Blair Loveday
The Ancient Magus’ Bride is one of many top rated anime series that I haven’t checked out due to time.
So when a collection of OVA’s were mashed together and released as The Ancient Magus’ Bride: The Boy From The West And The Knight Of The Blue Storm on Bluray I was curious. Could this work as an entry to a new series? Or would it be a mish-mash of confusion?
Jumping in it was clear I was missing context, but I just chilled out and powered through. If you have jumped into any long running anime series then you will be used to not knowing what’s going on but finding rhythm over time. Hell if you read Lord of the Rings, you are used to being in a situation where there is clearly history you don’t totally understand. And that’s totally fine.
We meet Chise who is apparently about to go to college. She is an apprentice to the Magus Elias who is a tall man with an animal skull for a head, oh and there is also a dog that can talk. I think you are caught up enough now.
Anyway, some lightning slams into a big magical rock, and we see some magic horseman run free killing everything near them. Chise and the team come across a horse with no horseman and they discover that thanks to the lightning he was separated from his rider.
These horsemen normally follow him, as they are a normal part of nature, killing parts of the forest so that new life can kick off. Without him, they are just riding around killing the land aimlessly. And so our adventure kicks off with them looking to reconnect the horse with its rider.
As far as a story goes, I really enjoyed it.
The OVA’s wind up being 3 episodes of a self contained story, and it’s a cool little story. In effect you can absolutely enjoy this as a short movie, and while a piece of me wishes it was released as a movie, it would have likely just wound up with 30 minutes of filler. The animation and voice acting are both great and on the whole it winds up being a tidy little story.
If you are looking at checking out The Ancient Magus’ Bride then this seems like a great place to start.
It gave me positive feelings about the characters and story, and it works so well as an awesome short movie. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go check out The Ancient Magus’ Bride.
