A common question that people get asked is what they'll do if they learned they only had a short amount of time left. Something that never gets considered, however, is what they'd do if they had a way to prevent this hypothetical fate. Would they try to do the thing that would save them as soon as possible, or would they put it off until the last minute and end up dying, anyway? The reason why I'm pondering this is the subject of today's review, Once Upon A Witch's Death, which I found out about when the anime was announced and thought seemed interesting. It seemed heartwarming yet simultaneously heartbreaking, and....well, in some ways, I was right about that.
Once Upon A Witch's Death, originally titled "Aru Majo ga Shinu Made", follows Meg Raspberry, a young witch who is an apprentice to Faust, also known as the Eternal Witch and one of the Seven Sages. On her seventeenth birthday, Meg is given some shocking news by Faust: she only has a year left to live due to a curse that, once she turns 18, will cause her to rapidly age and die. All hope is not lost for our young heroine, however, as there is one way to break this curse; she needs to consume a Seed of Life, which can be created by collecting one thousand (crystallized) tears of joy. Why did Faust only tell Meg about this when there's not a whole lot of time to collect them all? Because Faust knows Meg well enough that she knows that she'll procrastinate on collecting the tears of joy until it's too late. (Man, ain't that a mood....) Anyway, with this newfound goal and a limited amount of time to accomplish it, Meg starts to help the people of her town of Lapis with their problems, forming worthwhile connections with each of them and really coming into her own as a witch in the process.
Look, I really want to say that I really like Once Upon A Witch's Death, as there is quite a bit of it to like. For example, I really liked the character of Meg Raspberry. She has a cheerful personality despite her circumstances and a willingness to help the people around her, no questions asked. I really liked seeing how her character developed. I also kind of liked Faust, although I wish the series explored her character more than it did. A couple of other things I liked were the opening and ending themes, which are respectively "Drops" by Maaya Sakamoto and "Hana-saku Michi de" by Aoi Teshima; I'm not sure if I would go out of my way to listen to either of these songs (okay, maybe I would do that for the opening theme), but they do fit in with the fantasy setting pretty well. The voice acting is also pretty decent, with Youko Hikasa giving a particularly good performance as Eldora, even though her character doesn't appear much in the series.
With that said, however, I do have one major problem with Once Upon A Witch's Death, and it has to do with the way Meg is going about collecting the tears of joy in the first place. It's a fundamentally flawed method, since there's no guarantee that she'll get the correct kind of tears she needs for the Seed of Life, if any at all; in fact, there are a couple of times where she gets (crystallized) tears that aren't exactly tears of joy. Another issue is that going around and helping people with their problems would take a longer time than she'd be likely to have. There is one episode where she actually gets quite strategic with how she does this, but she ends up being told that she's in the wrong for it, and it turns into a lesson on actually cherishing the people she meets and helps. It's a great lesson on paper, but things like that do take some of the urgency of Meg's situation away. The anime also has a "screw you, go read the light novels" type of ending where we don't get to see the end result of Meg's quest, so there's that, too.
What else is there to say....? Well, there aren't any unlikable characters (at least, no unintentionally unlikable characters), but I didn't really care too much about all of them. I thought Sophie's backstory was pretty sad, but other than that, I don't really have any strong feelings about her character. I don't have very strong feelings about the animation, done by EMT Squared, either. The colors and character designs are very good, and there are some gorgeous shots occasionally; however, there are some moments where the characters' movements feel a little stiff. At the very least, it's an improvement over anime that they've done in the past, and given the fact that the studio was working on two other projects that came out this season (including the pretty boring "Unaware Atelier Meister"), it's a good thing that Once Upon A Witch's Death didn't turn out terrible!
Overall, Once Upon A Witch's Death was an okay anime, which is a shame, since I really wanted to like it more than I did. That being said, anyone who likes witches and is really into the fantasy genre in general might get more enjoyment out of it than I did. Maybe some moments in it might make you cry some tears of joy of your own!
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