Review of The Ancient Magus' Bride

I picked up The Ancient Magus' Bride manga late last year and quickly fell in love with it, just in time to gleefully learn an anime adaptation was coming out. At the time, a common complaint against the manga that people were hoping to see fixed by the anime was the pacing; many readers felt the story moved much too slowly. Personally, I never agreed with this verdict. To me, the manga's pacing felt as comfortable as a hot cup of English tea. Now that we've come to the end of the anime, I can't help but feel a certain amount of vindication as thegeneral consensus of the anime community seems to be that the anime moved too quickly. Haha, I told you so!

Seriously though, WIT Studio decided to do something so ambitious that it's hard to fault them too heavily on it - they covered all 44 chapters of the manga that exist to date. The audacity of this is why I didn't mark them down further for the anime's swift pacing - in a world where shows like One Piece have deteriorated greatly in quality for sticking to a strict 1 episode, 1 chapter rule, Magus' Bride goes all in and uses all of its content to craft a relatively good end result. That said there's something of Magus' charm that is lost when it moves to quickly. More importantly, there's something of the relationship between Chise and Elias that feels relatively incomplete when the story moves too quickly, and that relationship is such a central aspect of the series that it alone holds everything else in the anime back from quite reaching masterpiece level.

Overall, the end result of The Ancient Magus' Bride anime is still quite good - the music and art are nothing less than superb - but I cringe for the people who are watching the anime before reading the manga. I know there's more to the story and many of the people most upset with the anime adaptation don't, and that's the most frustrating thing about how this series was handled.

If you enjoyed The Ancient Magus Bride but felt like there was something lacking, I implore you to check out the manga. The pacing may feel odd to most shonen fans, but trust me when I say its that way for good reason.