Reviews

Jan 5, 2017
What does living an ordinary life mean to you?
How much of it would you be willing to give up for the sake of protecting it?
Soushin Shoujo Matoi is here to bring us answers to these questions from the perspective of a middle school girl who, as most magical do, accidentaly gets magic powers and is forced to save the world.

And with that one sentence I have pretty much summed up the story of Matoi. Story is not the forte nor is it the focus in the anime. It much more serves as the backdrop and device to keep the characters busy rather than actually being the point of interest. And I can't say I was bothered too much by this fact. Everything else in the anime, especially the characters and overall atmosphere of the anime, manages to keep it an interesting watch.

Before I go ahead and talk a bit about the characters I want to take some time and address what I think were the goals of the anime. Storytelling goes out the window since as I've mentioned earlier going into the anime and expecting a good story is as foolish as going into AnoHana expecting a knee-slapping comedy.
But the anime manages to even make what little story it has not boring by going against and embracing certain magical girl tropes. The anime in the beggining almost feels like a parody of the entire magical girl genre, except it really isn't. I don't know if parody was their goal but the entire middle part of the anime feels like one big joke. Heck at one point, one of the main characters even hijacks the opening sequence.
In all seriousness though, I think the writers for the show must have somehow forgotten their original plan when writting past the second episode, since the first episode starts out as regular mahou shoujo fair and is by far the most boring episode of the series. After the second episode and up until the later parts of the final arc there is little to no seriousness to be found in the show. I don't know why the show is like this, but it works and if it weren't like this and would instead go for a more standard and cliched, more cliched than it already is, route it would have been way less entertaining.

But enough about the seriously confused writing, I'll take some time now to talk about the more important characters of the show starting with, obviously, our main exorcist girl Matoi.
Matoi feels like a main character that's also part of the comic relief duo of the show. Which is really odd considering that at one moment she needs to act like the straight man to her counterpart Yuma, and the next moment she needs to be super serious tackling some super-dimensional threat.
In the beginning of the show she is the unwilling mahou shoujo with an attitude that makes her instantly likeable. She doesn't want to be a magical girl and she let's you know it.
As far as her character development goes, she might be the only character in the show to undergo any major developement with her slowly warming up to her job as a magical girl.

After Matoi we have the sidekick characters Clarus and Yuma who could form a comedic duo in their own right. In fact, any character in the show when put together with Yuma will probably seem like the straight man of the duo. You'd think that her constant hyperactive, loud, obnoxious antics would get old and annoying quickly but they miraculously don't. In fact she might be my favourite character from the entire show just because she has the "loudest" personality, even when every other character is dead serious, she isn't. She manages to be obnoxious to the characters in the show without being obnoxious to the viewer. Probably because we never actually see a character get annoyed at her, which makes her feel less frustrating than she actually is.
Clarus on the other hand is the most serious character on the show, if you discount her dead-inside partner that is. Once again we are presented with an extreme to round off our trio of magical girls. She is the extremely focused on her job, no-nonsense, blonde who balances out Yuma's shennanigans. If you've ever seen this type of character before, you can probably guess how her story plays out especially after finding out that wishes empower the beings that give the girls their powers.

You can't have characters in an anime without animating them and holy hell did White Fox ever screw the pooch on that. The anime uses a mix of CG and handdrawn animation in most of it's scenes and for the most part the special effects and fight scenes look decent and there's not much I can comment on there. The animation for the less action-packed parts of the anime sometimes looks like it was done in 2 minutes by an some unpaid intern. Faces often times look derpy and limbs, especially hands look like there was little to no effort put into them. Sometimes when characters are in motion they look a bit gooey and the linework all around looks a bit unstable.
It's not the worst I've ever seen, Studio Pierrot has done worse, but it would still pull me out of the experience whenever I saw a derp face or a misshapen hand or leg.

All in all I think Soushin Shoujo Matoi deserves a bit more recognition than it got because it is a genuinely fun anime and should appeal to most mahou shoujo fans. Even if you're generally not a fan of magical girls this anime does away with a few of the cliches that make magical girl anime be a bit repetitive. It doesn't pull a Madoka on the genre, nor does it perfectly embrace the tropes of the genre like Cardcaptor Sakura but it does what it wants to do really well and manages to create a very entertaining experience.
If you're looking for a more recent entry into the genre I suggest you give this title a shot.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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