Late to the party: Nanoha
Report from the halfway point
Somehow, amidst all the fall anime I’ve started (some of it’s gonna get dropped like a shitty potato) and extra blog work I’ve taken on, I found time to watch some more cartoons. The time I’m able to watch anime comes in bursts, so I tend to take full advantage of it when I can.

I’m not sure what possessed me to go after Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha at this particular juncture. Maybe it was just… there. I didn’t even know this was an Akiyuki Shinbo thing until some of episode one’s strange angles and techniques made me wonder who the hell directed it enough to look that up.
Set up.
First off, Nanoha is not quite what I expected. Like I said, I didn’t expect some strange Shinbo shit to be going on, and I certainly didn’t expect fanservice, which to be honest is a little weird. But I knew enough to know that there would be some things I didn’t expect. I’d heard talk of things getting dark after a certain point, and I knew that later seasons focused on the characters as they aged beyond typical magical girl years.

To me, the very idea of what happens to a magical girl after she grows up is fascinating (as fascinating as anything in the genre could be), and I’m watching as much in anticipation of those later seasons as I am for the first series. But as a whole, I’ve found that even in season one there is a lot more in-depth exploration of the “realities” of the mahou shoujo life. If, indeed, a magical girl were real, it’s unlikely life would be a walk in the park for her. While others have delved into that a little bit, Nanoha gets (relatively) weighty at times. Granted, it’s no Citizen Kane, but it’s more serious than I expected.

That’s just the tip of the magic wand, though — Nanoha seems to approach almost every aspect of its story in a more “adult” way than you’d expect from a genre usually aimed at little girls. That can be both interesting, as with Shinbo’s Tourette’s-like explosions of visual craziness, or kind of icky, as with fanservice.
Random thoughts:
- Shinbo has marked his territory here, no matter what anyone says to the contrary. Fisheyes, fast clouds, silhouettes, and of course the ol’ off-center scene composition all make their way into Nanoha on a regular basis.
- Characterization is not so good. Instead of straight-up explaining the characters’ motivations, I’d like to see something less lazy.
- I can’t say that Nanoha is the first anime where I’ve seen a huge shock of hair migrate from one side of the head to the other, depending on which way a character faces. But I think it’s the first one I’ve seen from the 21st century.
- It’s a given that the transformation scene will be shoved in your face over and over again, so I always hope for cool but short. Nanoha’s has a couple neat little head-trips, but also some barbie-doll nudity, and it lasts a full minute and a half. You don’t always see the whole thing, but holy hell. Beats Sailor Moon, I guess, but that’s not saying a lot.
- Nanoha and Fate’s “magic” is actually sufficiently advanced technology, as in Arthur C. Clarke’s third law, which I didn’t expect to crop up in a magical girl cartoon.

Anyway
I’ll get back to it eventually, and watch the second half when I have some time again. So far, I can’t say I’m impressed with the basic Sakura-meets-Inuyasha plot or the lazy characterization, but it has some charm and the visuals are cool more often than not.












