Mahoutsukai Tai!

Saw a listing for this on Ebay and thought it looked interesting. I love anime witches so it was also up my alley. Really happily surprised that beyond fun designs and beautiful 90s animation, this cute OVA is genuinely charming and funny and gives you just enough to invest in!

The plot isn't anything crazy and while a lot of the series is more slice-of-life, enough of a main conflict is maintained to keep you interested. The comedy is legitimately funny, it's that over the top 90s kind and it really works especially the physical stuff. Loved the mixture of 90s anime sci-fi elements with ... the more typical magic club stuff too, cool contrast. The show's magic is fun also, how they're like magicians and use cards, that kept the whole concept fresh.

I was worried about the depiction of Aburatsubo, who is clearly gay, since it's an older show, but even though it's a little dated, came away feeling like he was depicted surprisingly well overall! Also loved his design and how the guy magicians had the same cool outfits as the ladies!

Final thoughts: for such a short OVA it's pretty incredible, none of it feels like filler and while it tells a story on the smaller scale, it still manages to be really compelling. Worth watching if you want something fun and light-hearted with magic. There were several moments that really reminded me how magic in anime should be portrayed, as actually magical and surreal, really beautiful!

Magic User's Club is an anime with a stunning visual style, where it is obvious at every turn that a great deal of passion and dedication went in to every scene. However, beneath this mastercraft veneer, is something so typical and unremarkable that it is shocking. The content within this anime is essentially what you'd get if you asked some random uninterested stranger what they thought anime was like. It's by no means necessarily bad, it's just not really all that special. Without the visual aspect, Magic User's Club would have nothing left to set it apart. Beginning with the ... story, it at least has an intriguing enough concept, with the looming presence of alien machines studying the earth, sizing it up for invasion, and the response of a bunch of high school students to that presence with the use of magic. However, past the very initial premise, there's no real substance here. It follows your typical color-by-numbers tale of a magical girl using the power of believing in herself to save the world. There are love triangles and crushes, and all the tropes and jokes and slapstick and thinly-veiled-fetishes one has come to expect from a lot of anime. And I say this as someone who actually finds a lot of these anime tropes fun, and think they lend a certain character to the medium when used right, but here it's just kind of lazy. You can tell from the first episode how everything is going to end, and that really shouldn't be the case. Beyond this, the funny moments are really hit-or-miss. I did find myself chuckling every now and then, but some things get dry quick when you get to episode 4 of the same joke. I want to reiterate here, it's not bad, it's just not strictly good.

But man, the art makes this mid show look absolutely amazing. Magic User's Club is one of the greatest examples of what 90s anime has to offer visually. Everything from the color to the seamless animation and minute detail come together to paint a picture of immense and timeless beauty. It strikes at the very core of what makes this era of animation so good. Personally, my favorite aspects of the art, and indeed the entire show, are the backgrounds and the character design. The backgrounds are in and of themselves masterpieces of color and technique, balancing mood and composition in ways which bring the world to life. Then, within this living world, the character designs exude a unique vitality, blending realism and style which breathes life into the characters which they portray, and giving them a physicality which invests you in their wellbeing against your better judgement.

The sound meanwhile is pretty good, with a semi-orchestral OST which focuses on dramatism while taking a backseat to the art. The sounds of life are lacking however, lost in the music and unremarkable voice work.

The characters, while they might bear visually compelling designs, fall flat in their substance, just like the story does, and they lean on their tropes almost entirely to function. Not a single person in the main cast manages to rise above this, and as such they remain pretty mid even when compared to smaller projects of the same era, and in fact I found a couple pretty unlikable. When it comes to choosing favorites, there's only one character that really stands out to me, and that's Minowa, the journalist. I think, because he's a secondary character, he manages to avoid the garbage treatment the main characters got, which lead to him being unique and interesting, and to some degree, genuine. This is especially demonstrated in a particular conversation he has with one of the more interesting members of the main cast, Aikawa, near a beach bonfire. On this note, I want to say that overall, this anime had potential. It really did have the makings of something great. With a visual element so impactful that it can turn a 5 like this into a 7, imagine what it could have done to a show which was a 7 at its core. I think, if they just spent a little more time on everything else, this could have been amazing. Unfortunately, that didn't happen, and the later TV adaptation robs this show of its art, which is once again to say, the only thing that makes it good. So, we're stuck with this as it is. Magic User's Club is not a bad anime, and it's certainly one of the better looking shows I've watched, but that's not all there is to greatness. There needs to be something under the hood, and this just doesn't have that something. Watch it for the visuals alone, as I really cannot recommend it on any other metric.

Mahoutsukai Tai was released as an OVA in '96 & '97 from Production Reed. The OVA spawned a whole bunch of follow up media including manga and a thirteen episode anime. The good news is that this is the same studio that brought us Nuku Nuku. The bad news is they also brought us Nuku Nuku Dash. So, I have no idea how this one is going to turn out. 

Story:

Our story begins with invaders from space. They declare themselves in charge and defeat the forces sent against them. They proceed to hang around, doing nothing unless provoked and just kind of observing. They even obey traffic ... laws. Well, that's a convenient invading force. They don't care if we keep governing ourselves and going about things as normal. They just want to hang around. Our protagonists are part of a High School magic club and they accidentally draw the aliens' attention when they're going to attack their Bell-like base because their leader wants to impress the girls in the club. 

I could poke into all the dumb elements of the plot, but the OVA is ostensibly a comedy. So, the dumb stuff is pretty much by design for comedic effect. What I will criticise the OVA for is that the humour is fairly lacklustre. This is one of those comedies where the best it gets is being "kind of funny" with the potential to be funnier if there was a stronger build up. Take, for example, Akane decide to inflate a dude because he's, supposedly, being creepy. That's kind of funny. If they had more set up where we could see what this guy did to deserve being inflated like a balloon, it might have very well been funnier.

And that's when the jokes are at the high level of "kind of funny." A lot of the time, they're just not funny. There are a lot of "jokes" that basically boil down to Takeo acting pervy towards the girls or Ayanojou making unwanted advances towards Takeo. Basically, a lot of shit that's a bit uncomfortable. At least they don't delve into full gay joke territory, though they border on it at times.

Characters:

The characters are pretty one note archetypal. Which would be fine since you don't need incredibly deep or complex characters in a comedy. You just need characters with strong comedic interactions. Which doesn't happen in this series. The dynamics are just generally trite and kind of boring. 

Art:

The artwork is basically passable. It can be overly crass with the fan-service at times and the alien designs are boring. They're just a lot of circles, mechanical tentacles with eyes at the end of them and vaguely humanoid androids. Other than that, it's functional. 

Sound:

They got some really good actors like Koyasu Takehito or Iizuka Mayumi but the performances are pretty mediocre. Probably because this is one of those comedies where they try to compensate for the lack of strong jokes with a lot of exaggeration. Oshima Michiru's music is decent enough. It's a bit more standard than her tracks usually are, but it's better than the soundtrack for Kaze no Tairiku, at least. 

Ho-yay:

There's all the stuff with Ayanojou flirting with Takeo. It's very clear that it's one-sided though. 

Areas of Improvement:

Stop the fan-service with adolescent girls. Somewhere, some dude named Donald who never bathes, is in his forties and on a government watch list is into that. But it's still tawdry. Plus, it does limit your audience when you get really fan-servicey with teenage girls. Teenagers may get excited for it. Donald is into it. For the rest of us, it's just trashy.
Better set ups for the jokes. Having Sae decide she's going to be less clumsy only to immediately fall over isn't all that funny. Having her decide she was going to be less clumsy, last a while and then fall over when she's feeling proud of herself would be funnier. Either way, it's obvious that she's going to fail. The second method just gives some build up to it instead of an immediate pay off because they think the people watching this will forget the set up if the joke stemming from it isn't immediate.
Take more advantage of the magic. For a work with magic as a central element, they don't do much with it in terms of the comedy. About the furthest they go is Takeo accidentally shrinking himself. And even then they barely do anything with him being shrunk. You could do all sorts of crazy comedic stuff with magic as a tool. And I feel that's where this OVA could have shined, if they'd done a better job taking advantage of it.

Final Thoughts:

This is another one I can't really call bad. It has a lot of problems. It's certainly not good. But it does have its kind of funny moments and it is only six episodes long. So, if you like the idea of aliens fighting wizards, you might enjoy it. For myself, it was sub-par. I'm giving it a 4/10.