Before going into the story, I’d like to quickly run down the structure of the narrative. Magus Bride is a slow-paced and contemplative journey, and that’s not for everyone. Several friends of mine dropped it about a third of the way through simply because they didn’t feel any drive to see it through, which was exacerbated by a reliance on cheap cliffhangers. But if you’re willing to give the story time to unfold, it does have interesting ideas to explore. Now, into the story:
Magus Bride invites its audience to a world of magic in which dragons and fairies are commonplace. But despite its grand fantastic setting, the focus of its narrative is on the grounded and personal story of its protagonist Chise. To put it lightly, Chise begins the series in a dark place, and believes that she is worthless and no one would care if she died. Much of the show is dedicated to characters exploring their attitudes towards death; every person Chise meets helps to shape her perspective towards life, and these encounters change her as a person.
Chise develops a lot over the course of the series, and it’s not always for the better. Something that’s often ignored in fiction is that change isn’t always exclusively positive or negative, and Magus Bride handles this well. At one point, Chise decides that her life only has value on the condition that she can be useful to others, which leads to her becoming the needlessly self-sacrificing protagonist that we often see in anime. This particular plot point was kind of a weak point for me – most often the results of her self-martyring were that she would just be unconscious for a few days and then have no lasting damage. Still, it was interesting to see how Chise changes over time, and how this affected her interactions with those around her.
Chise’s growth is best shown through the evolution of her dynamic with the other lead Elias. At the onset of the story, the two of them are teacher and student, but over the course of events, Chise comes to realize that Elias isn’t the all-knowing figure she had taken him for, and that he has at least as much to learn from her as she has to learn from him. They spend a period of codependency, though Chise’s emotional growth leads to her trying to form meaningful relationships with other people, while Elias becomes increasingly dependent and obsessive. Chise’s relationship with Elias may be what starts her on her path at the beginning, but it’s also an unhealthy relationship that needs to be rebuilt from the ground up. This was another shortcoming – Elias does some genuinely terrible things which are downplayed by the narrative. Chise tries to see the best in everyone she encounters over her journey, including its villains, but it would have been nice if this nuance had extended a bit further into exploring the dark sides of its heroes.
But while the story itself is interesting, the visual presentation of it is lacking. The character designs are elaborate, but the models decline over the run of the show. There are also comedic aside scenes where the characters are chibified, and these detract from the narrative and disrupt its tone. One of the most disappointing things is that the second opening is composed almost entirely out of big scenes from the first half. None of the visuals are terribly bad, but they don’t really live up to the rest of the show. Everything is fine, but the attempts at spectacle don’t always land. Animation could have been used to accomplish things that wouldn’t have been possible in the manga, but instead this adaptation plays it safe and doesn’t add anything new to the story.
The audio makes more of an effort to go beyond the source material. Some sound effects are exaggerated for emphasis, which is a small but effective detail. On the larger scale, there are insert songs added to climactic scenes, which are sometimes effective but more often feel forceful and try to imbue drama into a scene that isn’t there. They’ll make scenes feel too drawn out, or they’ll go into the territory of melodrama. Other than that, the audio is unremarkable. The voice work and opening and ending themes are perfectly fine, though nothing exceptional.
What is the purpose of adaptation? If it is simply to increase awareness of the source material, then this anime was a resounding success. But I believe that an adaptation should try to elevate itself above its inspiration; it’s a different medium, and it should play to its unique strengths. In this regard, the anime adaptation is a failure. Everything that I enjoyed about this would still be present in the manga, and a lot of the things I disliked would then be absent. I think Magus Bride is a really interesting story, but I don’t think that this anime is the way to enjoy it.
