Little Witch Academia

Public money for training animators paid for the first twenty-six minutes

Japan's Agency for Cultural Affairs pays studios to train young animators on the job, and in 2013 that money paid for a twenty-six-minute short about a girl who wants to be a witch. Yoh Yoshinari directed it, and has since said the team valued training its younger animators over quality or entertainment. Four years and one crowdfunded sequel later, Trigger was building a twenty-five-episode series around the same character.

Yoshinari came to directing from the drawing board: mechanical animation director on Neon Genesis Evangelion, storyboard artist on FLCL and Kill la Kill, recognisable for building smoke and explosions out of spheres. At AnimeNEXT in 2017 he said the work did not suit him, because he likes working alone and his staff kept asking what to do next.

The Story

Luna Nova Magical Academy trains girls to be witches, and Atsuko Kagari arrives with no witches in her family and no aptitude to show for it. What she has is the memory of Shiny Chariot, a stage witch whose performances made her want the job, and the Shiny Rod, a relic Chariot left behind. Diana Cavendish, the top student of Luna Nova, makes no secret of her disdain.

Nothing here adapts a manga: the first of those came afterwards, a one-shot Shueisha published in August 2013. The short film in between was partly paid for by a Kickstarter, which passed its 150,000 dollar goal in under five hours and closed at 625,518.

The Ideal Audience

The episodes ran on Tokyo MX, BS11 and KTV from January to June 2017, and Netflix presented them to the rest of the world as two seasons. Netflix rates the series TV-Y7 and Common Sense Media puts it at seven and up: dragons, explosions and spells that go wrong, no bad language, no sex, no alcohol.

Crunchyroll placed it among its hundred best anime of the 2010s, IGN among the best anime of that same decade. A child can start their anime watching here, with no groundwork required, and the adult supervising is not being asked to make a sacrifice.