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Little Witch Academia: Enchanted Parade (Sub) Status: COMPLETE
Movie
Guaporense gave it high marks, but given Madoka Magica...
Movie
Guaporense gave it high marks, but given Madoka Magica...
Little Witch Academia: Enchanted Parade feels like a sequel in a bad way. By no means is it terrible, but it suffers from an inability to match and exceed the ambitions of the original 30-minute OVA.
In the original, we set up our heroine with aspirations to be a witch and room to live up to her idol. It felt rushed at only 30 minutes and it could have done with a lot more development, but now with twice the time to tell a story LWA feels more like it's been filled up than developed.
It takes about 7 minutes to introduce our three newest quirky characters and only then is when I became interested.
Our original three characters were rough archetypes in the most shallow of ways, a Genki Girl, a Shrinking Violet, and a Deadpan Snarker, so something new is appreciated even if they are equally flat characters.
When Genki Girl inadvertently pisses off Shrinking Violet and says she's no longer friends with Deadpan Snarker I'm struck by two obstacles that prevent me from being absorbed:
1.) Like that's gonna last.
2.) Even with a 30-minute OVA before it I never had a strong impression of their friendship to begin with anyway. Genki Girl's so genki that it just seems like she keeps the other two around to complain at while they hang around her to keep her out of trouble. Where's the tension in them splitting apart?
Granted, Genki's "I'm not friends with you anymore" moment is intentionally played for laughs, but when they reunite they still try to have a "but I thought we weren't friends" moment which they also play for laughs. It really just undercuts anything meaningful I might have been able to glean from it. It was amusing to me, but not overly funny either.
In the original, we set up our heroine with aspirations to be a witch and room to live up to her idol. It felt rushed at only 30 minutes and it could have done with a lot more development, but now with twice the time to tell a story LWA feels more like it's been filled up than developed.
It takes about 7 minutes to introduce our three newest quirky characters and only then is when I became interested.
Our original three characters were rough archetypes in the most shallow of ways, a Genki Girl, a Shrinking Violet, and a Deadpan Snarker, so something new is appreciated even if they are equally flat characters.
When Genki Girl inadvertently pisses off Shrinking Violet and says she's no longer friends with Deadpan Snarker I'm struck by two obstacles that prevent me from being absorbed:
1.) Like that's gonna last.
2.) Even with a 30-minute OVA before it I never had a strong impression of their friendship to begin with anyway. Genki Girl's so genki that it just seems like she keeps the other two around to complain at while they hang around her to keep her out of trouble. Where's the tension in them splitting apart?
Granted, Genki's "I'm not friends with you anymore" moment is intentionally played for laughs, but when they reunite they still try to have a "but I thought we weren't friends" moment which they also play for laughs. It really just undercuts anything meaningful I might have been able to glean from it. It was amusing to me, but not overly funny either.
As I said, the new characters don't bring much to the table either. One of them's even a Choji knock-off played to the hilt. GET IT? IT'S FUNNY BECAUSE SHE'S FAT AND SHE'S FAT BECAUSE SHE EATS A LOT.
I don't care for that.
In terms of scaling up to the levels of the original I think it also intentionally undercuts itself with the "no, no, it's really part of the parade" idea. When the human characters, for joke reasons, decide to dig up an old demon and it interferes with the parade, it seems as if the town might be in legitimate danger, and yet the only witch teacher on hand just calls out to the audience and like Dora the Explorer goes "Come on everybody, you believe they can do it, don't you? Show them you believe in them!" and the main characters beat them in precisely in that way.
That's not spoilers, that's just common sense. Of course that's what's gonna happen.
Oh, and it ends with the townspeople totally spitting in the face of the main characters' desperate attempts to assuage their prejudice against witches by throwing tomatoes at them.
YAY! And discrimination returned and they all lived happily ever after.
Not like it would have been any meaningful change if they did anyway, the only character we're shown who momentarily changes his tune is the main bully who gets caught by the Alpha Bitch and finds her attractive.
Yes, because we all know that people are only racist because they've never applied their skin-deep perspective to someone attractive.
That's the problem with misogynists too, it's not that they're terrible people, it's just that they've only ever seen ugly women.
I don't care for that.
In terms of scaling up to the levels of the original I think it also intentionally undercuts itself with the "no, no, it's really part of the parade" idea. When the human characters, for joke reasons, decide to dig up an old demon and it interferes with the parade, it seems as if the town might be in legitimate danger, and yet the only witch teacher on hand just calls out to the audience and like Dora the Explorer goes "Come on everybody, you believe they can do it, don't you? Show them you believe in them!" and the main characters beat them in precisely in that way.
That's not spoilers, that's just common sense. Of course that's what's gonna happen.
Oh, and it ends with the townspeople totally spitting in the face of the main characters' desperate attempts to assuage their prejudice against witches by throwing tomatoes at them.
YAY! And discrimination returned and they all lived happily ever after.
Not like it would have been any meaningful change if they did anyway, the only character we're shown who momentarily changes his tune is the main bully who gets caught by the Alpha Bitch and finds her attractive.
Yes, because we all know that people are only racist because they've never applied their skin-deep perspective to someone attractive.
That's the problem with misogynists too, it's not that they're terrible people, it's just that they've only ever seen ugly women.
Another issue I noticed which feels almost like a plot hole is the excuse given that witches can't travel outside of school without quickly losing their magic powers because the crystal/source of all magic is centered there and only extends so far.
This honestly sounds like a writing ****up to me. Am I really to believe that people go to this school to learn an art that can only ever be exercised at that school?
In Hogwarts there were RULES against using magic outside of school because of how it's treated by common people, but it wasn't IMPOSSIBLE to use. So by this logic, Harry Potter would only ever grow up to be... a teacher. That's his only career path. A teacher at the school where he learned, he can't take his skills with him, or travel abroad, those skills would be totally useless.
That's dumb.
It seems to me like the writer decided that simply imposing rules on the characters doesn't make sense because they're rulebreakers so instead of compromising that totally inane aspect of their characters, they decided to compromise the logic of the world they exist in.
Ultimately since I could never get invested and didn't find the humor anywhere near as funny as in Trigger's other works, I'd be inclined to give this a [Meh...], BUT because this is Trigger working on it, we at least get a lot of excellent animated eye candy including a phenomenally well done 20-minute finale.
I didn't care what happened, but I enjoyed watching it for what it was, so for that...
Final Verdict: [Friggen' Awesome][Pretty Good][Meh...][Just... Bad][Irredeemably Awful]
This honestly sounds like a writing ****up to me. Am I really to believe that people go to this school to learn an art that can only ever be exercised at that school?
In Hogwarts there were RULES against using magic outside of school because of how it's treated by common people, but it wasn't IMPOSSIBLE to use. So by this logic, Harry Potter would only ever grow up to be... a teacher. That's his only career path. A teacher at the school where he learned, he can't take his skills with him, or travel abroad, those skills would be totally useless.
That's dumb.
It seems to me like the writer decided that simply imposing rules on the characters doesn't make sense because they're rulebreakers so instead of compromising that totally inane aspect of their characters, they decided to compromise the logic of the world they exist in.
o__O
Ultimately since I could never get invested and didn't find the humor anywhere near as funny as in Trigger's other works, I'd be inclined to give this a [Meh...], BUT because this is Trigger working on it, we at least get a lot of excellent animated eye candy including a phenomenally well done 20-minute finale.
I didn't care what happened, but I enjoyed watching it for what it was, so for that...
Final Verdict: [Friggen' Awesome][Pretty Good][Meh...][Just... Bad][Irredeemably Awful]