Anime and Manga - New Season

[Bartimaeus]

3 hours ago, Sarex said:

The second one looks better, no?

The 2002 OVA art style is...not completely horrible, but I find the character designs to be very off-putting and lizard people-like, which doesn't help with what already seems like creepy direction. The animation and background designs shown off in the outro in particular are really not all that bad on the whole except for that, especially for a random 1-episode OVA made in 2002 of a decades-dead show.

5 hours ago, PK htiw klaw eriF said:

Yes, is that a bad thing though?

Uh, kind of? Not necessarily how I wanted to leave the show off on, but I suppose it was easily the most memorable bit of that episode...

Edited Friday at 06:11 PM by Bartimaeus

[majestic]

That outro/the ending credits certainly have an undertone of, well, loss, I would say. I don't know if it references anything in the original series or the OVA, but by the imagery in the scene there are a few things that work. Loss of herself or her identity, loss of her alternate identity after growing up, loss of her family, or a more general loss of youth and childhood or innocence (like in the Minako-centric episodes of Sailor Moon where she wonders if being a Sailor Guardian is worth losing your hopes, dreams and teenage years over).

It seems like it would make sense in a series that is basically about a really young girl having the power to transform into a teenage magician who is the star of her family's magic outfit.

Perhaps she's lost the ability to transform in the ending scene where she's just sitting in her room staring - presumably vapidly - into nothing. A thousand yard stare after the loss of her ability (that she suddenly seems to morph back into her red-haired self while looking the same as her teenage magical variant seems to hint at that, at least) ruined her family, a steep fall from fame and fortune. With their family's savings gone and no future, her father commited suicide, leading to her mother having a broken heart and mind, and losing the brother to addiction and crime. She's blaming herself, wondering where it went wrong, and pining for happier times.

Spoiler

And you thought you interpreted too much into it, huh?

 

Edited Friday at 08:40 PM by majestic

[Bartimaeus]

  @majestic The original show does actually have a pretty feel bad ending, for what I think is perhaps an interesting lesson grounded in reality, and you could apply much of what you said about the OVA ending to it:

Spoiler

The apprentices of her family's troupe have been mastering their skills over the course of the show and are finally graduating and moving on to do their own act - all while hoping that they eventually become as "good" as Emi (the magically transformed Mai). Meanwhile, Mai realizes that in all her time goofing off as Emi and outshining the other members of her troupe by using real magic, she doesn't actually know how to do fake (i.e. sleight of hand) magic, the thing she wanted to learn since the beginning of the show and what was the impetus for receiving magic powers in the first place, and now she's sorely fallen behind while everyone else is leaving her: she'd wasted all that time she could've been learning alongside them basically showing off but not accomplishing anything. She falls into a bit of a depression and begins to question how in the world she can continue to lead a double-life where it'll be impossible to be in two places at once when "Emi" is supposed to go off and perform elsewhere. She finally realizes that using real magic didn't require any effort or training on her part and it's making her feel like a lousy cheat and a failure...so she destroys her own magic and swears to learn how to do the "real" (fake) thing on her own merits. Her magical companion that's been with her the whole show, the Kero or Luna equivalent, curiously tries to persuade her not to do it, but when she does, he immediately disappears. In the closing seconds of the final episode, she's sitting alone in the dark at her family's theatre, trying to perform a basic trick but failing, crying and upset that she didn't even get to say goodbye...before the older boy that she's close to (in a semi-siblings, semi-she-has-a-crush-on-him-but-he-obviously-doesn't-on-her kind of way) and who helps with her family's troupe, the boxing boy shown in the original outro I linked earlier, comes around and tries to cheer her up. They leave the theatre, and she looks happier and as though she knows she made the right choice...and that's it, the end. At least it's not Minky Momo, but it's still quite a downer of its own.

The OVA ending feels...quite different in its presentation, a bit more dark and sinister because of the stylistic choices they made for it, but yes, you can make it fit somewhere along those lines. The wilful loss of her magic and companion in the pursuit of a real life goal definitely feels like segueing into adulthood and losing your carefree childhood innocence in a manner pretty similar to Shizuku in Whisper of the Heart - not to mention losing that entire part of her identity and what she'd had with it. And hey, in a way, "Emi" *was* killed - by Mai - so the fact that I felt like I was watching a murder does track, . Still really threw me off, though...it didn't really feel wholly appropriate, especially with then showing the teenaged Mai sitting stock still in the dark and in silence while the credits rolled.

Now the stuff about familial ruin and addiction and suicide...um, not so much. Especially because her parents are bakers and weren't getting anything from Mai performing magic in the first place - they were just letting her go off and hang out with the family troupe for fun, basically. So yeah, you're not entirely off the mark with your more serious ideas, .

Edited Monday at 11:07 AM by Bartimaeus

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

On 12/13/2024 at 12:10 PM, Bartimaeus said:

Uh, kind of? Not necessarily how I wanted to leave the show off on, but I suppose it was easily the most memorable bit of that episode...

Taken solely as the 2 minute clip you posted, I like it. It seems like the magician girl is realizing that she's just a dream of a young(er) child, one that disappears as the kid becomes a teenager in a much different reality than what she dreamed of. And then haunting refrain at the end of the girl at her desk invokes the kind of longing for her childhood dreams in the face of the reality of (young) adulthood. For me it hits like a more wholesome speedrun of Mulholland Drive, but I didn't watch the anime or OVA.

What I did watch was the most recent Dandadan. Boy howdy I wish other shows paid their animators better because it's nice to not see PS2 era CGI. Also the idea of an anatomical model from a science class coming to life to search a dump for a discarded anatomical model that it's in love with is honestly not anything I would have put on a bingo card but here we are. Not the worst surprise of 2024.