ネギま!? / Negima!?

First impressions - 11.10.06

This remake, more an Alternate Universe retelling, is called Negima!?, based on the same manga as last year’s Mahou Sensei Negima but in a different style. The manga’s fans insist that the original series, which I thought was a dumb but occasionally charming throwaway comedy with little substance and a lot of brainless fanservice, was a hideous slight to the masterpiece that is the original manga (but I’m doubtful anything based on the premise of a preteen magician teaching a class of risible harem-anime clichés, including ghosts, samurai and technological geniuses, can ever SERIOUSLY be good). The new version wasn’t a hit with me. The jokes, especially the big comedy reactions, were just lame and badly-timed, and the little references to other anime on the blackboard, while amusing, didn’t suit the tone of the scene, dragging the whole episode down. The art style also isn’t as cute as in the badly-animated but nice-looking original version. Ah well. 

Final thoughts - 15.04.12

Given that it was way back in the October of 2006 that I started to watch this, and I can only blame the fact that I lost a lot of episodes when an external hard drive died so far for it taking five and a half years to get through, I have to conclude that though Shaft’s version was more entertaining and far more sophisticated than the Xebec Mahou Sensei Negima, I actually found it quite boring. Not in a good way.

For whatever reason, when Shaft got hold of the Negima property and gave it to their leading light Shinbou Akiyuki, he decided to make it very much like his Pani Poni Dash!, which had ended a few months before. With Sayonara Zetsubou-sensei, it became rather his signature style, though now has reached the point where it has further evolved into something a bit less zany, making something more straightforward like Madoka have a unique aesthetic.

While it took it further from its roots, Negima wasn’t a bad thing to adapt in this way. It’s about one little magical boy and his immense harem of anime clichés – from robots to ghosts to ninja to acrobats to scientist girls who can make large mecha. If ever there were an anime that leant itself to abrupt style changes, exophoric references and pastiches, it’s this. And the parodies are laid on thick – Negima!?’s style happily parodies just about any anime subgenre you can think of, plenty of film ones and even has a South Park scene, which while not especially necessary or insightful at least seems more affectionate than FLCL’s stab at the same. Add in a great opening track (‘1000% Sparkling’) that seemed to be a real hit in Japan (if remixes, stepmania/osu et al maps and Nico Douga medley spots are anything to judge by) and you seem to have great entertainment.

But it just…missed, for me, in a way Pani Poni Dash! just managed to avoid and Sayonara Zetsubou-sensei seemed to have outgrown – not that it didn’t have problems of its own. Here…I think the problem was with the story. With PPD you had plots where there was a problem to be resolved each episode, be it a bus teetering on the edge of a cliff or an alien trying to conquer the world: they were episodic and there were numerous tangents, but it went back to that at the end. Zetsubou-sensei similarly kept things episodic, usually focusing an episode on a particular issue facing society (or blown out of proportion by the media) and exploring it. But Negima!?...well, it tries to have more of a contiguous story, centred at first on the general concept of Negi and his pacts, then moving to a series of antagonists, with Evangeline, a ‘black rose baron’ and some family members providing adversity, but the snatches of plot progression there are largely buried under endless skits, some of which raise a smile, a few of which made me laugh aloud, but most of which just got in the way and failed to amuse – and not just because jokes were going over my head (though I’m sure that happened more than once).

Taken as a whole, I’d say I liked Negima!? and what Shaft did here. I liked the stupid new animal characters. I liked the useless mascot forms some of the girls took, and the cosplay cards. I liked the way the antagonists were by and large relatable and interesting. I liked the odd surrealism, pacing and switching. But I’ve never much liked the premise of 10-year-old-genius-teaches-class-and-makes-magical-pacts-by-kissing-them-and-making-them-transform-into-fanservice-friendly-outfits. I’ve never much cared about the characters beyond liking some of the peripheral ones, especially when they have manzai-like routines. And I will go on to watch the OVAs (eventually). But I would not dream of rewatching Negima!? from the start, and certainly wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who wasn’t already acquainted with the Shaft/Shinbou way of doing things and certain they liked it watch this. Too much confusion is seldom a good thing. 

魔法 先生 ネギま! / Mahou Sensei Negima (original series)

Negima is one of the more popular manga series in Japan at the moment. However, it would seem that nine out of ten fans agree: the anime is vastly inferior to the original. Still, I don’t feel much compulsion to read the manga version. It’s a cute show, and certainly entertaining, but the premise is so daft that I feel I’ve now been exposed to it long enough to have little interest in going any further.

Negi is a ten-year-old magician from Wales. Part of his magical training is to be a teacher to a class of thirteen-year-old Japanese schoolgirls. Naturally. I mean, how can you be a magician without being a teacher on the other side of the world? And why wait until you’re older than your pupils, after all? But there’s more – the girls are all anime archetypes! I don’t just mean ‘the shy one’, ‘the athletic one’ etc. (though they’re all present and correct) – here we have ‘the ghost’, ‘the ninja’, ‘the vampire’, ‘the robot’ and even a scientist girl who can invent things far beyond the boundaries of current technology. So far, so silly, cliché comedy show. And for a while, that’s what this is. Somehow, several of these 13-year-old girls develop a heavy crush on this 10-year-old, and pretty much all the rest think he’s totally adorable. Yes, it’s a harem anime with a 10-year-old protagonist.

Luckily for the girls, not only are there baths for everyone to get naked in as often as possible, but for Negi to awaken his true magical power, he needs to fight with a girl who enters a ‘pactio’ with him by standing in a magic circle (drawn by Negi’s annoying ermine/ferret/stoat-type-thing sidekick) and kissing him. The story centres around the relationship between Negi and Asuna, the one girl who doesn’t seem to like Negi too much, but always seems to be with him just when disaster strikes.

And the series bumbles along in this manner for a while, which is perfectly agreeable. In last few episodes, a bombshell falls, and all of a sudden, the series becomes dark, intriguing, brave and quite moving. It seemed like it was genuinely going to be something quite special. But then the last couple of episodes made the ending of Mai-HiME look sensible, and the writers extracted from a certain cavity a time machine, some sort of rite that mysteriously solves a problem that no-one else had ever solved in a matter of minutes, and a ridiculous battle where ALL the girls get powered up by the pactio and defeat hoards of demons with their individual skills. This includes the fat girl who makes them eat so much good food that they die. Yup.

It’s a shame, because for a while, there, I thought Mahou Sensei Negima was going to be genuinely daring with its ending. Instead, it was a total cop-out. Still, the impact of episode 24 remains, and there’s fun to be had in total ridiculous excess.

(originally written 22.11.05, before the announcement of the Shaft reimagining.)