Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha The MOVIE 1st – Review

Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha The Movie 1st got me interested in the first season a couple of months before the movie came out and tried to get myself familiar with the universe. The series begins like a mixture of Cardcaptor Sakura and Inu-Yasha. After a strange dream, third grader Nanoha Takamachi discovers a ferret-like creature in a nearby park: Yuuno, a being from another planet, has disguised himself in this form while he’s trying to find the powerful Jewel Seeds that have been scattered on Earth. Since I just recently watched season 1, it felt like deja vu despite the redrawn animation. Some minor things were expectedly altered to compress the whole season into a 90 minute movie. However, the characters all look much better then the original anime. They are finally brought up to pare with a 2010 anime instead of an early 90′s anime.

For the Nanoha movie, they have completely reanimated all the attack scenes and they will blow you away. Lyrical Nanoha, despite being a show where the main character is a third grade girl with magical powers, is more targeted to the young men demographic than the girls one. That’s not because of fanservice, but because of the more complex plot. In my opinion though, I have always thought that Nanoha had a good blend of design ingredients that appeal to both male and female audiences.

And amidst all of that, it still retains its place as a magical girl anime, with flashy attack spells, a transformation sequence, and a third-grade girl with magical power. The series had huge pacing problems despite my praise given, and thankfully you’ll read to find out that the movie fixes this issue wonderfully. Nanoha will still fight most of the early monsters but each one has a purpose and does not eat up too much screen time. The first difference one notices is that, atypical for the apparent genre, Nanoha throws herself at the task with enthusiasm, hard work, and responsible decisions. I have to admit some talking parts bored me because I already know what was being discussed from the TV series. For viewers in the same perdicament as me, the team should have thrown in a plot twist to at least keep us guessing. However, although the original Nanoha transformation was already great, the movie trumped that!

So, to briefly summarize: Nanoha discovers Yuuno and quickly finds herself enlisted to help him track down the Jewel Seeds, which are dangerous magical artifacts that he lost over the Earth while transporting them to safe-keeping. As far as violence, like the original series, there is blood when characters are hurt or are suffering from illness. Also, there is some violent whipping scenes that viewers of the first series will be very familiar with. In closing, I loved the Nanoha movie and I felt that it improved in all areas where the original anime suffered. The movie makes quite an adequate substitute for the first TV series, and I would have no trouble recommending it to people as an alternative.