As the title suggests, The Stories of Girls Who Couldn’t Be Magicians (Japanese title: Mahoutsukai ni Narenakatta Onnanoko no Hanashi) is a story of a girl who can’t achieve her dream of becoming a magician. Seems familiar? When I first heard of this anime, I instantly thought of Little Witch Academia due to the similar premise. However, it might not be what you might be expecting it to be.
Adapted from a novel by Yuzuki Akasaka, the anime tells a story about a girl whose childhood dream is to be a magician. However, she then received an opportunity that she could potentially be a magician by using ancient magic instead of modern one.
Story-wise, The Stories of Girls Who Couldn’t Be Magicians really feels like Little Witch Academia. From the premise, the character, and the setting, there are lots of similarities. Unfortunately, this anime didn’t have that same “magic” feeling. It just felt too normal, like a regular anime that centred on a girl who wanted to be a magician. Every single choice or dilemma is just a seasoning of a result that we could predict, where the good and those who strive to be good/better will be rewarded at the end of the day.
Other than that, the rest of the story is just the students of the magic academy doing cute or fun stuff together, which I assume is to build up their relationships and connection with one another. Sadly, not much happened at the end of the season. Instead, this anime gives us a huge cliffhanger, which means the anime could be more interesting later on.
Too Many Characters, Too Little Developments
To be honest, I was expecting the character can be developed or be more unique. Unfortunately, the anime didn’t even have a single episode of the main character’s backstory or even the result of her dilemma. Instead, the anime often showed how the main character keeps whining that she can’t think of any good magic or thinking about”Oh, I’m just not that good”. It just doesn’t feel fun. Even if she failed, she can try to be positive, to be better next time. Her rival, who couldn’t even do magic at first, managed to use magic, and worst, even she managed to calm the main character. I have some expectations, but unfortunately, the main character is not someone empathetic.
Then maybe, at least the supporting characters might have a good development, and they do have a lot of interesting side characters. Sadly, again, no. You can feel that the anime only shows the surface of each of the characters, even though they might have potential to be interesting. But in the end, they feel more like a bunch of complementary characters with a limited role in that episode.
At the end of the day, those characters feel static. They didn’t change or become better. What you may see is that those characters, at least, feel that they become more confident in what they want to be. I think for this type of fantasy anime, it’s just too simple.
Unique Visual to be Different
From all of my rants, the visuals are one of the things that I liked about The Stories of Girls Who Couldn’t Be Magicians. The mixture of a crayon-ish and watercolour background is really unique and manages to set this anime apart from the anime that aired in Fall 2024. This background, combined with a simple moe character, managed to be at least nice to see. It isn’t the best combination, but it managed to convey that this unique approach to the visual can at least make the anime feel worth watching over a season.
This visual was also supported by an amazing animation that also reminds me of the Little Witch Academia animation. Not close, but at least a bit comparable. The anime really does care about 2D animation, as I couldn’t even feel any 3D animation being shown. Sadly, this kind of fluid animation is a bit rare within this anime on its own, because most of the time, the anime only shows us the slice-of-life scenes. Even if there was a good animation on those scenes, they were a bit too quick and fast, so you couldn’t even notice them.
However, at the final episode, The Stories of Girls Who Couldn’t Be Magicians managed to showcase the potential of what it could be in terms of animation. It seems like all of the vibrant and “magic” of this anime was intended to be shown in the last episode. This is great, but also too short.
The review is continued to the next page.
