In my mind, anime in the 90’s was dominated by this genre of generic action-adventure comedies about special task forces fighting some supernatural threat. There were a lot of these: Silent Mobius, Blue Seed, Gatekeepers, Witch Hunter Robin. They all had the same story structure: a protagonist discovers hidden mystical powers within them and joins an organization of misfits and hotheads to fight evil monsters creeping out of the woodwork to threaten humanity. The series would always start with monster of the week episodes and days in the limelight for each member of the team, then around the halfway point there would be some sort of explosive revelation and a main villain would show up from somewhere to harrass and harry the heroes. As the battle continued, it would always come out there was something rotten at the heart of the organization and the main characters would end up executing the final battle (usually against some kind of planet-ending threat unleashed by the main villain through some convoluted scheme that may or may not make any sense) without the support of the organization.
Even once you leave this narrow subgenre, lots of shows in the 90’s follow a similar plot structure: monster of the week, main villain appears, shocking revelation, escalating stakes and emotion, final battle against planet-ending threat, everyone lives happily ever after except the main villain who is now toast. Outlaw Star, Trigun, Evangelion to some extent. Even Rurouni Kenshin and Yu Yu Hakusho follow it on a macro scale: Rurouni Kenshin is all “rogue samurai of the week” until the Kyouto arc begins and brings us our main villain, shocking revelations, escalating stakes and emotions, and final battle against country-ending threat. Yu Yu Hakusho splits it across three stories: the pre Dark Tournament stories are monster of the week, the Dark Tournament is the intense midpoint, and the Chapter Black saga is the increasingly desperate final battle. (The Demon World arc, at least in the anime, is the poorly thought out ending where Suguru becomes a space bounty hunter.)
Since most anime in the 90’s were 26 episodes long, you can even map the plot structure to episode numbers. Monster of the week and ensemble limelights were concentrated in Episodes 1 to 9. Episode 8 or 9 would usually feature a tougher, more challenging monster; they’d save something to draw back in people who were thinking of leaving the show. It was also common to slip the main villain into a short final scene where he (or sometimes she) is watching the battle from a rooftop with his or her arms crossed and then says something mysterious and foreshadowing, like “I see he’s progressed well…but he still doesn’t know his true power.” The main villain would appear for real in Episode 10 or 11 and up the stakes by hinting at some mysterious larger goal, while also providing a real physical challenge for the heroes. Then we’d get a run of more dramatic episodes. If anyone in the main cast was going to die, this would be where it happened. There would also usually be an episode consisting largely of flashbacks that explained the dark, mysterious past of one of the lead characters. These would all lead up to the main villain unleashing the planet-ending threat and being defeated. The last episode would usually reset things somewhat to the status quo of the early episodes, in case the show was a hit and people demanded a sequel.
My guess is that this plot structure came about because so many of these shows were based on manga. Manga artists often don’t have a grand overriding vision for a series when they start, because they’re pitching a hundred one-shots and hoping one of them gets picked up. When something does get picked up, the mangaka has to quickly start churning out weekly (or monthly) stories. They have to be exciting to hook new readers, and they can’t be too complicated or have too much continuity, or else new readers will have a hard time following them. Monster of the week stories are perfect for this. If the series makes it through six months of serialization, it’s probably going to be around for a while, so then the mangaka can start introducing a more complex, ongoing story arc and know that there are people following the series chapter by chapter who can keep up. A 26-episode anime adaptation has just enough time to get in a few monster of the week stories and then do a treatment of the longer story arc. I also think that’s why we don’t see this story structure quite as much in newer anime: newer anime are usually one cour, not two, and one cour isn’t enough time to do justice to a manga series arranged like this. The World Only God Knows, for example, is a newer series that follows this plot structure, but with “conquests” of the week instead of monsters. It takes three cours plus OVAs to cover the early “conquest” of the week stories and do a treatment of the first long-running arc. They probably could’ve trimmed this down to two cours plus OVAs if they’d skipped some of the less relevant early stories, but there was no possible way they could have trimmed it to one cour and done real justice to the story or characters.
Little Witch Academia is 90’s to the core. It’s obvious in the art style, which purposely mimics both the cost-cutting shortcuts and thrilling action sequences of hand-drawn animation at the time. The character designs eschew the moe aesthetic that even non-moe shows like Re:Zero use today. The characters’ personalities and dynamics are somewhat cartoonish, and there are clear breaks from the laws of physics casually thrown in everywhere. It’s amazing nostalgia. It even largely uses the 90’s anime story structure that I just spent four paragraphs describing. It’s an incredibly fun, imaginative show that’s simultaneously a throwback to the 90’s, similar to its predecessor Kill la Kill, or Stranger Things for a non-anime example.
Episodes 3 to 13, which form our 90’s-core early monster of the week stories, are an amazing run of episodes that teach us a lot about the characters, introduce us to the world, and show us lots of fun and humor. I could’ve easily watched 25 episodes like this. The second half of the show isn’t quite as strong. Most of the episodes that advance the main plot kinda dragged for me. One contributor: Croix, our villain, a witch who also uses technology and has an army of app-controlled flying Roombas at her command, doesn’t really have a lot of personality. Or at any rate, she doesn’t evince a lot of personality; you can guess at what she’s like based on her actions, but one of the fun things about 90’s anime is the big bombastic personalities that you don’t have to think about too much, and we get that from all the other characters, so Croix doesn’t fit the mood as well as she could and she’s not compelling enough to make an episode, despite being a major focus of several. She’s also a reasonable antagonist for Ursula, whose rival she is, but not for Akko, the actual main character of the show. Diana is set up as Akko’s opposite, but she never antagonizes Akko, aside from yelling at her out of frustration a few times.
The main plot also feels thin in a weird way that I’m having a hard time putting into words. I want to say it feels like it was stretched out over too many episodes, but when I look back I’m not sure what could’ve been cut. Maybe parts of Episodes 15, 21, and 22. It bugged me that they revealed Ursula’s true identity so early and then kept it secret from Akko for the entire series, but when she finally does find out it’s handled well enough that I couldn’t be annoyed anymore.
Whatever the show does wrong from a plot perspective, there’s a ton it does right with the characters. I liked how, from the very beginning, Diana recognizes Akko’s achievements and shows hints of a grudging sort of admiration. When she scolds Akko, she seems to want to help Akko be better, not cut her down. (Her two groupies, on the other hand…) With that motivation, it feels like a reward late in the series when Akko and Diana get closer and even become friends. Ursula was great too. One of the benefits of the early reveal of her true identity was that we could see without having to rewatch the series how much she had given up her true identity and started to live the mask of a put-upon, humble, lowly teacher. Then every so often we’d see a spark of her old self that made us believe in what she used to be. My favorite, and definitely in the running for my favorite moment of the series, was her outburst at the end of Episode 7, where she stood up for Akko and against the other teachers’ snobbery.
Diana and Ursula were great, but my number one favorite is Sucy. She’s too funny, and her dynamic with Akko and Lotte makes them really fun to watch. I loved Episode 8, where we go inside her mind. Sadly, I also hated Episode 8, where we go inside her mind, because after that we know everything about Sucy and the show proceeds to stop advancing her character. It would’ve been nice for some of the things we find out about Sucy in that episode to be revealed more organically, the way we found out things about Ursula and Diana. I was also sad that Lotte and Sucy have so little to do in the second half of the show.
Aside from the characters, Little Witch Academia excels at big action set pieces; the series is full of crazy dodgefests that look straight out of FLCL. I don’t recall even Kill la Kill having this many of them, or ones this well animated. Ending the series with a massive amazingly animated midair fight sequence that takes up most of the final episode was the best decision ever, especially after Episode 24 ended on a bit of an anticlimax.
It’s also great at weird, creative takes on magical adventure. Episode 7, for example, is just a chain of escalating weirdness that made me laugh while also making complete sense within the world, starting with Akko taking a class taught by a goldfish without realizing that the goldfish was the professor or being able to understand goldfish language. Episode 10 was a lot of crazy fun. The Samhain Festival story in Episodes 12 and 13 was creative and weird like Episode 7, had crazy fun like Episode 10, and also had character moments where it more clearly defined characters like Diana and Akko, helping them move from where they were in the first half to where they needed to be in the second half. In a bigger sense, it excels at building a world around a story, instead of building a story around a world. The magical world in Little Witch Academia is not a secret hidden world like in Harry Potter or Negima. Being a witch is a lot like being a lord in modern England: witches still have connections with the rich and powerful because of tradition and former glory, but no one considers them relevant or devotes much thought to them. Some of their patrons hardly make a secret of how little they think of magic, and Luna Nova Academy is always operating on a shoestring budget and doing cheap things like underfeeding the students to scrape along.
Despite the minor story flaws, Little Witch Academia is the first Trigger series I’ve seen that I can say I wholeheartedly love. Kill la Kill came closest before, but it never quite took its characters seriously enough to get there for me. Space Patrol Luluco felt too much like a bunch of shameless 90’s nostalgia and shallow reference humor. Inferno Cop was, well, it’s funny, but I doubt anyone who’s seen it will argue that it’s a “wholeheartedly love” kind of show. I’m already a sucker for witches, especially little witches, especially if they’re in academia. Flying Witch was good; Someday’s Dreamers was okay; Little Witch Academia is amazing, and gave me exactly what I wanted from a show about little witches in academia.
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