The Genre: Children's Fantasy

The Format: 3*DVD - 8 eps @ 10mins on each

The plot:

DISK1 - Thinking that she can never see her boyfriend again, Moe's despair summons a spunky soul collecting apprentice spirit of death named Risky. Risky urges Moe to depart the mortal realm, leaving behind her precious soul until a glimmer of hope and a brief smile on Moe's face causes Risky to transform into Safety, a polite and proper apprentice angel who just happens to share a body with Risky. Accompanied by this feisty apprentice devil/delicate apprentice angel, Moe's life suddenly becomes a humorous and touching trial as she struggles to balance her love life with protecting her schoolmates from Risky's devilish clutches. The best of Japanese animation, combined with a charming universal story about the struggle between light and dark, make Moe's adventure a contemporary fairy tale for all ages!

DISK2 - The tale of Risky and Safety, an apprentice death spirit and an angel in training forced to share a single body, proceeds from the distant age of legend to the farthest reaches of outer space! Volume 2 deepens and strengthens the relationships between Moe, Risky and Safety, introduces new character Koiuji, the divine caretaker of the local Love Shrine, and reveals the secret reason for Risky and Safety's unusual entanglement.

I hate gender non-specific names. People should be forced to give their kids names where it’s obvious what gender they are, like John and Bernard or Jane and Amy. And shortening to non-specific names, like Charlotte and Charles becoming Charlie or Samuel and Samantha becoming Sam shouldn’t be allowed either.

I’ve noticed the Japanese have a habit of doing this. Owing to their use of a pictogram language and their all round general 'being foreign-ness' they have a lot of names that aren’t really gender specific. But on top of this, when they convert their names into English they like to do funny stuff that they think looks cute.

Ray Omishi (one of my favourite manga artists) is a classic example. The direct translation of Omishi’s name is “Rei,” which, as Eva has shown us is a girl's name. But Omishi prefers the translation “Ray”, which is a boy’s name. Now this all means that I don’t know whether Omishi is a boy or a girl, despite hours spent thrashing google into the ground to try to find out.

Sorcerer Hunters was written by Sotoro Akahori who is actually a very prolific manga writer, having probably been involved with half the things you’ve read. Omishi was essentially the artist, but obviously she had a great deal of creative input and was responsible for some complete SH stories towards the end.

As most manga does, SH reached its conclusion and Omishi moved onto other things. Magical Theatre is one of these. An entirely original creation, it’s something I know very very little about, again despite trying. I’m fairly sure that the anime is aimed at kids, but all I do know for sure comes from watching this anime, which I’m meant to be reviewing here.

So, what is it all about, then?

Ah, well, not wishing to deliberately procrastinate further, you do need to know a couple of things before the explanation will make sense. First off is what a shinigami is. A shinigami is essentially the Japanese equivalent of the angel of death. By this I mean a collector of souls for hell. It’s a shinigamis’ job to capture the souls that can’t go to heaven- i.e. people who committed suicide. It’s essentially a bad spirit.

The next thing is the Japanese approach to Angels. The Japanese obviously aren’t coming at things from a Christian perspective, but they are really quite fond of Angels. Basically, Angels are seen as the good guys, and if it’s the shinigami's job to collect the souls of people that kill themselves, then it’s the job of Angels to stop them wanting to kill themselves.

Finally, you need to know Japanese culture. If you don’t, then you won’t actually get half of this anime. The sleeve notes and translation points provided with the DVDs are very good and give lots of helpful explanations, but I think this is not enough. Now I myself am not that up on Japanese culture so there were a few things I didn’t quite get, but the beauty of the series is that it does still work on other levels.

So, who or what are Risky and Safety? Well basically Risky is an apprentice shinigami and Safety is an apprentice Angel. The trick, though, is that they share the same body, transforming between the two depending upon the emotions and situation at hand. As you can imagine, it’s all a bit more random than this in practice.

The story itself is very engaging and the humour is spot on, making me laugh out loud more often than not. It’s a little idiosyncratic maybe, but then this series was never really intended for an international audience.

Overall, I can honestly say that I enjoyed watching this anime a lot, but the above description probably fails to convey that sentiment.

Some of the more practical things now. The format of the series is a little unusual, being divided up into a series of 10-minute shows. This presumably means the manga was a series of shorts as well. The animation style is also a little unusual, with a strange movement that whilst it isn’t really staccato it gives me the distinct feel of that particular brand of computer animation you see in modern cheap or independent cartoons. As to whether it actually is computer animated I know not.

I’ve never heard of the company that’s releasing the US DVDs but the resulting package is very “anime-fan friendly”. It gives me the feel of having been produced for fans, by fans. It’s unfortunate, then, that the dub is so poor.

Not that it’s a bad dub in and of itself it’s just one of those poor victims of the vim, vigour and gusto that Japanese VA’s put into their work compared to their US counterparts. There are a few extras, but nothing spectacular, with the most interesting thing being a double-sided cover (there’s a Risky side and a Safety side).

But the best thing about the release is that despite the 10-minute format there are some 8 episodes per disk, so you still get plenty for your pound.

The Summary: Take one measure of cute and one measure of dark, place in blender, frappe.

The Score: 3/5

The Pictures:

(click for larger versions)