Review of The Ancient Magus' Bride
Well, this anime surely does tries to convey a whole lot of things. It even wears the now featureless tattered skin of romance over it's mangled mutilated corpse. Why? Because this show tries to be so much, but it never trully got 1 thing right. I will however give it a passing grade for at least trying. I am a person who was always intrested in the whimsy and the fantastic . But when everything is whmiscal and fantastical, that abnormality becomes a simple reality. That's what this show did to me personally, an overload of the whimsy and fantastic. A vomit of fairy tales andthe occult. Sorcerers ,Mages and Witches, fairies ,dragons,faceless amalgams, you name it they have it. And since they crammed so much, they really didn't bring out the differences between some of them,outside of sorcerers being basically some sorta magic realm exorcists? Handy-men? Trully a pointless distinction. And the difference between a witch and a mage might as well be non-existent. You'd think at first a coven of witches and the word witch being used they'd simply be an all-female group of mage-like individuals,but we see a dude wearing a veil in the gathering. And we see the witches basically use the same chants and processes as mages do.
The further we dove into the story the more entangled everything felt, and less explanations were given. This anime is a beautiful painting. You are meant to be staring at it and be in awe at what beautiful art it is. But as a show, it falls flat. In these 24 episodes + 3 in the prequel, i have to say it dragged itself around and didn't give me much to consume . Not to mention i was far more intrested in the stories that didn't revolve around the MC and her love interest.
And the batman approach to a disgusting human being of a villain,Joseph Cartaphilus gets to live on for whatever reason, until we need him to be a villain again ,instead of wiping his miserable existence off the face of the planet. You'd think at least those self-important fairies would seek retribution after he attacked the queen and all. But no. Also,the brief "fights" are horrendously animated compared to literally ever other frame in the anime that actually looks good.
Im not sure i'll watch the second season. I might be to blame since i set high expectations from this show, but im left.... dissapointed,becuase i still believe it could have been so much better. Alas, i can't fully recommend this no matter what .