There are so many ways to answer this question- and it might be the same answer as why it’s still popular. When you think back to some of the great anime from years past- like Akira- it’s a simple story about a guy becoming so powerful he became a monster- an interesting concept, but the way it’s animated is what makes it special.
Western animation didn’t do anything like this. Everything from the colors, to the camera angles, to the concepts, to the design of its worlds and characters. When Japan wants to- it can put out some of the best animation the world has ever seen- and do things that make Hollywood studios with their billions of dollars jealous. Anime can be an amazing medium.
Then there’s this.
It’s hard for me to understand, how an industry that created all the incredible stuff it has over a century would even bother making something like this.
What makes Magic Maker special? What sets it apart from other animation from the west?
What sets it apart from other anime?
The answer is simply nothing.
Absolutely nothing aspirational, hopeful, useful, inspiring, exciting, thoughtful, creative or interesting has been put into- nor expressed by- this anime.
It is NOT about interesting concepts. It is NOT well animated. It is not creative. It’s a miserable pile of cardboard cutout characters and generic CGI backgrounds and glowing bubbles of mana mashed together into a painfully boring 23 minutes of flavorless pith.
Normally I would not rate a show so harshly when its characters look at least mildly well drawn or the backgrounds were decent- but I am not giving credit anymore for a major studio like this who are just importing a bunch of stock backgrounds; while half the episode consists of a non-animated chibi of the character talking against a blue or green background; and the other half takes place with a brick wall pattern behind the stock characters, or the stock house they imported from minecraft. They can do better, and with enough choices, so can I on my own PC.
The entire reason so much of this rubbish gets made is not just because it’s popular but because it’s EASY. It’s cheap. There is hardly any animation in any of these episodes, and even the fight against the goblin, and near the end the demon guy, were barely anything, and the goblin was another stock character import (and they didn’t even bother to integrate it!) It’s low effort mass produced chaff. There isn’t even a need to write a story, because the ‘story’ of most of the episodes is: boy tests making mana bubbles, boy tests making more mana bubbles, he fights a monster with them, sister and father look amazeface, the end.
No it is not the worst anime I have ever seen, its biggest sin is just being BORING.
Week after week, I had to force myself to watch this. It does not attempt anything interesting with its animation, camera angles, designs, story, or characters. It plays it safe in every department, it remains content to just be as bland as possible. I cannot see how anyone could be impressed by this, unless your expectations were so rock bottom that anything better than a total train wreck would have seemed brilliant. There was a time when anime had something to prove, and went to great lengths to create things you couldn't even imagine. And we have come full circle to something that does not even try.
It depresses me that the once great animation powerhouse that was Japan, who have produced so many incredible, inspiring, fascinating anime for so many decades, has fallen so low.
