Review of The Ancient Magus' Bride
Overall, I enjoyed this anime, and would say that is worth watching. It is slightly on the slow moving side, especially at the beginning when it is fairly episodic, but the atmosphere of its world really makes up for it. You feel like you’re discovering the magical world along with Chise, and for me this is what really carried the anime throughout. The character development is decent overall. Chise’s character evolution is fairly basic and predictable, but well done nonetheless. There is a good variety of characters that come with interesting back stories and you end up caring about them because they all make upa part of the world’s charm. I liked the development of Chise and Elias’s relationship.
Despite how much I enjoyed it, I'm not giving this anime a higher score becuase the main plot arc towards the end felt messy, and many parts of it felt very under explained. I’m ok with things just being chalked up to magic or just part of how the world works to some degree, but there were specific plot points that were vaguely introduced in a way that felt like they should be returned to and addressed at a later point, but never were. It's possible that the manga addresses them later on and the anime just hasn’t gotten there, but even overlooking this, towards the end the pacing felt rough and rushed, the plot points felt disjointed, and the climax (of the protagonist vs antagonist plot arc) felt underwhelming.
A little nitpicky rant about one of the songs - and you can skip this paragraph if you want because in the big picture of the anime it’s not very important, I just wanted to get my unpopular opinion out. A lot of the music is truly very well done but there is one scene where it really let me down – Lindel’s elf song. I’m sure tons of people will disagree with me on this, and I will preface by saying that objectively speaking his voice is beautiful and the melody is pretty enough, but it is just extremely simple and repetitive which ends up killing the moment, which would otherwise be a gorgeous moment. The only variation of the melody was a cheesy key change. It didn’t match the dance the elves did at all. I guess I was expecting Loreena McKennitt or something because the rest of the music was so good. Oh well, I know I’m the odd one out here and if you watch this anime there’s a good chance you won’t feel this way. Anyway, now that that’s out of my system…
I truly did enjoy watching this anime because I am a huge sucker for world building and that’s really what this anime excels at. It’s by no means a masterpiece – I understand the low ratings a lot of people give it on account of its plot – but there is a lot of originality, wanderlust, and beauty that make it worthwhile and memorable.