Review of The Ancient Magus' Bride

The Ancient Magus’ Bride was one of the first anime I watched seasonally, picking it up when it was about halfway through its run. It’s also, short of Code Geass, the anime my opinion of which deteriorated the most in the weeks and months following its completion. Honesty, when I sat down to review it, I wasn’t even sure how I would properly contextualize my feelings towards it. It’s been so long since I watched the show, and my thoughts on it have shifted and faded so much, that I genuinely had no idea if it would be even possible for me to properly reflecton it. Thankfully, watching the prequel OVA Those Awaiting a Star ended up being the perfect refresher to reignite my complex feelings towards Magus Bride, as it's pretty much a perfect microcosm of the show, strengths and weaknesses alike. If you haven’t seen Magus Bride for yourself and are curious whether or not you’ll enjoy it, I suggest you watch said prequel OVA, which is three episodes long, and decide from there. It’ll pretty much tell you all you need to know about the kind of experience you’re gonna get.

The Ancient Magus’ Bride is a slow-burn fantasy slice-of-life set in modern day London, where magic has evolved alongside the normal world Harry Potter style. Although in this world’s case, magic is less witches and wizards and all things sorcerous and arcane, and far more classic fey inspired, with faeries, elves, pixies, nature spirits, and all manner of enchanting discoveries hiding around every shadowy corner and inside every thick shrubbery. It follows a depressed, magic-sensitive slave girl named Chise who gets sold to Elias Ainsworth, the titular ancient magus with a face of bone, who prompty frees her and makes her his proper mage’s apprentice because this is not Shield Hero, thank you very much, and even if he has the intention of making her his bride some day, he would rather their partnership be on equal terms. So the show follows their daily life as Chise explores the world of magic she’s been made privy to, meeting all sorts of whimsical characters and situations (and some much more threatening), while slowly overcoming her personal trauma and helping Elias overcome his own biases towards her so they can stand on increasingly even footing with each other.

And it's the kind of show that you really want to like just on principle, just by virtue of how confidently it charted its own, mature path through the often hellish waters of seasonal anime. It was real fantasy in a world dominated by isekai! It was slow-paced and contemplative! It was quiet and self-assured, rejecting all the overplayed anime tropes in favor of its much homier, grown-up aesthetic! Add to that a strong, full 2-cours production from Studio Wit, and it’s no wonder Magus Bride ended up dominating the Fall 2017 season so single-handedly. Unfortunately, while there was a lot to like, and even love, about Magus Bride, it also had its fair share of weakness that became harder and harder to ignore as it went on, especially in its second half. It's an ambitious, worthwhile, but frustratingly imperfect piece of art, and it's really up to you to decide whether or not the end result is worth your investment.

Magus Bride’s greatest strength is the charm and wonder of its magical worldbuilding. It captures that same Harry Potter excitement of seeing a perfectly realized magical concept come to life, making you feel the wonder of “I could imagine this actually existing and interacting with our world”. Every single magical creature we meet, every single enchanted locale we visit, is so instantly believable that you just want to leap through the screen and explore all they have to offer. Studio Wit’s production is lush and colorful without being oversaturated, like a warm summer’s day thick with just the right level of humidity. You feel like you could get lost in this world, with these people, teasing out every nuance of how its magical rules operate for hours on end. Through its slow slice-of-life pacing, it presents the kind of atmosphere that makes you just want to relax into the warmth of the library, read books under its librarian’s watchful eye. And Chise’s characterization provides a powerful central focus, painting an eminently sympathetic portrait of a lonely girl struggling with emotional baggage far greater than any person should have to deal with, least of all someone that young. Your heart can’t help but reach out to her and pray that she finds the same peace of mind in this magical world as you’ve found yourself.

But it’s here that the flaws start creeping in. Once Magus Bride gets past the inherent enchantment of its premise and ideas, it just doesn’t have that much else to offer. I know the point of this kind of iyashikei healing show is to reach a level of simplicity and warmth that allows you to just soak in the atmosphere, but once you properly relax into it, there’s just nothing for you to do there. It’s a vibrant world, but it’s also static, where not much changes and it takes ages for any meaningful evolution of its ideas and themes to occur. As a result, the pacing goes too far beyond the relaxing atmosphere it’s aiming for and ends up painfully slow. The charms of any one episode of Magus Bride only last so long as you’re able to maintain interest in its general atmosphere; once that interest fades, it becomes an exercise in checking the running time every few minutes and thinking with shock, “How the hell has so little time passed? It feels like an eternity!” I can’t help but think back to a show like Mushishi, which pulled this kind of relaxing tone off perfectly without ever sacrificing a second of narrative engagement. That show would’ve taken just one episode to tell the same story this show regularly tells in three, and nothing of emotional or atmospheric value would be lost in the translation.

The Ancient Magus Bride is a show that requires a great amount patience to appreciate its charms, patience that it doesn’t always earn. Which is a shame, because the moments where I was really, truly invested in this show were magical and engrossing like few anime have accomplished. If nothing else, I appreciate the prequel OVA for helping confirm my thoughts on the show as a whole, and I’m glad I got this second chance to process my complicated feelings towards this deeply flawed, but ambitious and honorable, anime series. If you have the patience to handle Magus Bride, I definitely think it’s worth a look. At its best, it’s something truly enchanting.