If there's a time when the absurdity of animes blended nicely with more serious and innovative things it was the late 90's. We had so many freak shows that we lost count, bizarre things like
Bakuretsu Hunters,
Maze and
Photon, serious shows with troupes of comedy guys like
Orphen,
Escaflowne and
Slayers, and a few with severe turns of personality like
Outlaw Star and
Trigun. It was a time where the bizarre met the glorious, and when I first put my eyes on Magi I had that in mind.
Magi: The Labyrithin the Magic (Magi) tries to bring forth some of this magic lost in the late 90's. It's a show that, initially, mixes a comedy cast with a serious purpose, adventure with ecchiness, shounen with bits of drama. It is a tale about a young boy, called Aladdin, who doesn't know exactly who he is, but carries magic far beyond what is normal. He meets the carefree Alibaba, who dreams of conquering the one of the mysterious dungeon structures that rose from the ground all around the world recently. From there they depart on an adventure where Alladin will find about himself while loving tits and Alibaba will try to rise from thief to lord.
This ambitious project also posed a tough challenge to today studios. If you try to remember, there hasn't been a decent show of this style since the very late 90's. Most who tried to mix comedy in adventure ended up as total unfunny parodies such as
Tower of Druaga or bland fantasy shows like
Rune Soldier Louie.
Anyway, let's stop talking history and go the veredict. How fares Magi in this ambitious attempt? Well, you can see the result right at the name of the studio that animated it:
A-1 Pictures. What does it means? Huh, anyone who has been keeping an eye to recent shows has learned that
A-1 Pictures translates to "ambitious projects, light presentation", and there's where Magi falls.
- So much for looking like a 90's show...
It doesn't take long for Magi to show its true colors. What initially poses as a comedy adventure in the first episode turns out to be simply yet another superpower shounen. Lots of secondary cast, villains poping in openings, tales about unknown creatures, a consel of dark mages, etc. Magi's plotline moves in a way similar to Fairy Tail, although it keep itself more rooted to its bits of maturity then you would think. This means that Magi will drag on fights, take too long to evolve, but from time to time grant us nice scheming plots and interesting action.
A beautiful adventure
A-1 Pictures has always done decent works, although the production of its later shows open room for some debate. Magi by itself is not exactly a masterpiece when it comes to animation or consistency, but manages to give life to a very charming setting, filled with deserts, brown cities, open fields, and seas. This succeeds in giving the sense of adventure that Magi initially proposes, where every place looks different from the other, as if the world is really being explored as the plot goes on.
Aladdin? Alibaba? Morgiana?
Yeah, these are cheesy choices for names, but can be ignored in the long run. The cast of Magi is, in fact, a fairly decent one for what the show turns out to be: a typical shounen. Aladdin brings the "I don't know who I am" type of guy with a mixture of overpowerful being, cute child, and honorable man, making up for a quite satisfying persona that could surely lead the show... but that is left for Alibaba. Alibaba, sadly, is your most annoying type of character, he takes too long to learn, makes the same mistake three to four times before starting to rethink his strategy, ignores advice, ignores the events, etc. In fact, he is never really affected by the events of the show in the long run, he only seems to remember stuff that happened in the immediate past and forget about everything else. Morgiana at last is a sweet character on her own, not tsundere, not cute, but kinda of macho and independent, evolving nicely from former slave to free kind girl that always keeps her spirit of servitude at hand.
But it drags too much in the end
Magi doesn't start that bright, it takes a while for it to grab your attention and put you in its intended path. When it reaches about the tenth episode it becomes a very smooth and enjoyable show. Unfortunately, it all goes down as the final sequence of the season approaches. What is supposed to be the second biggest fight of the season drags on far too long, becoming excruciatingly painful to watch. All the fun you had is thrown away during these typical superpower shounen part, where the most fun character, Aladdin is removed for many episodes and you must endure with the lesser Alibaba as the lead. Here is where you can clean all your doubts that this is NOT a comedy adventure, but a shounen with bits of comedy in the likes of Full Metal Alchemist.
Neverending cast
Maybe even before the long excrucianting late-mid part, you may notice the superpower shounen glimpses in its openings, where you see dozens and dozens of characters poping with new powers, the uber powerful Sinbad with his followers, etc, yet you never see more than half of them in the actual episodes. This is one of the most basic shounen aspects that typically destroys its shows: flashy cast to show off some new power. With some luck, many of these presented character are barely shown in this season, while a few happen to appear and vanish so we know they won't be popping in the near future.
One more to the pile of shows without end
Yep. Magi is just the first season and you barely even see what happens in the intricate world of politics that starts to grow promising by the end of these episodes. This can prove to be a great asset for a better second season, or just the needed fuel to burn all the initial premise and turn Magi into a third-generation One Piece.
Magi managed to lure me when it was released. I watched the first episodes and became fairly interested in what I saw. It looked like a show with decent crazy comedy that was in fact fun and not just some highschool bunch of jokes about weird fetishes, it had those funny faces, it had a sense of adventure, and it had a serious background with nations and powerful magical beings.
Because of that Magi was put in my watchlist and I've waited for it to end airing. When I came back to finish it, though, what I saw was something very different from what I expected. Magi didn't turn out to be terrible, it was still a safe show that failed in the areas that nearly all other shounen failed. But the magic behind the comedy and adventure was lost quite easily. After half a dozen episodes the comedy lightens and the setting is better explained, but after that it was not the comedy that returned, but the superpower shounen that overwhelmed whatever was left in the show. Battles dragged too long, powerful creatures came out of nowhere, heroes started showing hidden powers, etc. It ended up as an average shounen with a promise of getting better in the future, but that doesn't mean nothing these days.
