Just finished rewatching this. I'm normally of two minds on magical girl shows - I loathe Sailor Moon with an unreasonable, burning passion, but pretty much everything else is okay. I even worked on Wedding Peach! But Nanoha's not that kind of show.

I remember seeing some promotional material for Pretty Cure a few years back, where the show's producers were saying that they were aiming for girls 5-12 and men 16-25 or so - basically, trying to make it a dual-use show that's good for the little girl market but also something that an otaku would want to pick up. Nanoha... is a magical girl show where the producers weren't worried about the little girl market. Review follows. (Spoiler free, just don't wanna clog the page.)
The good:

- One of the best examples of a genre cross-up that I can think of. It looks like a normal "girl gets magical powers and fights monsters" show, and hangs out there for a few episodes, but the monster of the week format goes out the window early - when we see one of them late in the show, it's polished off in a minute as an intro to the episode. Instead, we get...

- Action. No moon tiara here. Property damage ensues. Stuff gets blown up. The action's pretty kinetic and generally well-animated, with relatively little of the "let's put up a still shot and pan across it" that you get in a lot of shounen shows.

- Antagonist as a foil. One of the things I always hate is the enemy who's out to destroy the world, universe, metaverse, time itself, yadda yadda. And one of the best things about anime is that the storytelling lends itself to making interesting conflicts between characters where good and evil aren't necessarily the defining lines. When the black hat isn't evil, there's potential for some very good storytelling. This is where THIS show really shines. Gimme antagonists with reasonable motivations! Or at least understandable ones, huh?

- Weapon design. A+ for doing something original. Absolutely the best kind of "magic wand" in any show of this type. Good costume design too - not as good as CCS, but what the heck is?



- Very sweet ending. Satisfying all around.

The bad:

- Title. It's a mouthful. Gets worse with the sequels, adding "A's" or "StrikerS" to the end...

- Animation can be inconsistent. There are shots where the animators really did their job and ones where they phoned it in. Lots of stuff ended up getting fixed for the Japanese DVD release. Every so often it's just ugly... not Higurashi ugly or anything, but enough to take you out of the experience.

- The transformation sequence... hoo boy. Yeah, okay, naked transformations are more or less a standard trope of the genre, but Nanoha's -really- young for that kind of thing. You get the feeling that the sequence was animated the way it was specifically to reward the members of the audience who... let's just say the guys who tuned in for that sort of thing, huh? Suffice it to say that if this sort of thing is enough to turn you off, you shouldn't watch the show at all. On the other hand, on rewatching and knowing to fast-forward at those bits, it didn't really bug me, so there you go.

- Fan service. Every so often the animators throw in a panty shot or something similar. Not normally a problem, but again, -nine years old-. Countered somewhat by some fan service from other characters who are, heh, not nine years old, but still.

The ugly:

- There's a couple of sequences of outright child abuse. NOT nice stuff. No, it's not Nanoha.

In the end, very highly recommended. Cut it a little slack in the first few episodes, and the reward is great. (Trust me, you'll know when. ;p)

When you're done, there's another 13 episodes of even-better sequel, though I'll leave that for when I've rewatched it. The third series is currently airing, but it's set 10 years later and, so far, isn't up to the same standard; however, things are looking up, so it may yet finish strong.

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 09:46 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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