Review of The Ancient Magus' Bride

The worst thing about this show by far is the direction. It is a nice example of how good artistic intentions can fall flat without the proper understanding of the art. And I say that's the issue here - lack of understanding - because of the nature of the mistakes made in animating this: They are all childish. The show is full of obvious, and therefore, simple and superficial notions on aesthethic appeal and emotional conveying, which lead to shallow scenes carrying the "hooks" to what you should be feeling, but nothing for you to actually feel for. It's easy to imagine what I'm describinghere espacially when you know this is a fantasy. Lots of sparkles, flowers, big scenary shots, shiny particles, dancing faries and a soundtrack so cheesy it makes you feel embaressed. The key moments in the anime are all showcased in this manner: cue in the corny ost! Let in the rose petals! It's all so unnecessarily grandiose you're gonna find yourself wondering if you missed something. I haven't read the manga so I don't know how much of this comes from having to adapt childish imagination on the source material, but the director must be at fault here, at least at some level. All the visuals in this suffer from the overall immaturity of the production, including the ones that are beautiful in and of themselves. The gap between what you perceive and what they want you to perceive is ever present, and makes everything just feel so forced it ruins even the good stuff. It creates this most interesting irony where the conscious effort in making moments so awe-inspiring makes the awe-inspiring bland and unsubstantiated. The images they try to give life to also seem uncompatible with their animation capabilities, guess that's what happens when the studio budget goes to attack on titan. Well, I don't know, maybe if I hadn't seen Kyoani's latests budget burning productions this would be visually impressive to me, but I've seen them so it's not.

Now on to the show itself:

My initial impression of Mahoutsukai no Yome was very good. It's world is immediately interesting and it captures you very quickily. The characters seem intriguing at first - especially Elias - and detached from the usual steriotypes dominating this industry. I will not talk much about the story here, because this is anime is about, first and foremost, the development of it's protagonists, so I think it's fair to say that the story is relevant only in how it creates the moments that trigger their growth. Thus, I don't wanna analyse it as a stand-alone narrative. Now, keeping this in mind, the second biggest problem I see in this show is the way in which the life-changing (or character-changing, for that matter) events proceed. For Chise, it normally occurs on the form of a reflection after some significant happening, however, this reflections are to the anime's character development as roses are to it's visuals: pompous but shallow. They are a collection of deep-sounding seemingly chin-stroking but actually meaningless quotes. This is not to say that Chise doesn't go trough meaningful change, she does, and it's good, but this changes are always accompanied by this vacuous grandiloquence that makes her progress seem like an endless parade of empty words. Here again we see childishness ruining the good stuff.
In the case of Elias, he grows by learning human emotions through his living with Chise. This dynamic, though, by it's constant focus on his jealousy and posessiveness, ends up creating this shoujo manga-twilight like relashionship that proves once and for all that this show has zero depth. This is Tonari no Kaibutsu-kun taken literally.