Mahoutsukai Tai!

I'm glad I had the chance to watch this when I was visiting a friend. I had always meant to see it--it's been a staple of anime canon for ages--but just had never gotten around to it.

This is one of the few anime with a Petite Ditz as the main character where I did not spend most of the show wanting said ditz to choke. Sae is genuinely adorable and lovable, everything most anime heroines aspire to be. Her over-the-top klutziness is endearing as opposed to hackneyed and grating. She pulls off the old school "Love Conquers All" magical girl beautifully. She seems GENUINE.

For ... a short OVA that devotes a lot of its time to slapstick, I was pleased with the subtlety of character development and interactions. It really is a character story, in the end, all magic wands and hats aside, and that adds something special. By the end of six episodes I really did care about these characters and wonder about their welfare in the future (to be answered in the TV series), and that is the emotional tie every writer aspires to create between the characters and the reader.

"Mahou Tsukai Tai" is not without flaw, of course. Some of the episodes drag with filler, and sometimes the slice-of-life aspects become dull. This slower pace is truly a relic of 80's and 90's anime, almost unseen in modern shows, and in that I find a nostalgic value.

This aside, if you don't require your anime to feature guns, vampires, or giant robots to enjoy it, and if you are not adverse to overwhelming helpings of cute, I recommend giving this show a try.

So this was one of those anime I'd often see recommended back when I first got into anime in the late 90s and early 2000s, but for whatever reason, I never got around to watching it at the time. But now that I finally found it on Nozomi Entertainment's YouTube channel, what I found was a product of its time that's aged rather poorly. Or maybe I've just grown too far out of the target demographic.

I'd heard that this was a magical girl series going in, and while that's technically not wrong, it's pretty clear that it expects its audience to identify more ... with the pervy guy who runs the club than any of the girls. At least it never quite hits harem territory, even if it's about a nerdy guy, the hot young women that surround him, and a gay guy whose only character trait for 90% of the series is to "humorously" hit on that nerdy guy (I don't think I've ever seen an anime filled with as many gay panic jokes as this one, and it's exactly as uncomfortable as it sounds). The main girl still has a lot of screentime and a character arc, but it's nothing deep or that interesting. Sae's whole thing is that she's clumsy and doesn't believe in herself, which she feels the need to tell everyone around her over and over again, until she finally learns to believe in herself. It's the same kind of thing you've seen plenty of times, usually done better than this.

That isn't to say that everything about it fails. The alien threat is interesting in that it actually manages to feel alien and isn't like anything I've seen in a magical girl series before. I liked the gag early on where two of the girls treat being part of a group of magic users trying to get into a big fight with aliens as boring and worth blowing off.
The nerdy guy's absurd pervy fantasies managed to make me laugh once, even if they failed more often than not. And there was one small story arc between the gay guy and one of the girls that ended up being kind of sad and sweet. I just wish the rest of the show could have had an emotional core like that.

This probably still makes it sound like I disliked the show more than I did. It's hardly awful, and I don't regret my time watching it. I feel like I would have been really into it if I'd seen it at around age 14, but in my early 30s, I don't feel like there's a whole lot for me here.

Mahoutsukai Tai was released as an OVA in '96 & '97 from Production Reed. The OVA spawned a whole bunch of follow up media including manga and a thirteen episode anime. The good news is that this is the same studio that brought us Nuku Nuku. The bad news is they also brought us Nuku Nuku Dash. So, I have no idea how this one is going to turn out. 

Story:

Our story begins with invaders from space. They declare themselves in charge and defeat the forces sent against them. They proceed to hang around, doing nothing unless provoked and just kind of observing. They even obey traffic ... laws. Well, that's a convenient invading force. They don't care if we keep governing ourselves and going about things as normal. They just want to hang around. Our protagonists are part of a High School magic club and they accidentally draw the aliens' attention when they're going to attack their Bell-like base because their leader wants to impress the girls in the club. 

I could poke into all the dumb elements of the plot, but the OVA is ostensibly a comedy. So, the dumb stuff is pretty much by design for comedic effect. What I will criticise the OVA for is that the humour is fairly lacklustre. This is one of those comedies where the best it gets is being "kind of funny" with the potential to be funnier if there was a stronger build up. Take, for example, Akane decide to inflate a dude because he's, supposedly, being creepy. That's kind of funny. If they had more set up where we could see what this guy did to deserve being inflated like a balloon, it might have very well been funnier.

And that's when the jokes are at the high level of "kind of funny." A lot of the time, they're just not funny. There are a lot of "jokes" that basically boil down to Takeo acting pervy towards the girls or Ayanojou making unwanted advances towards Takeo. Basically, a lot of shit that's a bit uncomfortable. At least they don't delve into full gay joke territory, though they border on it at times.

Characters:

The characters are pretty one note archetypal. Which would be fine since you don't need incredibly deep or complex characters in a comedy. You just need characters with strong comedic interactions. Which doesn't happen in this series. The dynamics are just generally trite and kind of boring. 

Art:

The artwork is basically passable. It can be overly crass with the fan-service at times and the alien designs are boring. They're just a lot of circles, mechanical tentacles with eyes at the end of them and vaguely humanoid androids. Other than that, it's functional. 

Sound:

They got some really good actors like Koyasu Takehito or Iizuka Mayumi but the performances are pretty mediocre. Probably because this is one of those comedies where they try to compensate for the lack of strong jokes with a lot of exaggeration. Oshima Michiru's music is decent enough. It's a bit more standard than her tracks usually are, but it's better than the soundtrack for Kaze no Tairiku, at least. 

Ho-yay:

There's all the stuff with Ayanojou flirting with Takeo. It's very clear that it's one-sided though. 

Areas of Improvement:

Stop the fan-service with adolescent girls. Somewhere, some dude named Donald who never bathes, is in his forties and on a government watch list is into that. But it's still tawdry. Plus, it does limit your audience when you get really fan-servicey with teenage girls. Teenagers may get excited for it. Donald is into it. For the rest of us, it's just trashy.
Better set ups for the jokes. Having Sae decide she's going to be less clumsy only to immediately fall over isn't all that funny. Having her decide she was going to be less clumsy, last a while and then fall over when she's feeling proud of herself would be funnier. Either way, it's obvious that she's going to fail. The second method just gives some build up to it instead of an immediate pay off because they think the people watching this will forget the set up if the joke stemming from it isn't immediate.
Take more advantage of the magic. For a work with magic as a central element, they don't do much with it in terms of the comedy. About the furthest they go is Takeo accidentally shrinking himself. And even then they barely do anything with him being shrunk. You could do all sorts of crazy comedic stuff with magic as a tool. And I feel that's where this OVA could have shined, if they'd done a better job taking advantage of it.

Final Thoughts:

This is another one I can't really call bad. It has a lot of problems. It's certainly not good. But it does have its kind of funny moments and it is only six episodes long. So, if you like the idea of aliens fighting wizards, you might enjoy it. For myself, it was sub-par. I'm giving it a 4/10.