full twelve weeks. Slice of life “cute girls doing cute things” anime often fly under the radar in terms of anime genres that seem to only get new entries due to some perceived bottomless demand for them, in comparison to say narou-kei isekai or harem romcoms (both of which are made in much higher quantities and, I would say at least, have much lower averages in terms of quality over all), but an anime like this is a nice reminder that it is perhaps good that there aren’t actually way more of these things, because at some point you’re just diluting the scene with cruft.

Also there’s not even a girl who’s a clown, which is an enormous missed opportunity.

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Sparks of Tomorrow – These three anime are listed in alphabetical order, but even so, it might be appropriate that I’ve saved this one for last, as it’s by some measure the one I have the least to say about. Sparks of Tomorrow‘s big claim to fame is being the newest Kyoto Animation project, and to be sure, Oota Minoru (who has been at KyoAni since the Haruhi days but hasn’t actually directed an entire anime of his own until now) and his crew bring the usual levels of expected polish and style to the production. The backgrounds are also very nice, and give a real sense of believability to the series’ setting, an alternate-history, steam-powered 1907 Japan where electrical engineering never caught on and electric lighting and the like is still very much a novelty. Our hero is Sakamoto Kihachi [Uchida Yuuma], younger brother of a presently-vanished electrical genius whose dream was to bring electricity to the masses.

Now, this is the second paragraph and I have already used the word “electrical” and its variants five times. (It is perhaps for the best that the show’s early, unofficial English title, The 20th Century Electric Catalogue, taken from an important book and plot token in the story, was never canonized.) Kihachi’s brother, the contents of the Catalogue itself, and how he would’ve revolutionized the world with it, are all left pretty up in the air at the moment, and while you could argue that the show is indulging in some Great Man Theory here—in an opening bit of narration we’re told the present state of affairs is because all of the early “electrical geniuses” died young, so clearly it’s up to Kihachi’s older brother to fill their shoes—it really feels, at present, like we’re more supposed to latch on to the feeling of something important as opposed to any specifics. Fair enough, but it does make the premiere feel a little odd overall.

What it does have going for it is a decent cast of characters. Kihachi himself is disillusioned by his brothers’ disappearance, and spends most of his days fixing various machinery at a Buddhist altar shop that took him in. His opposite number, our female lead Momokawa Inako [Amamiya Sora], is very impressed by the electrical inventions Kihachi shows her. Toward the end of the episode she literally thinks she’s in heaven for a moment, thanks to a particularly impressive display. Inako’s main talents are an intense credulity and open devoutness in, um, just about everything, really. It’s a somewhat strange, cartoonishly naïve personality for a character to have, but it works in its own way. The real linchpin of the cast though, for my money, is actually our villain, a bizarre, scheming sleazeball named Mizoe Yousuke [Uchiyama Kouki] who is the heir to a steam engine zaibatsu and strong-arms Inako’s dad into letting him marry her as part of a plot to claim the Electric Catalogue for himself. All of this is, in a word, odd, and I’d be lying if I said I had any idea of what to make of it at this early juncture. (And the often extremely zany animation, which is fairly uncharacteristic of KyoAni’s usual house style, really only emphasizes the strangeness.) But odd is good in the world of the anime premiere, and while this isn’t entirely my thing, I can imagine it appealing to some on novelty alone.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: JAADUGAR: A WITCH IN MONGOLIA

Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.

A genre represented a bit sparingly in the usual churn of seasonal anime is the historical drama. That’s not to say that there aren’t any—this isn’t even the first one I’m covering this season—but they’re a little less common than some genres, and when they do happen, they tend to stick to a pretty narrow geographical range; Japan itself, or, sometimes, China. As its title suggests, Jaadugar: A Witch in Mongolia, is an outlier in this regard, and it actually starts farther west than that, in Iran, but while this is notable on its own, it’s not the only reason the series is worth attention.

For one thing, this is the latest offering from Science SARU, who are pulling double duty this season between this and their upcoming Ghost in the Shell reboot. (Witch in Mongolia in particular is the work of a creative team led by chief director Yamada Naoko and director Abel Gongora.) Here, they’re working to translate the striking art style of the original manga, whose creator goes by the pseudonym Tomato Soup, into animated form. The result is something that, likely more by convergent evolution than anything, looks just a bit like Kaiba‘s art style, but translated into a rich and breathing portrait of the medieval middle east as opposed to that series’ far-future psychadelic sci fi. So what you have here is a very strongly-realized historical setting presenting a compelling story about the power of knowledge and how it can help us deal with our circumstances, even when those circumstances are very bleak indeed. That’s interesting. That’s something truly different.

Of course, being a series set in the real-world past does come with a few hurdles we all need to jump together as viewers. To put it more bluntly; slavery is a major plot element of this series. I will never tell anyone that they have to put any discomfort with that aside and just push on through, but I think there is a huge, huge difference in how the practice is depicted here—an honest acknowledgement of a historical reality—and, say, the two-bit power fantasies of bottom of the barrel narou-kei dreck, which is where this stuff tends to pop up most frequently in anime. If you want your off-ramp, it’s here. This stuff is part of the story, and I am going to talk about it as frankly as the story itself does, there isn’t really any way to write about it without doing so.

Because—silly as this may sound—the actual events of the story are very important to establishing what the story is going for here, I am going to recap these first two episodes, looping in my own thoughts and observations where applicable. If this seems a little more “recappy” (and longer) than my usual first impressions pieces these days, that’ll be why.

Seeking a new servant in her household after the death of her husband, a woman named Fatima [Kuwashima Houko] visits a slave market run by a man named Ahmad [Takaoka Binbin]. There, she’s sold a new housekeeper and, in return for Ahmad knocking a few hundred dinar off the price, she’s also to take in a young girl named Sitara [Sekine Akira]. Fatima’s brother Muhammad [Mogami Tsuguo] attempts to instill some learning in Sitara, as Ahmad told Fatima that the girl has a knack for it, but finds himself frustrated when she’s unable to even learn the very basics of Quran recitation. Frustrated, Muhammad says that he’ll just pay back the discount and return her. Left alone after this, Sitara attempts to escape.

She does not, quite understandably, want to spend the rest of her life enslaved. She says she’s going home, but in her attempts to find her way out of the manor, she gets lost. In a garden, she encounters a young boy, also named Muhammad [Saito Jun]. (He’s the elder Muhammad’s nephew, son to Fatima and a late father. I will be differentiating him and the elder Muhammad by age.) She takes an immediate interest in him, including teasing him after her headdress accidentally slips off. Unfortunately! This leads to her being caught, and upon being scolded she breaks down that she misses the home that she and her mother used to serve in. (Zumurrud [Nikray Farahnaz], one of Fatima’s other servants, is unsympathetic and tells her that if she really wants a home to call her own, she should study hard so she’ll get bought by a worthwhile master. Ouch.)

In spite of this, the younger Muhammad makes an earnest attempt to connect with her. Enough of an attempt that he tries to teach her a little something; taking a metal bucket from Zumurrud, young Muhammad drops it in the courtyard from a great height, making a terrible racket. When this sends everyone but Sitara and Zumurrud into a momentary panic, he notes that, because these two had the time to see that the bucket was about to fall, and therefore to prepare themselves, they knew to cover their ears and avoided the clamor.

The younger Muhammad says that this kind of foresight; preparation to avoid calamity, big or small, is what defines learning. In saying this, he calls back to an earlier line from Fatima—when attempting to convince the elder Muhammad to teach Sitara the Quran, she explains that seeking knowledge is the duty of all Muslims—and highlights what is sure to be a main theme of the series.

This is enough to convince her to take studying seriously. And thus, we are treated to a montage. Sitara learns household tasks, learns to pray, and recieves an outfit from the house. As the montage (and Fatima’s period of prescribed mourning for her husband, the synchronization of the two feels deliberate) ends, Sitara speaks with the younger Muhammad once again. The two are clearly close at this point, and she’s surprised (and a little upset!) to learn that he plans to journey to Nishapur, and to other cities of the world beyond, to learn as much as he can about the world from as many different peoples and faiths as possible. It’s an admirable goal, and young Muhammad believes that it’s what his father wanted for him, but Sitara is visibly upset by the prospect of not seeing him again, and it’s not hard to conclude that the two have some nascent feelings for each other. No matter, young Muhammad promises Sitara that he’ll write to her. Now, Sitara is illiterate, but this is his way of encouraging her to practice her letters. He wants to become a great scholar and, hopefully, someday, teach many young folks like herself. With some sadness, she and the rest of the household see young Muhammad off on his journey, and the narration tells us that he will become a person of some renown. (This is true, because the younger Muhammad is the Persian polymath Nasir al-Din al-Tusi.)

The narration also tells us something else, however. That this is the last time he and Sitara will ever see each other in person.*

We cut to eight years later. One of Sitara’s recitation practices is interrupted by the sounds of the Tussian militia outside, heading off to fight a band of troublesome nomads. This disruption is quickly forgotten as one of young Muhammad’s letters arrives. In it he talks about how in love he’s fallen with the sciences; astronomy, geometry, medicine, and how he prefers their methods of learning to the purely theological. He also encourages his family to let Sitara learn these disciplines, as well, suggesting Ptolemy and Euclid as starting points. Euclid’s Elements is a bit hard for her to grasp, but when Fatima introduces her to a book on astrology and astronomy (recall, this was the 12th century and the two were not well delineated), she’s captivated. In here, Fatima repeats the “seeking knowledge” line, once again underlining it as a main theme of this story.

Back in the manor proper, one of Fatima’s other servants, Anis [Ise Mariya], scolds Sitara as she burns something in the oven. It’s true, she tells Sitara, that some slaves are given education to entertain or delight their masters, but decisions of this nature aren’t made by the slaves themselves. “We’re property, not people.” She says, in a way that is so matter of fact that what she’s saying actually comes off as more chilling. All the moreso because of how this episode ends.

The militia, mentioned briefly earlier, are revealed to have fallen to the nomads. The episode closes on a brief exchange between two of these men; a commander of some sort, and his superior, on horseback, who asks if Tus has any scholars because he’s “looking for something.”

When the Mongols are inbound to the city, Muhammad and the rest of the household treat them more like a natural disaster that will blow over. The slaves, along with the rest of the valuables and Fatima as well, hide in a spacious cellar underneath the manor while the elder Muhammad takes his sons up to the mountains to hopefuly ride out the proverbial storm.

Fatima and Sitara have a bit of a heart to heart in the standstillish world of the cellar, speaking about Fatima’s books (a collection her late husband spent a lifetime building) and how important they are.

She also asks Fatima if she “cares for” Muhammad, and both her actual reply and the little flight of fancy she has—she and Muhammad decked out in fancy clothes, eating pomegranates together—make it a clear yes. Fatima says that she wants Sitara to serve Muhammad “by his side, as a human being.” For someone in Sitara’s position, that’s high praise. Days pass, and after a few, there’s some noise outside the cellar. Fatima assumes it’s the older Muhammad, returned to come get them. It is not.

It is here that we are formally introduced to the Mongols invading the city. We don’t learn his name just yet, but the leader of this little expedition appears to be a prince, one of the sons of Genghis Khan. For whatever reason they may have, he is looking for a copy of Euclid’s Elements, a book that has of course come to mean a lot to Sitara over the years. Unable to restrain herself, she shouts at the Mongol prince to return it and calls him a thief. Unfortunately, not only is the prince clearly offended by the mere act of being yelled at, he has a servant on hand of his own, who translates the insult into his language. This is enough to incur his wrath; he tells Sitara—his servant translating all the while—that bravery from one as delicate as she is unseemly, and promptly brings down his sword on her head.

Fatima, of course, cares enough for Sitara to not stand idly by while she’s attacked, and jumps in front of the blade. Dying in Sitara’s arms, she calls her her daughter. It is a sad and tragic event, and it does not seem like it’ll be the last of those in this series.

Brought up in the first episode is the limit of theoretical knowledge. The younger Muhammad embarked on his journey in part because his own teacher scolded him for his lack of life experience. Here, we see those limits in plain relief. There is simply not anything that Sitara, as she currently is, could possibly have done.

No matter the era, the place, or the reason, an invading army is almost never welcome. Witch in Mongolia portrays this pain with a very raw, immediate touch. After Fatima’s death, Sitara is left to watch as the invaders plunder the manor, and when they finally lead her away in a train of captives, we see the beautiful sandstone buildings and sky-blue dome tops of Tus rendered as so much rubble underneath the smoke and fire.

This happens all over the world, and has happened, from the dawn of human history to the present day. The methods change, both those for delivering the killing blow and those for extracting the wealth, but the fundamental injustice of the strong trampling the weak has not. Tus, after its sacking in 1220, was, in fact, eventually rebuilt, but it did not last, and the city didn’t survive the 1200s. Those are incalculable lives and stories either lost or displaced, and Witch in Mongolia is about just one of them. As Tus burns, Sitara and a throng of other captives are marched out of the city and into the surrounding desert. She manages to meet back up with Zumurrud and Anis, although the former is badly suffering from watching her brother be shot by archers before her very eyes. Later, the captive train comes across a field of the dead, and a woman attempts to run off upon recognizing one of the bodies. She, too, is promptly shot to death by one of the Mongol archers.

This is all very, very bleak. Obviously. Even saying as much feels a bit trivial. Keeping Sitara going are memories of her time with Fatima, eagerly awaiting the bloom of the flowers in Safar and her letters from young Muhammad. It may seem somewhat strange, to an audience living in the modern world, and given Sitara’s own reaction in the opening minutes of the first episode to the prospect, that she looks back on serving under Fatima so well. But, we must remember that despite their arrangement being what it was, it is clear that Fatima cared a good deal for Sitara, and it was under her tutelage that she was able to learn about the world. I am of course not remotely saying—and I do not think the show is trying to say—that this justifies the practice, merely that it explains Sitara’s own feelings on the matter. It’s also important context for the decisions she makes toward the end of the episode.

When the train of captives reaches the Mongol city camp, the exhaustion and emotional turmoil is too much. Learning from some of its few survivors that Nishapur, too, has been burned to the ground (for the crime of defending itself; an entire city for the head of the invading force’s commander, per the Khan’s orders) pushes everyone to the absolute brink, as it now seems impossible that even young Muhammad is still alive. It’s too much for Sitara, too much for Anis, and too much for Zumurrud, who, later this same day, collapses, dying as she remembers her brother Mikhail, leading Sitara to wonder if she wasn’t missing her brother the entire time they lived together with Fatima. Sitara losing more people close to her does nothing to help her emotional state, of course. Anis attempts to calm her down by telling her not to blame herself for Fatima’s death. She reasons that, as slaves, they aren’t really held responsible for what they do in the same way as a free person would be. Whether she truly believes this or is saying it as much to comfort herself as Sitara isn’t entirely clear. But, it ends up not mattering, as with Zumurrud’s death, Anis has clearly reached the end of her rope as well. Overnight, she lunges at one of the Mongol soldiers out of nowhere, and is shot dead.

With essentially everyone in her life now gone, Sitara wonders if she shouldn’t just pick a direction and walk; an arrow will pierce her, too, if she does this for long enough, she thinks.

Then, unexpectedly, she’s interrupted not by one of the Mongol soldiers, but by the Mongol prince’s servant, the translator who was with her when Fatima was killed. He obliquely offers her a way to reclaim the copy of Euclid’s Elements that the prince stole, and on that note, the premiere comes to a close.

All told, this is clearly the opening act of a very considered story with a lot of long-term goals. I really, really want to know how the translator is going to go about getting the book back. It’s clear that this is, at this point, one of the very few things Sitara still has from her old life to hang on to, and that it’s an object with such obvious ties to the story’s themes is interesting as well. (And accordingly, what she might do with that book is inherently interesting as well.) Something I’ve neglected to mention up until this point is the opening narration, which promises us a “witch who made a vast continent her plaything.” I don’t know, precisely, how we get there from here, but I want to find out.

*In real life, there is apparently little to no evidence that these two people knew each other, but drawing a connection between the two—Sitara is based on a real figure as well, known only by that name and as “Fatima” to the historical record—is a fair use of writer’s privilege I’d say. For both the former of these particular factlets and the aforementioned historical identity of young Muhammad, I must thank my good friend Zersk (googling “Muhammad of Tus” and the like was getting me nowhere), who, fun fact, is also the artist who drew the witch icon I use to comment on this website. 🙂

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All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: BANG DREAM YUME∞MITA Is Out of This World

Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.

2026 has been, to undersell it, a strong year for anime thus far. But if we’ve been missing anything, it might be the girl band renaissance that’s consistently been a highlight of the medium’s last few years. A year-ish since the last major show of this genre is not, by any means, a drought, but it felt like we were absolutely swimming in them for a little while, so it can feel like an absence regardless. If you’ve been feeling that way, fear not, the drought is over; Mugendai Mewtype are here. BanG Dream! Yume∞Mita (which I will be spelling without the infinity symbol interpunct, cool as it is, from this point onward) is the latest entry in that longrunning series. It dropped with a gargantuan three-part premiere earlier today, because, well, of course it did. BanG Dream season waits for no one.

Mugendai Mewtype are a bit of an oddity within BanG Dream on the whole, however. This anime is absolutely accessible to anyone who’s not been following them for years—they’ve been active in some form or another since 2022—but it is nonetheless notable that this thing was only made after a retooling of their overall concept. (My very limited understanding, as someone who is a casual BanG Dream fan at best, is that they were originally mostly a VTuber outfit and only became an actual live band later. This anime was, presumably, conceived somewhere after that point.) As such, Mewtype are underdogs of a sort, so it’s nice to see them getting their own story.

As for what that story is like, I’m going to actually flip my usual script here and talk about the style and tone of the series first, and save the actual plot for the bottom half of this article. Worth mentioning, more than anything, with this multipart premiere, is the show’s extremely expressive visual style. A far cry from the frozen and elegant gothica of Ave Mujica, its immediate predecessor, Yumemita is a cartoon-ass cartoon. Characters bend and stretch to express contentment or shock, other art styles or locations are beamed in for a few seconds for comedic effect, the works. I would go so far as saying that off these three episodes alone it really gives Girls Band Cry a run for its money in terms of being one of the most visually impressive 3DCGI anime to date, not just within its genre but outside it as well. The colors are, similarly and once again in contrast to Ave Mujica, brighter than a fresh lightbulb and more colorful than a pack of Skittles, extremely vibrant and practically radiating off of the screen. Ultimately this is the sort of thing you need to see to truly appreciate, but if my recommendation is worth anything I can safely say that the anime is worth watching for its visuals alone.

From this, you might surmise that Yumemita is on the lighter end of the tonal spectrum. You’d be correct to! Overall, this is a pointedly less heavy affair than the previous two BanG Dream anime have been. That’s not to say there are no stakes (there are, and there’s one delightfully glowering exception to everything I’m about to say that we’ll get to), but there is, for example, no long-simmering backstory involving—spoilers for those two shows, by the way—parental abuse or incestuous niece/aunt romantic pining. Yumemita is thus perhaps more in line with a “normal” BanG Dream anime, if what I’ve seen of the first season is representative. But this isn’t a show content to rest on its laurels. In its more straightforward moments, Yumemita experiments visually, as previously outlined. In its more serious ones, it turns that experimentation toward something more tense. It manages to pull this shift off with surprising ease, and the show’s few (few so far, at least) darker moments read more as deliberate contrast than lack of cohesion.

It’s worth taking a detour to discuss one further aspect of the presentation; the subtitles. Mostly, they’re fine, but seem to be strictly single-line, meaning there are a couple of cases where lines aren’t subbed because they’re spoken under another, usually longer, set of dialog. (There’s a particularly annoying instance of this in the third episode.) In a few cases, pretty important-looking text messages aren’t translated at all. This doesn’t majorly impact the show’s basic comprehensibility in the same way that Ave Mujica‘s truly busted official subs did, but it’s still annoying, and it feels like we’re missing a bit of nuance, and it’s aggravating to have to take time out of so many premiere writeups I do just to note that the subs are scuffed. This may be another one where the wait for fansubs is worthwhile, but I don’t think the officials are bad enough to wave anyone away from entirely. It will come down to personal preference, in the end.

Speaking of the show’s writing, Yumemita also has an exceptional command of comedy, and I’d in fact say that were it not for the aforementioned exceptions you could get away with just calling the series a comedy outright. (As-is it’s more of a dramedy.) Much of this revolves around Arale1, our main protagonist, vocalist of Mugendai Mewtype, and owner of a truly impressive mile-a-minute motormouth that she tries and often fails to keep a lid on. Bandmates Nonoka, a happy, bunny-coded airhead that serves as the group’s guitarist, and Miyako, a mangaka who also does illustrations for Mewtype and is their keyboardist, get their fair share of jokes in, too, however. Final group member Yuno, Mewtype’s DJ and general doodad manipulator, is essentially the group’s collective straight man and is more a subject of comedy than anything else.

(From left to right: Yuno, Arale, Miyako, and Nonoka, rocking out while singing the OP)

With all this said, the actual plot of the show is an interesting beast in its own right, and we shouldn’t discard it. In premise, Mugendai Mewtype’s actual formation is extremely straightforward. Our heroines were individually-successful creators in their own right—Nonoka livestreams, Miyako has her manga and illustrations, Yuno both contributes songwriting and composition to other artists’ projects and was in a previous band of her own, and Arale was also in a previous musical group (a different one, it should be stressed). As would be expected of people who meet as part of, essentially, a business arrangement, none of the Mewtype girls directly knew each other before the events of the first episode, and it feels safe to say that none of them are on the same page. (Although some of them were at least aware of each other. Arale in particular fangirls to hell and back over Miyako’s manga.) In fact, none of them really seemed to know that they were going to be in a band together as such at all. Especially not Miyako, who explicitly simply didn’t read the terms of her contract. (Get a lawyer to go over these things, kids!) Worth mentioning here is also the band’s manager, a horrible little voxel FunkoPop thing, because the band’s actual meetings, you see, occur entirely within something akin to VRChat.

The main point-of-view character for most of these three episodes is Arale herself. Arale’s past experiences with online fame lead to her to be, to put it nicely, a little neurotic about how she acts around other people. Constantly, over the course of the premiere, she wants to say something but doesn’t, or can’t stop herself from saying something that she doesn’t want to. In neither case do either of these cause much issue for Arale in the present at least, but they clearly embarrass her and she spends most of the premiere trying to worm her way out of having to sing as part of Mugendai Mewtype at all. (In fact, in a commonality with the MyGo/Ave Mujica trilogy-to-be, there’s pretty much no actual music in this first trio of episodes aside from the OP and ED themes.) Especially early on when speaking to her IRL schoolmates, she only says a few words out loud while an entire internal monologue plays over top and, indeed, is what’s actually subtitled.

Arale gets up to quite a few antics over the course of these first three episodes, but trying to avoid singing (especially in front of anyone) is her main thing at the moment.

Why? Well, as mentioned, Arale used to be part of a different group. The LaLa Girls, as they were known, were together for a while until they weren’t. We don’t know all the details, but one thing is quite clear: a video of Arale talking shit about both her bandmates and some other, unrelated people was leaked on their Youtube page, and our girl got very cancelled. We first learn of this when she runs into two of her former bandmates. Ritsu, who really seems to miss her and want to reconnect with her, and Viola2 [Kaede Hondo], who is, even in just her brief screentime here, a magnetic presence who seems very determined to make sure that doesn’t happen. Both are part of a new band with a flower theme, we don’t know a ton about them (or there other two members) yet, but it seems like they’ll be an important presence here.

(From left to right: Bell, Viola, Ritsu aka Clematis, and Popo)

Earlier, I mentioned that this series has a largely fairly light atmosphere compared to the last two BanG Dream anime. That’s mostly true, I mentioned an exception, that would be Viola and her general role in this story. Arale has a flashback / bad dream at the start of the second episode that really makes it seem like she’s in the wrong with the whole “leaked video” thing. But a good chunk of Viola’s dialog, and her weird, touchy-feely actions while speaking to Arale (including petting her hair and talking about how she looked better with twintails), definitely imply something weird going on. This comes to its head at the premiere’s conclusion, in a post-credits scene after the third episode. Here, she pretty heavily implies that she either somehow set Arale up, or kept the video in her pocket as a weapon the entire time. Ritsu, in particular, seems very uncomfortable with all of this, and Viola is clearly keeping her under her thumb by threatening to hurt Arale even further unless Ritsu cuts contact. She goes on a monologue here that is just pure cartoon supervillain shit; she strings together a speech about how human civilization rose because the first humans weren’t afraid of fire and how it only takes one spark to set something alight. If she didn’t draw attention to it herself, you could easily miss that this is pretty much entirely just wordplay riffing on the term “getting flamed online.” The performance from her voice actress, the permanent cat smile plastered across her face, and the deployment of the show’s SD squishiness to highlight just how much sadistic joy she’s taking in this all serve to make her almost outlandishly EEEEEEVIIIIIIILLLLL. The only thing she’s missing is an ojou laugh and a threat to kick someone’s dog. It’s quite a contrast from the rest of the show! Arale, in spite of her past mistakes, is trying to better herself and most of the interpersonal issues between Mugendai Mewtype themselves seem comparatively minor! So this is all a bit of a twist, for certain.

It’s not necessarily the only thing in this premiere to suggest some darker directions this series may take—Miyako has an entire subplot about pushing herself to the brink of exhaustion to juggle the band and her existing job as a mangaka, for example—but it’s by far the most obvious.

This is, of course, still nowhere near the kind of hair-raising stuff that happens in, especially, the later parts of Ave Mujica, but the tonal pivot is pulled off with such finesse that’s easy to forget that this is the same show where, an episode earlier, Arale and Nonoka lure Miyako into talking to them by scattering a bunch of candy on the ground in front of her. Or, indeed, earlier in this same episode that same pair of characters convince themselves that Yuno is secretly a highly-advanced AI and try to trick her into revealing herself by making her solve captchas and shit. (This gets a hell of a punchline a couple minutes later where it’s shown that, while Yuno herself is not a robot, she’s perfectly happy to use ChatGPT to reply to Nonoka’s incessant text messages. Ouch.)

Suffice to say, if Yumemita wants to make a more permanent pivot to darker material, it has the tools to do so even if the material in question is a bit different in presentation than that of other recent BanG Dream entries. Viola is being set up as an outright antagonist, and not a ton of band girl anime actually have those! Usually, a character in that position has sympathetic motives of their own, and while it’s very possible that something like that will eventually happen with Viola as well, nothing here telegraphs that at all. So far, she just really seems like a possessive, sadistic bitch! It’s honestly really compelling! If in part, admittedly, because it’s such a contrast to the goofball shit in the rest of the premiere.

Still, I’d hasten to say that I don’t think these two halves of the show contradict each other in any way, either. If the past few years of BanG Dream anime have proven anything, it’s that the wild risks these shows take tend to pay off. I am here for this, and you should be, too.

1: Normally, this is where I credit voice actors. However, to my understanding, all of the Mewtype girls are just credited as the characters themselves in all BanG Dream projects. This seems weird to me! but it’s how they do things with this particular part of the project, for whatever reason. If I had to take a random guess, it relates to their origins as a VTuber group.

2: Viola’s group all have stage names, and given the flower theming, we can guess “Viola” isn’t her real name. Whatever that real name might be, we don’t get it here.

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All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: Let THE WORLD IS DANCING Sweep You Off Your Feet

Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.

You blink, and two months are gone.

The only thing I’ve written on this site between the start of this season and the last was a stray review of the relatively obscure early-10s anime film Aura. And so it is the case that, with only that piece bridging this season and the last, the Summer 2026 anime season arrives on our doorstep. It actually did several days ago, in fact. The World is Dancing itself premiered yesterday (one of those weird situations where the premiere on streaming is ahead of the TV broadcast, Dancing will be a Thursday show for most of the season), and a few more scattered offerings debuted as far back as a week ago. Still, for me at least, this particular show is the spearhead of what promises to be the best anime season in a number of years. (I feel like I say things like this all the time, to the point where it’s perhaps blunted the impact of me saying them. So I do want to be clear that I think this is shaping up to be the best anime season of the 2020s so far period. We find ourselves in rare times.) The World is Dancing is a period piece, set in 14th-century Japan, following the life of the boy who would, in the future, become the founder of what we now know as Noh Theatre.

That’s two layers deep for our general concept. Nothing crazy, certainly, but enough that a more casual audience might struggle to connect to it a bit. But don’t worry, if your question is something along the lines of “what do people get out of this sort of thing, anyway?”, someone else is right there next to you, asking the same question. And that someone is our main character, Oniyasha [Hanamori Yumiri].

Oniyasha is the son of Kan’ami [Konishi Katsuyuki], the taciturn and stern head of the Kanze peformance troupe. What the Kanze perform is a sort of traditional dance theater called sarugaku (recall, Noh doesn’t exist yet), and much is made of Kan’ami’s attempts to advance the artform and make sure that the place of both his troupe and the style they perform in remains secure in the world. Unfortunately, being quite serious about all of this comes at the cost of a strained relationship with his own son. Oniyasha and Kan’ami do not see eye to eye as we begin our story, and Oniyasha spends much of the performance that opens the main part of the episode spacing out and wondering about the skeletal structure of birds and horses. (Creatures born to fly and run, respectively. Humans, he thinks, are surely not born to dance.) This leads to a bit of chaotic slapstick; in the midst of the performance Oniyasha’s zoning out leads to a chain reaction of fumbling that results in a knife stuck in the flank of a nearby horse. (To his credit, Kan’ami rushes in to save his son from said horse’s understandable wrath.) Oniyasha spends much of the time afterward feeling low, his father is quite upset with him and actually, at one point, chucks a turtle at him (objectively a horrible thing to do, but kind of so ridiculous—down to the turtle popping out of its shell to greet Oniyasha—that it’s hard to take seriously).

Oniyasha spends much of the remainder of the episode in this daze, conversing with acquaintances and friends at various points about what dancing means, and what it’s for. He gets different answers, a boy of roughly his own age that works for his father tells him that when his father dances, the world changes, but Oniyasha can’t really wrap his head around this just yet. (Don’t worry, he’ll understand very well before the end of the episode.) In this early part of the episode I would describe him as almost…Bocchi the Rock-ian? Obviously their starting motivations are quite different, but Oniyasha has that “going through it girl” energy about him, despite being a boy. And there’s a snappy comedy to his head-in-the-clouds mentality throughout much of the episode. (Another obvious comparison, more by design, is Tokiyuki of The Elusive Samurai, another anime that takes place in the 14th century, one that is set to return later this month, in fact.)

The true hook of the episode comes at its end, however, and with it, a swerve into the more serious and contemplative half of this show. After leaving a conversation with his friend Kogane [Uchida Maaya], Oniyasha is lost in thought once again, and soon becomes lost in fact, as well. Not knowing where he is, he asks a farmer—a man with white hair, suspiciously important-looking, all things considered—for directions. The man points him off, and he soon finds himself hearing strange, raspy singing from a cabin in the woods. In it, there is a woman dancing. Dancing in a way he has never seen.

The actual animation of the episode here wobbles out into decoherence (the beginnings of this sequence in particular bring to mind Takopi’s Original Sin‘s use of similar, to very different ends, last year), to take us with Oniyasha as he’s swept away by this surreal and intense display of art. I have spoken often about the convention of the “passion ignited sequence,” the moment in an anime about an artform or sport or the like where we the audience can see the protagonist become enraptured by it. This is a particularly extreme example, as Oniyasha is not just taken with this mysterious woman’s dancing, he’s overwhelmed by it. And he honestly seems more than a little frightened. (The animation, it must be said, really helps sell this, almost more resembling a sequence of paintings than frames in the usual sense. Kuroyanagi Toshimasa‘s team at Cypic really know what they’re doing.) Running out into the night, away from the mysterious woman and her shack, he’s found his answer. If he can capture this, this particular kind of expression, that is what dancing can mean, to him and—as the closing narration hints—soon to many others, as well. Just like that, the seasons change.

The first episode closes with the unusual move of playing what will normally be this anime’s OP and ED sequences back to back. This has a particularly meaningful connotation here; one of the things we see in the “OP” is Oniyasha, dancing as the woman danced, seemingly in the thick of one of the more restrained and formal performances of the type his father’s troupe puts on. Perhaps this is his way forward, perhaps not. In either case, it makes The World is Dancing‘s premiere a very strong first episode in a season that is sure to have many, many more of those. We could hardly ask for a better opening act.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Reviews

(REVIEW) How AURA: KOGA MARYUIN’S LAST WAR Won the Battle

This review contains spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning.

Aura: Koga Maryuin’s Last War, is a simple tale about bullying with a more complex and nuanced worldview than that description alone might imply. The basics are very straightforward: high schooler Satou Ichirou [Shimazaki Nobunaga] was, in his middle school days, deep in the chuunibyou delusion mines. These days, after an incident we remain in the dark about until the final act of the film, he’s cleaned up his act and is a respectably normal guy. Satou Ryouko [Hanazawa Kana]—no relation—is decidedly not normal, herself caught up, imprisoned perhaps, in fantasies of that very same type. Hers are about the “Other Side”, a world in her own mind that she has left to become The Researcher, her wizardly, scholarly, witch persona, versed in scattershot occult knowledge. The bulk of Aura is about these two characters and their relationship, by turns close and relatively rocky, and how they deal with the world around them. Ryouko spends much of the film on an ill-defined quest for what she calls “dragon terminals,” but in a literal sense, this movie is about two misfits breaking through to each other. However, I say “in a literal sense” for a reason, because –

AURA: Koga Maryuin’s Last War, is, also, a bittersweet but ultimately triumphant love story. The tale of The Researcher {Satou Ryouko}, a wise sage from another world, and how she comes to find solace in another who has shared in her supernatural experiences. That other, of course, being Koga Maryuin {Satou Ichirou}. It is the tale of two lost souls—more than that, really, given the gaggle of background characters known as the Dream Soldiers who are, also, reincarnates from the Mirror World—who reach out to understand each other in a world that is hostile to them at every turn. But, of course, such things are rarely so simple.

Bullying, in the most straightforward sense, is the main conflict driver of Aura. Ichirou was bullied in the past for his Koga Maryuin persona. Ryouko is bullied in the present for her Researcher persona. This manifests in all the usual ways; social ostracization, foul graffiti slathered on Ryouko’s desk that calls her a whore and tells her to die, the theft of her shoes, and the occasional more physically direct confrontation. One of these bullies actively beats Ichirou up. Another, a gyaru, is responsible for most of the shoujo manga stock bullying previously aforementioned, and also makes a habit of flicking bits of paper at Ryouko. Late in the film, she even blackmails Ichirou by threatening to leak some embarrassing photos from his Koga days. (Aura must, chronologically, be one of the very last anime to use the old “mean, bitchy gyaru” stereotype as opposed to the more common “nice gyaru” of the present day. Can you imagine, say, Kitagawa Marin doing this shit? Unthinkable.) Complicating matters is teacher Dorisen [Mizushima Daichuu], who essentially assigns Ichirou to watching over Ryouko.

The Dream Soldiers admire him, too, for being willing to stick up for Ryouko. And for a time, especially in the film’s middle third or so, it seems that they might come to some sort of mutual understanding without any dramatic occurrence, two souls in resonance.

However, mere admiration is not enough incentive as the film reaches its climax, as the bullying becomes entirely too much for either of them to bear, and we learn the full truth of the incident that broke Ichirou out of his own chuunibyou persona. One wherein his parents discovered letters he wrote to the “princess” of his persona’s home reality. In them, he describes his parents as mimics, false people in a false reality, and they, of course, react badly. (Neither they, nor the film itself, seem to question why someone would develop a psychological complex in which their parents are impostors. If I have a chief criticism of the film, even “on its own terms,” it’s this.) After cutting off contact for a time, the final confrontation comes with the revelation that Ryouko has climbed onto the school’s roof. She plans to do something drastic.

Suzumiya Haruhi, eat your heart out.

There, she has assembled the Dragon Temple. To even the most mundane eyes, it appears as a school desk Angkor Wat, heaps and heaps of the things piled high into a pseudo-sanctum far too complex for a high schooler to have reasonably assembled alone, much less in a short time. If you are wise enough, if you are looking for the magic, it’s here. Right at this moment, an arcane suicide attempt that doubles as the light shining through a keyhole. AURA could have become bleak here, if it wanted to. It could have been the Bridge to Terebithia anime that never was. But it does not! Ryouko, the Researcher, the witch, here also a princess, is rescued by a dashing dark hero. The day is saved! And he gets the girl.

Ichirou sheds his shame for the sake of the girl he loves. Donning once again the guise of Koga Maryuin, he takes a prop sword and bashes through the desks, cracking Ryouko’s temple apart as he approaches her, pleading that she has to live in the real world with him. To live and suffer, to cherish the adventures they can squeeze out of our mundane reality. He tries his damnedest to make the case that it’s all worth it, but ultimately what gets to her is that simple plea for connection. That the two of them are the same.

AURA, then, stands at a crossroad in more ways than one. Mundane and magical. Of the past and the future.

Indeed, not only in plot but in presentation, Aura resembles an anime of the 00s proper more than one the 2010s, with its somewhat muddy color palette and generally moody emotional timbre. Of course, it is always helpful to keep in mind that every single anime studio did not instantly switch from grays and browns, sharp shadows, and airbrushed metal surfaces to KyoAni-style pop colors and tons of flashy VFX the very second that the calendar flipped over to January 1st, 2010. It is instructive, as the last decade fades into the rearview, to remember that any stylistic trends of a given time period are just that, as opposed to absolutes.

Consider AURA, also, as a magical work. We are never given reason to believe that Ryouko and Ichirou’s fantasy is anything but. But consider that there are multiple senses of the word “fantasy.” Consider, too, that all fiction is equally fictional. It bears repeating, could a high schooler truly have assembled those desks into such a magnificent altar? What of the minor character Kume [Morikubo Shoutarou], responsible for the dragon-shaped nails that spurred the imagination of both Ryouko and Ichirou? He identifies himself as a creator of small wonders, despite acknowledging that such things are rare in this world. And, again, there is the temple of desks that Ryouko constructs.

Depending on your proclivities, these sorts of questions will strike you as either the most fascinating thing about the movie or a heap of totally pointless navel-gazing. It is not hard at all to read Aura as a straightforward anti-escapist fable, a cautionary tale of how things can go wrong if you’re not living in the real world, and how no amount of retreating into your own delusions can solve the problem of loneliness. I suspect that this is more or less the “intended” reading of the film, and am well aware I am swimming against the currents somewhat with this piece.

But, that ignores that it is precisely becoming Koga once more that gives Ichirou the connection to Ryouko he needs to save her. And anyway, who cares solely about “intent?” Once a work of art is released into the world, it grows wings of its own.

So which is it, then? I, your humble reviewer, have tried, here, to represent both ideas in alternating line breaks. I, the writer.

And I, the witch. Ultimately, both are real (or fake) in their own ways. Such is the case, too, with AURA itself.

“As a film”, further criticisms could of course be levied. The directing, from Kishi Seiji at AIC ASTA, is a competent execution of the denpa visual style that, had, by this point, become well-established, but it is perhaps a bit lacking in true personal “oomph” other than its final climactic scene. (Even that feels very SHAFT-indebted, albeit not in a bad way.) There’s a bit of nudity that is beyond unnecessary, even as someone who is normally fine with that kind of thing. You could also argue, perhaps, that the gyaru antagonist has no real arc and is simply shoved to the side as the film ends.

But these are all craftsmanship issues, and I’m not reviewing a table, you understand? This isn’t some functional object, it’s art. None of those flaws being corrected would be worth anything if the film didn’t speak to me. That they’re present doesn’t undermine the fact that it does. AURA is a patently ridiculous movie, there is no shortage of scenes or screenshots you could take out of context to make it seem like the most absurd thing in the world. It’s also brilliant, those two things aren’t mutually exclusive.

If nothing else, it is absolutely fascinating to consider Aura‘s place in the broader continuum of chuunibyou-related pop culture. Because, by any reasonable metric, the chuunis won in the end. Setting aside the most obvious indicators (eg. that light novel adaptations comprise the bulk of anime adaptation today), there is an overall generally more favorable attitude toward these individuals over the past decade and change. You could very, very easily argue that Ryouko is genuinely mentally ill. And yet! The story treats her with no small amount of sympathy! Not that Ichirou’s more grounded perspective isn’t treated so as well, but if we were truly just supposed to write all of this off as Ryouko Being Weird, I don’t think the ending would be written the way that it is. And Aura isn’t unique in this regard! Compare it to its closest cousin, KyoAni’s seminal Love, Chuunibyou, & Other Delusions. Despite the chronology telling us it has to be the reverse, Chuunibyou essentially picks up the thread that this film leaves off, recognizing that the dividing line between the so-called worlds of fantasy and reality is itself somewhat illusory, and that in any case the two halves can exist in harmony. (A rather perfunctory post-credits scene on the part of this film perhaps notwithstanding.) Whether the world today would strictly be kinder to Ichirou and Ryoko I can’t entirely say, the bullies they railed against certainly still exist, but I’d like to think that more than ever, Ichirou would be empowered against them.

Part of Koga’s speech in the film’s final minutes asserts that the enemies of this world are invisible. This is a subtle, but very accurate, distinction. “Material reality”, so to speak, cannot be changed by fighting off dragons, slaying demon lords, unsheathing a cursed sword, or so on. But, it can be changed nonetheless. The weapons are different, the battles unseen, but they rage on, around us, every day. So fight on, Dream Warriors, we will win a kinder world for ourselves yet.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: Tripping Over Myself to Praise THE KLUTZY CLASS MONITOR AND THE GIRL WITH THE SHORT SKIRT

Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.

I’ve ended up covering a lot of romcoms in the first impressions column over the years here on Magic Planet Anime. I do not say lightly that this one might be the simplest I’ve ever written about at any length, The Klutzy Class Monitor & The Girl With The Short Skirt is a dead-simple romantic comedy with a zany flair, a retro sensibility, and a knack for comedic timing. The whole premise is in the title: there’s a class monitor at a high school who is kind of a klutz despite his position, there is also a girl at that same high school who wears her skirts short and dyes her hair. They clash in the episode’s opening minutes, a very old-school banter volley where the klutz (Sakuradaimon Togo, played by Enoki Junya) and the girl (Kohinata Poem, Akechi Riko) argue about if her skirt length is actually inappropriate or not. Togo, perhaps not the most feminist young man in Japan, argues that it’s too revealing. Too sexy, even! This promptly gets him punched in the gut.

This kind of yelled insult -> girl punches boy comedy is, by this point in the medium’s history, so ancient that seeing it in something that started airing a mere three days ago (and based on a manga from 2019, when this was already well out of fashion), is novel in of itself. You could pretty easily argue that by parroting the points that he does, Togo is upholding sexist double standards about how women are allowed to dress. He honestly is doing that, and if we were supposed to think Togo was right, as opposed to merely well-intentioned but stupid, I don’t think this show would be very good at all. But what makes the series really tick, assuming this first episode is a good indicator, is its timing and sense of style. The whole pervert slap trope has been largely excised from modern romcoms in place of something more subtle and reflective of how relationships actually work. The visual stylings of the show, so willfully retro that the bright colors and sharp lines are complete with printer dots on the backgrounds, make it clear that this is an intentional pastiche. (Were it not for the presence of smartphones, it’d be easy to assume this was set in the 90s or something.) Togo, who despite being a complete tightwad is also sort of a dumbass who isn’t much for academics, makes an active effort to get to know Poem when they both end up in remedial math lessons. Predictably, she starts falling for him. And again, while there’s obviously an element of turbo-hetero wish fulfillment here, the intentionally stiff and simple emotional beats make for a series that’s….oddly refreshing? Togo and Poem might be polar opposites, but you’d never mistake this show for that one, despite the broadly similar premises and some visual language in common. (Not to mention excellent music.)

If Klutz & Skirt calls back to anything in particular, it feels mostly of a piece with the anime comedies of the mid-2000s. These were usually loosely school life-based, too, but they tended toward the absurd or simply the zany as opposed to harboring any deep storylines or thoughts on life. (They even do that thing I love, once common but now rather rare, where the episode is divided in half by a midcard where a character says the name of the show out loud. A favorite little bauble of mine, I miss it!) A useful synecdoche here is the sheer number of times Poem clobbers Togo—about six, if I counted right in these 20-some minutes alone—that kind of physical abuse just isn’t that common in this genre anymore.

Frankly, if the series has accomplished anything of note here, it’s been making me wonder if I don’t kind of miss this stuff. At the end of the day the subtler emotional currents available to the genre that essentially replaced this one are great, and they’re probably my preference, but there is something to be said for the old-school tsundere category that Poem falls into. This is particularly pronounced when they learn each other’s given names. Poem does not want Togo calling her that, since it’s an embarrassing sparkle name. When he makes a habit of doing so anyway, the predictably percussive occurs. The show just has a nice, snappy rhythm to it, even if it’s working in simple archetypes. The director, Iwanaga Daiji, deserves some real credit here for making the show feel so kinetic.

There’s a solid supporting cast here, too, by the looks of it. We haven’t gotten to know any of them deeply yet, but in the last segment of the episode Akina Motoko [Itou Yuina], one of Poem’s friends, develops a big, pervy crush on a hot health rep after he carries her to the infirmary.

She’s normal.

The other girl in Poem’s clique, Tasaki Rui [Fukuhara Ayaka], we haven’t really learned much about yet, but her very short hair makes her GNC AF. So hey, points.

She also seems to enjoy flustering Poem. Just pointing that out.

I think all I’ve said here will clue you in pretty thoroughly to whether you’d get anything out of Klutz & Skirt. There are different kinds of strong anime seasons, and this one in particular has proven to be the sort that absolutely floods the zone with sheer numbers, there are a lot of things airing right now that are good, a few that are great, and even the stuff that’s less essential is still interesting. It’s said that a rising tide lifts all boats, but I do hope that the slightly more niche stuff like Klutz, fellow oddball romcom Kirio Fan Club (which I’d like to write about at some point, stay tuned?), and so on, don’t get lost in the shuffle. Things like this deserve to find their audience just as much as your Witch Hat Ateliers and Akane-banashis, and I hope they do.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: The Magic Never Went Away – The Sorcerous Beginnings of WITCH HAT ATELIER

Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.

“Magic is a miracle that makes the world vibrant.”

When she was a young girl, Coco [Motomura Rena] purchased a book at a festival. This book, sold by a mysterious magician in a mask, is the inciting object of Witch Hat Atelier‘s story, and Coco obtaining the book in the first place is, thus, where our story begins, at least in a chronological sense.

Witch Hat Atelier‘s first episode isn’t much of one, would be the problem. The practice of releasing double or even triple premieres is an increasingly common thing. It’s often rather exasperating, in fact, but in the case of Witch Hat Atelier specifically, I understand completely why they went this route. Because if you were to only see that first episode, you’d only get half of the picture. Nonetheless, we do have to start at that festival, with that book and the pictures within it, central as they are to this story and, perhaps more importantly, what I want to discuss about this story.

If you want to recap the first episode, that’s very easy. Coco, daughter of a fabric seller, is a young girl obsessed with magic due to her acquiring that book as a very young child. Magic is everywhere in the world of Witch Hat Atelier, lighting up cobblestones beneath one’s feet, purifying a spring so one can drink from it, but the how is a mystery. Coco—everyone, really—is led to believe that magic is a matter of blood. You are born able to use magic, or you aren’t. Those who are so born are witches, and everyone else is just a regular ol’ person.

This is how, just to name an (unfortunate) cultural touchstone, Harry Potter, for example, handles things, with its convoluted throngs of wizarding lineages. (Although the general concept is hardly unique to that series.) Related to its presence there, though, I have always, to my core, hated this approach to magic in fiction. Some of this has to do with my own real-world practice of eclectic neopagan witchcraft, some of it has to do with personal beliefs about the nature of life, the world, talent, and skill. Some of it is just pure preference, in that I think it’s lazy worldbuilding. I also think it often leads to worlds rife with unfortunate, unconsidered implications about what the existence of inborn gifts of that nature might lead to or imply. It is something I have many problems with, to put it mildly.

However, I don’t bring all this up to criticize Witch Hat Atelier. Because what Coco and most others believe is not necessarily what is actually true. One day, a witch named Qifrey [Hanae Natsuki] visits her mother’s shop. While there, he takes a noted interest in her picture book, but mostly, he offers to fix a broken-down carriage—a carriage pulled by flying horses—when some neighborhood kids break it. (Being a handyman is, too, the job of a witch in this world.) Qifrey asks that he be left to the repair alone, he doesn’t want any prying eyes on him. Coco, precocious child that she is, outwardly agrees, but cannot resist the temptation to see magic performed. Sneaking into a crawlspace above him, she watches him work, and she learns the truth as he slowly sketches out a series of magic circles. Magic, in the world of Witch Hat Atelier, is not cast, but drawn. Anyone with a fountain pen, a bottle of special ink, and the proper knowledge can work miracles.

The knowledge of this fact is a secret, of course. Witches are sworn to keep this fact from the public, and this immediately, drastically changes both what magic literally is in the context of the events of the story and also its broader use as a tool of metaphor. There is a reason we devote more or less the whole first episode to this revelation—that and Coco being cute, of course—and it’s because Witch Hat Atelier is very interested in laying out what magic means and can be in very plain terms before it does anything else. Magic can be done by anyone, which nominally makes it accessible and democratic. But the witches themselves keep this knowledge from everyone, so magic is controlled as well. This pulls us back to the “wizard lineage” issue to some extent, but makes it an intentional point of consideration as opposed to a thoughtless byproduct. With this, Witch Hat Atelier wants to get us thinking.

If magic can create great works of beauty and provide numerous benefits to the world—and from what we see here, it can—it can also be terrifying. These are the central tensions that the story returns to over and over, and that last point is the note the episode ends on. Coco, now knowing that magic can be done by anyone, practices copying the many seals depicted in her picture book. She does not actually know what they do, mind you. She’s just trying things out and, essentially, guessing. Her first several spells are minor; a tiny fireworks show, a sprouting flame, but when she realizes that larger circles are more powerful and well-drawn ones even moreso, she gets the idea to simply trace the seals in the book. Nearly as soon as she’s finished attempting this, Qifrey bursts through her window, just in time to save her from a spell gone horribly right. Her entire house, and the fabric shop within, bursts into erupting waves of crystal, turning everything inside into a blue, prismatic, frozen-solid glitter. Qifrey is in time to save Coco, but not Coco’s mother, who is caught in the petrification and turned to a crystal statue instantly.

That is the note that episode one ends on. Coco’s childhood in ruins beneath her as Qifrey holds her tight in the air. Initially, he’s quite set on erasing her memories—by implication, the standard procedure for people who find out about magic but aren’t supposed to—but after some pleading from Coco, and the realization that without her picture book he’s down a lead about “them” (how vague and scary!), he changes his mind. Instead, he will take her as an apprentice. And so the stage is set for our real story.

But, of course, we can’t get to that without all of this. It’s foundational, establishing the contradictions of magic in this world and giving us reasons to both find awe in it and to fear it. The visuals, it must be noted, are laser-focused on getting all of this across. Coco’s first fledgling attempt to draw a magic circle fills her—and us—with a genuine sense of wonder as the circle literally floats off the page and then explodes into a crackle of glittering fireworks.

At the same time, the sense of fear and panic at the cascading crystal waves of Coco’s unintentional petrification of her own home is overpowering, it’s enough to strike genuine terror into a person. We immediately, intuitively, get it. This is the joy magic can bring, this is the danger magic can bring. We understand from the very first episode both the limitless potential for magic and how that potential might be turned to destructive ends; why we might want it to be free and thrive, and why we might want it cordoned off and controlled. As I say, contradictions. (On a less literal level, these are all still true. To me, magic is art, in its infinite capacity to both hurt and heal. But no single one to one metaphor works entirely.)

Something much more straightforward, it must be said, is that all of this is so effective that it should instantly dispel any worries over this adaptation. The Witch Hat Atelier anime was highly anticipated, and it comes to us from BUG FILMS, specifically a team headed by director Watanabe Ayumu (also simultaneously working on Akane-banashi, busy guy) and his assistant director Shinohara Shun. There was some understandable apprehension about BUG’s involvement with the project. Some of this simply stemmed from the long gap between the anime’s announcement and its premiere, but some stemmed from the unfortunate and severe broadcasting delays suffered by BUG’s last and only other TV anime project, Zom 100. (I don’t know if the Zom 100 premiere writeup is the article I’ve penned for this site that’s aged the most strangely. It must at least be up there, though.) Still, I think the fact that the Zom 100 debacle was an entire three years ago, the involvement of a different director here, and the quality of these first two episodes should allay these fears. In addition to the visual strengths I’ve already discussed, there’s also a truly charming use of pop-up storybook animations that mimics the use of similar in the manga without feeling quite one to one. Overall, I’d say this is the rare adaptation that is stridently faithful to the source material without feeling overly staid. That’s a very hard needle to thread, and the team working on the anime should be proud that they’ve accomplished it.

This all continues to be true in the second episode, the more subdued half of the premiere. One thing to know about Witch Hat is that it is a slow story for the most part, and accordingly this second episode is almost entirely about Coco getting settled in to the titular atelier, the small hillside school where she will be learning her new craft. Craft really is the word for it, too, as this episode also goes into more detail about how magic actually works, breaking down the different parts of the seals and how they affect the outcome of a given spell. It is as much science as art, like so many of its analogues in the real world, and getting to see Coco try—and fail!—to learn the basics of the craft is one of Witch Hat‘s little joys.

There’s also quite the primer on the history of magic here. Qifrey explains how, once upon a time, everyone simply knew how to use magic. This, of course, led to spells being developed so horrible that they defy description—the first application of any technology is warfare, after all—until one day, some banded together to put a stop to all this. Somehow—the details are left very vague—they cast a spell that wiped the memory of magic from all but a select few, leading to the current status quo. This is all told in a very broad-stroke way, but a way that’s believable within the series’ context. We are getting, more or less, the “official” version of things here, and we also detour into how Coco will have to pass a handful of trials before she’s considered a true witch and is permitted to enter the Tower of Tomes, the witches’ own Library of Alexandria, where she might perhaps discover the secret to rescuing her mother.

Qifrey also explains what separates permitted from forbidden magic. The short version? Anything cast on the body, other than the spell to erase memories to keep the secret, is forbidden. This means nothing that can harm another person, certainly, but it also means no teleportation, no direct flight, not even healing magic like we might find in so many other fantasy settings. Again, we come to contradictions. It is immediately obvious why anyone would want to keep things this strict and this simple, but it’s also obvious why some might object to this. So far in this narrative, no one does, but the very fact that this magic is “forbidden” as opposed to simply “lost” all but tells us outright that some do.

Whatever that may eventually entail, this is also a rather domestic episode. We also meet Qifrey’s three other students here, carefree and energetic Tetia [Haruki Kurumi], who is the first to greet Coco and does so with open arms, the coolheaded and somewhat detached Richeh [Tsukishiro Hika], who we learn perhaps the least about here, and finally, most importantly, there’s Agott [Yamamura Hibiku].

Agott, serious, disciplined, with inkstained fingers, makes herself immediately known as Coco’s foil. Coco, despite the harrowing experience of accidentally petrifying her home and mother, is still bright-eyed about the prospect of learning magic and is, in some sense, perhaps even naively optimistic about her own ability to reverse her mother’s fate. Agott, like all of Qifrey’s other students, has heard rumors of an Outsider who enacted a forbidden spell and is now being taken in as a witch. Unlike Tetia and Richeh, she is very blunt about how this has colored her perception of Coco; she thinks there’s essentially no chance that she’ll ever see her mother again, and she doesn’t think she’ll ever be a proper peer of Agott herself or the other girls in the atelier.

Whether or not that’s true remains to be seen. The very day after taking in his new apprentice, Qifrey heads off to attend to business at the ‘Great Hall’—whatever that may be the domain of knowledge of manga readers alone, for the time being—and Agott promptly challenges Coco to a test, presumably of her own design. Whatever awaits Coco, it is unlikely that Agott’s skepticism is the last, or most dangerous, thing she will have to face.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: Spring 2026 Roundup

Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.

It’s been a while since I did a good roundup post! You know how these go, so let’s get on with it.

Akane-banashi: The widely-acclaimed Shonen Jump rakugo manga gets its anime adaptation this season. Depsite the trailers looking rather dull, I was actually quite impressed with this episode itself. However, as much as Akane-banashi at large is the story of its title character Akane [Nagase Anna], this first episode mostly isn’t. Instead, it’s mostly about her father, Osaki Tohru [Fukuyama Jun], stage name Arakawa Shinta. This episode takes place in Akane’s childhood, and it is clear throughout the episode that she loves and admires her father immensely. (And, well, if my dad was voiced by Lelouch Lamperouge I’d probably feel the same way.) She gets into a fight at school over a classmate disrespecting Tohru by calling him a deadbeat with no real job, and, when the kid’s mother wants to know what happened, she responds by acting out the entire scenario herself, in a very rakugo-esque manner, overtly gesturing to the talent she’s already fostering at a young age.

She might, in fact, be a better rakugoka than her father someday. Watanabe Ayumu (a man who is set to have a very busy spring, between directing this and the Witch Hat Atelier anime) and his team take great pains to depict Tohru as someone who is talented but who has to try quite a lot to really tap into that talent. The predominant mood of the episode is not of a preternatural talent here to blow you out of your seat like you’d get in an anime about rock music or such (or indeed like we might get later in this very series), but of effort. The very animation itself has a weathered, almost sepia look to it. A look that also gently implies that money might be an issue for the family. Certainly, it would explain Tohru’s desperation to become a shin’uchi. Rakugo’s third and highest rank, a shin’uchi. That level of accreditation would presumably open some doors for him, certainly.

The sweaty and nervous atmosphere of this guy absolutely bombing his promotion test is perhaps the emotional crux of the episode. Uncomfortable and unenviable, hotter than the spotlight directly on him. Even when things turn around there’s an air of inevitable personal tragedy over the whole thing and, yeah, he fails and gets expelled from the profession. So set is the stage for our true heroine, who we will be meeting in earnest next week. Incidentally, like last year’s Cinderella Gray, you can watch Akane-banashi legally and for free on Youtube. So that’s nice!

Daemons of The Shadow Realm: Fullmetal Alchemist author Arakawa Hiromu‘s latest ongoing, now in anime form! This first episode was, well, it was a fuck of a lot honestly! We start out with a very traditional and straightforward-seeming setup, two siblings born as night turns to day leads to an adolescence where the brother, Yuru [Ono Kenshou], protects his sister Asa [Miyamoto Yume] who lives in some kind of sanctuary inside the mountaintop village they call home. This is a bit odd in its own right, but it’s absolutely blown to pieces when planes and helicopters carrying armed soldiers invade, dropping both conventional modern military fighters and a pair of individuals who command supernatural agents called Daemons into the village to kill Asa and capture Yuru for unspecified purposes. One of these individuals, a woman, succeeds in killing Asa, only for her to inform a shocked Yuru that she is Asa (which Yuru, obviously, does not believe).

We don’t get any answers as to how or even whether that might be true here, though. He flees along with his village’s medicine seller (seemingly someone who’s tapped in about the existence of the modern world outside the village) and the episode ends on an interesting note. The medicine seller gives Yuru a key to a socket in front of the twin statues guarding the village. These, promptly, are brought to life as Yuru’s own Daemons, simply named Left and Right but taking the form of a buff demon man and woman.

There’s a lot to unpack here. The atmosphere of sudden, intense violence when the soldiers invade is classic Arakawa. They are downright ruthless, and the Daemon-wielder they have with them, Gabby, is honestly even worse, commanding her inky Pac-Man monster to chomp most of the village to death. All together I was a little surprised by how much I liked this since I”ve never been a huge Arakawa stan (I liked Fullmetal Alchemist just fine as a teenager, but not so much that I felt the need to seek out her other work, and I liked other things a lot better around that same time).

This show is slated for two consecutive cours and the pacing and plotting here is snappy enough that I’m really interested to see if I can keep it up for 24 whole episodes.

GHOST CONCERT : missing songs: An impressively incoherent full-speed trainwreck from the brain of Symphogear creator Agematsu Noriyasu. Agematsu has a lot of post-Symphogear stuff that is vaguely like this, in that they, like Ghost Concert, are concerned with the intersection of music (and artistic expression more generally) and technology. Ghost Concert piles a near-future sci fi setting where non-AI music is illegal on top of that, and then further adds a Fate-esque twist where the main character is a medium who can see and be possessed by the spirits of famous historical figures.

There is, suffice to say, a lot going on here, and if any of it made any kind of sense it might be great. As it is, well, I did already call it a trainwreck but honestly that’s underselling it a little. I have almost no idea what the different parts of this show have to do with each other, which given that we’re only a single episode in leaves me a bit flabbergasted.

What I will give the series is that it has pretty impressive action animation and direction—the directing here handled by Jinbou Masato and animated by a team at the infamous Studio ENGI—but aside from the fact that I don’t really expect that to last, it’s hard to latch on to empty calorie goodies like cool explosions, aspect ratio-changing AMV sequences, and glowing VFX during the fight scenes when you have no real idea of what’s happening or why. The episode’s actual plot is bizarrely vague, something about our main girl Aiba Seria being possessed by the ghost of Cleopatra and turned into an….evil slut, I guess? (As a side note it drives me crazy when stuff characterizes Cleopatra this way, but that’s more of a pet peeve than anything.) Possessed by Cleopatra and summoning the phantoms of Caesar and Mark Antony for help, she fights a blue-haired girl and a priest for vague reasons. There is singing. After the fight she has a massive row with her friends who I guess did not know she was some kind of medium? It’s all so hurried and haphazard that it barely registers as a story at all.

If nothing else, this at least seems to make the argument that the Symphogear guy doesn’t like genAI. I guess that’s nice, but it’s agreeable in the same way a Macklemore song is. Sure, the general sentiment is nice and some of the technical aspects are impressive. It’s still not anything you’d really ever listen to of your own volition.

SNOWBALL EARTH: I think even just a couple of years ago, I would’ve talked myself into watching a few more episodes of this on the basis that it “has potential” or something, but to be honest, an interesting premise alone a show does not make. We spend this whole first episode getting to that premise in the first place, so even if it did, I have not exactly been rewarded for my 20 minutes here.

The real death knell for the show is just its tone. We want this to be a serious thing about a lonely boy and his obligation to save the world with the help of his giant robot friend and we want it to be sad when the giant robot sacrifices himself at the end of the episode on some Iron Giant shit. But we also want this to be a goofy parody with a lot of knee-slapping corny humor that’s basically just a string of jokes that people made about Shinji in the early 2000s. It commits to neither so the two halves work against each other and the result is a show that mostly just pissed me off. This thing has the audacity to reference the original Gundam in its opening episode which if you’re going to do that, you better have more to show for it than this.

Petals of Reincarnation: Well this was really stupid! I’d say I don’t necessarily mean that in a bad way but, honestly, here I sort of do. It’s about half and half, I guess.

With the constant deluge of narou-kei bullshit I honestly welcome something that’s an edgelord revenge fantasy in a more direct and honestly more imaginative way. Granted, the bar is in the ground so “imaginative” means we’re doing the “powers borrowed from great figures of history” shtick. Fate is usually held to have invented this, but in terms of competence and general responsibility with its historical characters I am expecting something more along the lines of Nobuna-Gun. (This show is where the “Hitler as a little anime boy with a sharingan” image that’s been kicking around the internet lately is from, for reference, if you’ve seen that.)

I won’t go into the events of the narrative because they’re not important, or, honestly, even interesting. But the fights in this first episode were pretty cool, especially for a new studio (BENTEN Film, supposedly mostly ex-Gainax of Fukushima staff) and a team helmed by a not particularly acclaimed director (the Grendizer U guy is doing this). The show has what is for better or wores an extremely distinctive visual style, with some very, very, very bold color choices. Downright garish ones at times. Add in some SHAFT-y dialogue screens and such and you get a series that has the air of being distinctly the budget version of a couple other shows. There are way worse things to be, even if that’s hardly high praise. And the female lead, herself named Haito le Buffett [Maruoka Wakana], proves that if you make Miyamoto Musashi a girl she will always be the coolest character in the room. (Although this version doesn’t hold a candle to Fate‘s, obviously.)

The main thing holding me back here is that the main character is a vacuous edgelord and I kinda hate him in the wrong way. We’ll see how much juice he can get out of Mega Man’ing everyone else’s powers, but honestly how much more of this I watch is going to be down to how cool the action scenes are vs. how annoying I find him and the other characters. Other than Haito, none have left a particularly positive impression so far. Between this, Ghost Concert, and Killed Again, Mr. Detective (which I did not write about here, because I frankly had very little to say), it’s at least proving to be an interesting season for shows that are just very odd above all else. If you like those, you may get some enjoyment out of these. Otherwise, well, there’s always this option:

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.