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Tuesday, 20 March 2012 15:41 |
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 Originally simulcast by Crunchyroll and now also showing up on Anime Network, Modern Magic Made Simple ( or Yokuwakaru Gendaimahou, depending on where you look) introduces Koyomi Morishita to the world of magic - which is a world she seems singularly incapable of dealing with...
Life hasn't been fair to Koyomi Morishita. Even though she's in high school, she's so short that everyone assumes she's still in grade school. The boys and girls in her school tease her mercilessly, and she's not exactly graceful either. On the other hand, she's still better off than Yumiko, who has a magician trying to kill her. Or at least Koyomi WAS better off, until their paths crossed and put her in the firing line! Fortunately, salvation arrives in the form of master mage Misa Anehara, who agrees to take Koyomi under her wing in learning the new style of magic, which breaks enchantment down into sequences of code. That'll be quite a task, given that so far Koyomi's talent seems to consist of making washbasins randomly fall out of the sky. But if it was easy, it wouldn't be magic, would it..?
Let's be clear: Koyomi isn't cut out to be a mage. Her magical ability never progresses beyond the washpan stage, which is a nice gag the first few times you see it, but it soon wears thin. For proper magic, you need to turn to Yumiko, possessor of a rather important magical staff; and while Misa and Koyomi's fellow student Kaho have Misa's "modern" magic down pat, magic that runs as "code" on your cellphone just seems like cheating to me - which gives the series a few ticks in the negatives column before it ever really gets started.
While the series spends a lot of time goofing around, there is a serious story under the ful-loving surface, a story that hooks back into Yomiko's staff and what it represents. It's the key to the magic of Digitalis Flammalacia, who once possessed a library of hugely powerful spells but who has been sealed away for the safety of the world. No prizes for guessing where she's sealed. Digitalis' power is hugely appealing to some, though, and mage Guibarthez has taken a particular interest in retrieving that power - even if that would mean killing Koyomi to separate her from that staff. After Koyomi and Yomiko become friends (in a rather tsundere way, at least on Yomiko's side), Koyomi ends up travelling through time and summoning quite epic numbers of washpans in the process of trying to deal with Guibarthez.
Which should be interesting, but isn't really. I never felt any real connection with most of the characters (the one exception being Kaho, whose Ruri Hoshino-esque deadpan attitude and elite hacking skills make her the most interesting character - but sadly one who sits on the sidelines for most of the series), the gags wear thin very quickly, Guibarthez is a cookie-cutter "I want it all" villain who also fails to spark any interest, while the storyline is for the most part similarly uninteresting, with very little real sense of threat or urgency, even during the main "battle" sequences.
You'll notice a common theme there: uninteresting, which is probably the worst word you can use to describe an anime series. I can't even point at many of the ideas that the show is using that I could point at to say "nice idea, could've worked better". All of which adds up to a large dose of disappointment. Modern Magic is one of those shows that wasn't poor enough up-front for me to outright drop it - I kept watching from episode to episode, waiting for something good to emerge from it, only to find myself hitting episode 12 and still waiting. It may not have cost me anything over and above my streaming subscription, but there's 5 or so hours there wasted that I'll never get back. Don't make the same mistake.
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