Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, directed by Akiyuki Shinbo. Screenplay by Masaki Tsuzuki. Produced by Seven Arcs (2004). 13 episodes of 24 minutes (approx. 312 minutes). Not rated.
Available on Amazon Prime.
Probably one of the most famous and influential of magical girl titles, Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha briefly enjoyed a place of prominence on Amazon’s short-lived and ill-fated anime streaming service, Amazon Strike. Strike is dead, but the show and its several sequel series are still available for streaming with an Amazon Prime membership (and if you want to binge it without paying, Amazon allows a month free).
Update, : Amazon has marked the series unavailable, at least in my region. Check the affiliate links above for availability.
As I’ve mentioned previously, 2004 saw the appearance of two influential series, both of which became long-running franchises, that arguably completed the process that Sailor Moon got started—namely, the process of transforming the magical girl into an action heroine. Pretty Cure, a show for young girls, did this by incorporating martial arts sequences inspired by Dragon Ball Z, whereas Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, aimed at older audiences, took its influence mostly from mecha anime, especially Mobile Suit Gundam. In fact, legend has it that someone working on the production saw Nanoha’s magical-girl outfit and commented that it made her look like a Gundam, so they decided to roll with that.
The original Lyrical Nanoha is a thirteen-episode series from studio Seven Arcs, made on a modest budget. Except for one incongruous scene (to be discussed later), it is stiffly animated; the franchise’s popularity as a staple amongst otaku is likely due largely to its higher-quality sequels, which offer more bone-crunching action (and implied yuri) than the original does.
It is probably safe to say that Nanoha laid the groundwork for all of the “adult” magical-girl titles that came after it. It was not the first magical-girl show aimed at otaku, but may have been the first (at least it’s the first that I know of) that took itself seriously. As I’ll explain shortly, it’s not a very good show, but without it, we would not have some of the better-made and better-written magical-girl series that came after—including its inarguably superior sequel.
Also worth noting is that Nanoha is the franchise that cemented the trope that magical girl warriors make friends in Gilgamesh/Enkidu style by kicking the snot out of each other. Thus the word “befriend” is facetiously used by Nanoha fans to mean “blow the hell up.”
Also, for some random reason, there’s Pizza Hut.
Critical Reception
So influential and popular is Lyrical Nanoha that the excessive praise it has received has resulted in an equal and opposite backlash of criticism that overemphasizes its faults; you can easily find reviews on the Internet both drooling over it as the best thing in the world and bashing it as the worst thing ever. Probably the most famous of the pans is the one by Carl Kimlinger of Anime News Network, who describes Lyrical Nanoha as a work of pandering, overstuffed lolicon sleaze complete with BDSM fetishism—a claim I’ll put myself in the uncomfortable position of contesting momentarily.
If we take off our fanboy goggles, step back, and view Nanoha as objectively as we are able, the truth appears to be somewhere in between. It falls firmly in the mediocre range. It is not a staggering work of heartbreaking genius by any means, but neither is it unwatchably bad. It became as popular as it did probably because it appeared at the right time to fill a particular niche. In fact, if we look at some works that preceded it, we may produce some speculation as to the reason for its popularity: It appeared six years after the hugely successful Cardcaptor Sakura, which it somewhat resembles and which had attracted a sizable peripheral fanbase, and a mere two years after that extreme example of unserious fan-pandering, Nurse Witch Komugi. At the time, adult anime fans may very well have been in the mood for a magical-girl show aimed at them but with an intelligible plot and without painfully self-aware references.
The Origins
Like many magical girl titles, Lyrical Nanoha is a spinoff from another franchise, in this case a pornographic video game called Triangle Heart 3. Nanoha was a minor character in the game, but she sparked some fan interest, and she made an appearance as a magical girl on a merchandise CD called Lyrical Toy Box. That brief magical-girl story was altered considerably and expanded to become the magical-girl show before us, which in turn grew into its own franchise, eclipsing its predecessor. Although Lyrical Nanoha contains many of the same characters as Triangle Heart 3 and wastes time referring to it, it is apparently not in the same continuity.
The Plot
The story of Lyrical Nanoha starts off as a simple and formulaic magical girl tale. A boy named Yuuno, a mage armed with mysterious powers, is fighting a malevolent monster in a forest. Defeated, he collapses to the ground and transforms into a ferret. Soon after, Nanoha, a third-grader at a nearby elementary school, finds him and decides to nurse him back to health. He can talk and also communicate with Nanoha psychically, so he reveals to her that he is an archaeologist from another world, on a mission to recover a set of unstable magical crystals that can generate monsters. Unable to complete the mission himself, he grants his magical staff, Raising Heart (or Raging Heart, depending on what version you like), to Nanoha and enlists her help. It soon becomes clear that she has a natural aptitude for magic.
Fate
For a few episodes, Nanoha and her ferret go on missions to stop the monsters and capture the crystals—and it is during this phase of the show that the influence of Cardcaptor Sakura is most apparent. Around halfway through the series, things get more complicated when Nanoha meets her rival, a dark magical girl named Fate, who is also after the crystals. Fate is a largely emotionless but highly skilled mage, and she is single-mindedly devoted to her transparently wicked mother, who wants the crystals for what can only be a nefarious purpose.
With Fate’s introduction, Lyrical Nanoha develops what would become the signature of its brand—a series of rock-em, sock-em battles between cute girls wielding dungeon-punkish magical powers. They blast each other with various attacks, always finishing up with their staves opening valves to release dramatic puffs of steam. Although the fights in the original series are slow-paced and subdued compared to the grand, building-smashing sequences in the sequels, they’re reasonably entertaining.
The Bureau
As the series progresses, new players come onto the board. A military organization called the Space-Time Bureau, which is responsible for keeping mages in check and preventing them from blowing up universes, shows up to aid Nanoha and Yuuno. A perfunctory love triangle develops between Nanoha, Yuuno, and a boy from the Bureau named Chrono, who is a revamped version of Nanoha’s love interest from the game. The Bureau is after Fate’s mother because she wants to cast forbidden magic that could destabilize the multiverse.
Commentary
Although it shows promise in its second half, the series overall is weak. The animation, as already mentioned, is stiff. The one exception is a bizarre and famously incongruous scene early on in which Nanoha and her family are eating dinner, and everyone is moving and twitching in ways they never do during the rest of the show. Nanoha herself bounces in her seat and taps her hands on the tabletop as she nervously screws up the courage to ask her parents if she can keep a ferret. This brief moment is beautiful—and puzzling. It’s a strangely trivial thing to blow the animation budget on.
And that scene is symbolic of Lyrical Nanoha as a whole: Throughout its thirteen-episode run, the show struggles to find its bearings. For about five episodes, it’s a run-of-the-mill and largely brain-dead magical girl program with some grody fanservice (to be discussed shortly) thrown in for the neckbeards. It also wastes a lot of time making allusions to Triangle Heart that have nothing to do with its plot. Then it transitions into a mecha-inspired action show with military flavor. Then a random army of actual mecha show up for the climax. Lyrical Nanoha is an anime constantly fighting to find its identity. By the end, it knows what it’s about, but it takes too long to get there.
The Writing
On top of this, I have to say that the writing is really, really bad. In my multi-post rant about Cardcaptor Sakura, I mentioned that a lot of writers in manga and anime want to have child characters but apparently have not a damn clue how children actually talk or act. Nanoha and her buddies could easily give Sakura and crew a run for their money in the competition to be the most unrealistically depicted children in anime. Once again, we have elementary school students who are perfectly sedate, politely sipping tea and reflecting on the meaning of life. Probably the worst moment in the show is one in which Nanoha’s two best friends have flashbacks recalling how they met her for the first time and subsequently deliver platitudes on the importance of friendship, though it is in stiff competition with a scene in which Nanoha asks her parents’ permission to disappear for a few days and they grant it with no questions asked.
The Creepy Stuff
Now, if you will permit me, I’d like to discuss the touchy subject of Carl Kimlinger’s claim that Lyrical Nanoha is a steaming pile of lolicon dreck. The claim is neither wholly false nor wholly accurate. It’s partly true because Nanoha’s creators did not have a clear idea of what they were doing when they started. The first few episodes deliver several views of Nanoha’s underwear, though you’ll miss them if you blink. The fifth episode, which is set … sigh … at a hot springs, contains a rapid series of raunchy (and badly drawn) still frames—though, again, if you happen to be reaching for your beer at that moment, you’ll miss them.
I don’t say this to go after Kimlinger, who’s already been raked over the coals undeservedly by weebs. I certainly can’t defend the cheesecaking of nine-year-olds, but Kimlinger exaggerates. The fanservice looks halfhearted, as if the creators were throwing it in because they thought it was obligatory, and it simply stops in the show’s second half.
And, of course, the magical girl genre as a whole has a long history of this kind of cheesecake, driven by the contradictory motives of second-wave feminism on the one hand and eye candy for creepers on the other; despite these irreconcilable motives, the final product is the same: Boob jokes and panty shots. Only the excuse used for them differs.
In addition to the exaggeration, one thing Kimlinger says appears to me to be outright false: He claims that the fanservice, and I quote, “includes a brutal whipping in which eight-year-old Fate’s clothes are flayed from her body while she hangs from a rope.”
I just can’t see it. Yes, Fate gets whipped (by the villainess), but it has no sexual element that I can detect. The actual whipping happens off-screen (remember the aforementioned poor animation), and Fate’s clothes are not “flayed from her body”; rather, they are slightly damaged, and they become no more revealing than they were already. The scene is uncomfortable, as it’s supposed to be, but there’s nothing kinky about it. I’m not suggesting that Kimlinger is dishonest, but I think he’s seeing something that isn’t there.
Anyway, that may be a poor note to end on, but I will say I was for a long time avoiding this show in large part because of Kimlinger’s review. I don’t completely disagree with him, but I also don’t think he quite accurately represent it.
