Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha - Reviews

I gave up a long time ago of automatically comparing magical girl genre pieces to Pretty Cure, even if reasons were compelling.  I've basically learned from Shugo Chara! that each example works to its own style and that comparisons are able to be made because of the nature of the magical girl formula.  A girl acquires the power to perform the fantastic, and the season eventually boils down to the personal growth the girl experiences by the last episode.  This was specifically true of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, who dinned into our ears that she was nothing more than your usual third grade girl.  Granted, Nanoha looked, spoke, and acted with a maturity far beyond an 8-9 year-old.  That's possibly some of the magic.

But comparisons to other magical girl versions can be made.  Nanoha appears much like Cardcaptor Sakura with the outlandish uniform (though Nanoha has no faithful sidekick Tomoyo Daidouji to supply a new set of duds for each mission) and power staff (though Nanoha's staff seems to have more industrial strength with all the steam it blows off after a magic duel).  And Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha follows the 'strip-down/suit up’ method of transformation, much like Prétear.  This probably explains the parody of the transformation done in Happiness Charge Precure where the magic girls changed into cures under sheets (modesty above all!).

The plot is formulaic.  Nanoha, third-grade girl of no special repute, comes to the aid of a stricken ferret wounded from a mysterious attack.  But the ferret is a visitor from another realm, a magical one.  Actually, the ferret is a magic boy Yuno Scrya.  He has come to gather the 25 'jewelseeds' to prevent them from falling into the wrong hands.  Ironically, those wrong hands show up, connected to another magic girl Fate Testarossa, aided by her faithful doggie/foxy lady Alph.  A good share of the episodes are battles between Nanoha and Fate, until Nanoha wants to know why they are fighting.  What is Fate's reason for wanting the jewelseeds?

This mystery eventually reveals itself with the help of an inter-dimensional police force led by Capt. Lindy and her hardcore 'by the book' lieutenant Chrono.  The problem is with Fate's 'not-the-mommy' Precia Testarossa, who is using her mage powers to upset the universe and save her daughter ... not Fate, who always has been brutalized by Precia for merely failing to get those jewelseeds.  Well, if not Fate, who is the daughter needing saving?  From here on, things get warped.

The animation is hit and miss.  There are features of exquisite technique, as when battles use sweeps of glaring light or ominous shadow.  There is a moment in the opening theme when you can see Nanoha lip-syncing to the song.  But there are moments of horrible examples.  The buxom characters of Alph and Precia can alternate between shapely and lumpy in minutes.  The secret hide-out of Precia Testarossa is an asteroid that is unimaginative, gaudy, and just outright dismal.  The opening theme is great to passible animation.  The closing theme 'Little Wish' is a repulsive exercise in creating a bobble-head-body Nanoha and ferret-boy Yuno on the loop of lapping about the credits.  And speaking of the musical lead-ins and lead-outs ... can things get so mellow that insomnia can be cured?

The quest to win Fate as her friend becomes the all-consuming task for the perky Nanoha who is coming to grips with the fact that ferret Yuno is actually a boy.  After the initial shock, you just wonder how this might develop. 

The Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha franchise is surprisingly resilient.  To date, a total of thirteen seasons, specials, OVA's what have you (and this specific series [2004] was the third offering).  Throw in fourteen manga and you make a case for a favorite in the magical girl genre.  You would wonder if the stories continued to be straight-forward or if times tweak the nature of that typical third-grade girl.

I only saw the first episode of this and then dropped it.

Nanoha does not act like a nine-year-old. She is in third grade, yet she's very perceptive for a third grader and can be sickeningly sweet, too. She is simply a normal caring, idealistic third grader.

I found Arisa very annoying and bratty. Like how she yelled at a dog to stop barking but she loves dogs? She's a hypocrite!

There were some religious things in it, the thing that I hate the most
about anime.

This show felt like a long time watching it and I kind of couldn't wait
for it to end.

Let's take stock of what I knew about this series going in.

"Cardcaptor Sakura for lolicons"
"Magical Girl anime with actual property damage involved and spells loaded as cartridges"
"seinen sci-fi superheroes masquerading as a shoujo Magical Girl show"
"Magical Girls vs. space battleships! Enough said."
basic plot: third-grader Takamachi Nanoha searches for the Jewel Seeds, artifacts from another dimension(s)
there's a good bad girl, Fate Testarossa, and Nanoha/Fate slash is very common, implying the source material may be slashy
I'd seen the names Hayate, Reinforce, Wolkenritter, Vita and Linker Core, not knowing any context. In retrospect, I know I had seen many more names but forgotten them.
I'd seen descriptions of the various manga, and what stuck in my memory was "What relation is Vivio to Nanoha?"
What really grabbed me was knowing about StrikerS, the idea of showing Magical Girls grown up and training a new generation. Sadly, not something I'd expect in a real shoujo.

Now, did it deliver what I hoped? I knew that much of what I'd heard wasn't from the first season, so see my forthcoming reviews of the sequels to get the full story.

When Nanoha is granted her powers, Yuuno tells her the long incantation/password. I think two things. 1: Wow, I didn't realize it was going to parody Cardcaptor Sakura this directly. 2: I hope she doesn't have to repeat this ritual every time. This show knows what the audience wants, though. Starting with her second transformation, Nanoha is able to cut the magic words. Here the show is consciously ridiculing and discarding Magical Girl conventions... somewhat. We still get to see the stock-footage transformation sequence until halfway through the series. Incidentally, after that point, when we see her transform from the outside, it's very quick in comparison. Later scenes in As pretty much confirm my realization that the transformation sequence is only in Nanoha's mind. I don't know enough Magical Girl series to know if that's the convention.


Early in the series, when the first episode still colors my vision cherry-blossom pink, it becomes clear that Nanoha is meant to be more awesome and cool than Sakura by virtue of being more powerful (a dangerous thing for a writer to think). Sakura's flying was rather... well, "girly", often riding her staff side-saddle. She could only use one power at a time, so she couldn't attack while flying. Nanoha flies with energy wings that grow from her feet. In the title sequence, when she flies, she is no witch on a broomstick. She flies like a superhero. When she does a big loop, it captures the ancient dream of flight in a way Sakura didn't (until she rewrote the cards...) It's only because of this context that the most familiar of powers is able to seem cool again, even liberating.

To continue the convention-breaking, Nanoha and Fate don't call their attacks. Their devices do so for them. This reinforces the idea that magic is just sufficiently advanced technology. However, in the second half, this is undone. Called-attack conventions creep in, and Fate uses incantations that invoke deities.

Okay, it's official. "Divine Buster" is (distant) second to "Genocide Sunshine" as an awesome-stupid-awesome attack name. This isn't the biggest attack, though. That one has a name and appearance that have me thinking "disco".

And oh, so much moe! Can anyone be as pure and good as Nanoha? Or so I thought, until the next season topped her...

Despite that, the saccharine ending theme doesn't fit. It's here that the show best masquerades as genuine shoujo.

The episode previews are one of the places it does so worst. Several spend their limited time on fanservice shots that aren't necessarily representative of the coming episode.

The last episode: sappy, soppy and slashy.

Eventually, I decided to compare the dub. It was painful immediately. Nanoha's voice is the worst among a set of uniformly exaggeratedly high, tinny kids' voices. My review score will apply only to the sub.