Negima ANIME FINAL
Sep. 27th, 2012 10:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
spottoBecause woah I never got around to watching it. All I did was hear all the horrendous reviews and decided that I was done with the franchise (especially after that manga ending)
But the other day I was organizing my trusty external and moving a whole bunch of series I've gathered into it. I found a whole bunch of old Negima stuff, so I decided to finish watching the last OAD and movie I never got around to watching. I was going into the movie with low, low, looooow expectations and told myself to STAY CALM AND COLLECTED while it I watched. So yeah, now that I'm finished with it...REACTION.
First of all, due to watching Nichijou and falling in love with Mio's voice, I paid extra attention whenever Natsumi spoke. Interestingly enough she did get some decent amount of screentime compared to the others (especially my favourite and lovable MISCELLANEOUS group) But anyway the movie starts off ZOOMING PAST all the actual canonical action throughout a dozen or so chapters in the manga, just summarizing it all like a silly slideshow or something. Basically everyone dies but then Negi shows up and everyone is okay again and then he’s friends with Fate and they beat up that Lifemaker dude and then Fate dies but no one cares and then three months or whatever later we’re back in the classroom HOORAY!
It’s graduation time.
Negi is called into the Headmaster’s office and Kazumi is accompanied by the annoying twin duo to go eavesdrop. The big news? HE MUST CHOOSE A PERMANENT PACTIO PARTNER if he is to become Magister Magi, and those who are not chosen lose their memories of magic foreeever. So a majority of the movie is spent angsting about this consequence. The fighty people go fight Negi one last time, the lovey-dovey people go kiss him one last time, the main main characters discuss and wonder what it’ll be like with some classic Ayaka/Asuna action ho yeah. For some reason several characters who are not known to be jumping on top of and thus molesting Negi in some dogpile of sexual harassment doom are doing so. Near the end Chachamaru and Ako are part of this group for some reason, which I don’t see them doing so I’m going to wager a guess that SHAFT does not give a crap about keeping characters in-character.
Anyway after all that happens Mars suddenly appears, decides to wreck havoc thirty years earlier than Negi had planned for the ultimate fix of the Magic World. So in order to stop it from eradicating all life as we know it, he must destroy its fancy barrier and then fuse Mars into Earth. I actually have no clue what hell kind of BS plan this is, but in order to have enough power to do so this instant he needs to choose a permanent partner NOW. So Negi decides to choose everyone because IF HE CAN’T HAVE HIS HAREM, THEN THE WORLD IS NOT WORTH EXISTING. So then they jump on a giant magic circle of doom and try to stop Mars. Every student who has offensive pactio powers aid in Negi’s giant beam of doom (for example, Makie’s incredibly crazy gymnastics ball! THAT IS SO GOING TO BREAK A PLANET’S BARRIER!) which indeed implodes the barrier but the whole fusing Mars into Earth thing unfortunately fails.
So we get a few minutes of OH MY GOD WHAT DO WE DO and then Chao appears! Hooray! Because Chao is here, and therefore all of Negi’s students, they are able to do the fusion spell and save their worlds! Everyone is then happy, we go to their graduation and then it ends! Huzzah!
You know, as terrible as all that sounded I think I preferred it to the end of the manga. I think I was bitter for weeks after the end of the manga. I’m somewhat more relaxed about it since it ended in such way due to Akamatsu’s dispute with his publishers, but I dunno, I think part of the reason Negima can’t get a faithful Anime adaptation and that the manga ended like it did is the fault of the mangaka himself. He didn’t see through that companies wishing to adapt his manga would do a good job or not. He let them milk all the money possible and destroy all resemblance of his characters and even he could not do justice to the manga he created. See that’s the thing, with the adaptations of Negima I already expected it to be bad or at least not faithful. The saving grace was always “at least the manga’s still good!” So when the manga ended with quite possibly the worst type of ending ever, it of course would be rage-inducing. I had nothing left to fall back on because the source material itself failed.
Oddly enough the movie itself is actually quite an appropriate conclusion for all of the existing animated works of Negima. The beginning where the movie scrolls past all the canon manga stuff is a parallel to the OADs, which while mostly faithful shoved a lot of stuff into such a small time-frame, just like it was in the movie! The ending with everyone using their pactios to achieve a great cause reminds me of the retarded ending of the XEBEC Anime. The bathhouse scenes call back to the incredibly fanservicey OVAs, and everything else is the SHAFT Anime, since the SHAFT Anime threw away all plot and just used the characters for its own plot, which is exactly what the movie is about.
Nonetheless, it did give some decent closure. Basically my review of this movie is “IT WAS BAD” but it could’ve been worse because us fans of Negima are used to WORSE, what with being everything else. At least we get to see some of our favourite characters in their pactio outfits, and some decent action along with it. I found Ayaka at first fighting over Asuna with the possibility of Negi picking her was fitting, and then right after that when Ayaka wanted Asuna to be picked, what with everything that has happened...that was very in-character and sweet of the class representative. I also like Natsumi’s scenes with Kotaro, She brought up a good point that even if she didn’t forget, the memories are pointless if everyone else forgets. It was another pretty touching moment, I must say. I don’t care about the love octagon triangle harem thing at all and also I didn’t find Yue and Nodoka’s scenes all that deep so I have little opinion of that. The fight scenes were good, but maybe my memory is bad...wasn’t it only Ku Fei that wanted to duel Negi? Why would Mana and Kaede want to? I don’t remember those two having a rivalry with him. With each other yes, but not with Negi.
That leads to...miscellaneous! They just threw every other character with each other, and funnily enough my favourite characters are among this group. (Chisame, Haruna, Chachamaru, Eva, and the Konosetsu scenes were largely kind of meh) Because this movie is only an hour and fifteen minutes long (even less so in the initial screening, eesh) we can basically crush and press the rest of the characters together into ONE CHARACTER. They are the generic students who like Negi! They don’t have their own personalities or problems or insecurities or anything like that! Oh no not at all!
Okay, I might be exaggerating there. We do have Yuuna acknowledging her father for about two seconds in the movie. Kazumi just does usual journalistic scoop stuff, but really these characters are pretty shafted in the movie. Oh well, largely expected. I wish they had a budget, a company and a creator that CARED so this movie could be hundreds of times longer and actually have some resemblance of proper plot and care thought into every single character. Did Zazie only get one line? Is the fat girl’s only purpose to serve food? Misora might’ve been the most forgettable student there! Sayo’s voice actress is quite the veteran and I think she probably could’ve been paid five dollars for her service in this movie.
See, when I started reading this manga there was one issue that never escaped my mind. THERE ARE SO MANY DAMN STUDENTS. How was Akamatsu going to go through them all and give them all unique characterizations!? Then more and more other characters are introduced for the purposes of the plot, and half the class is left forgotten in the wastelands of Mahora. Then the story ends, so pretty much my issue never got solved in the first place. I am always against anything that has too many characters. I thought the first season of Digimon had too many chosen children, but they managed to pull off a pretty good show anyway.
Anyway let’s go to my superficial comments on the movie!
Due to the bathhouse scene, several characters are shown with their hair down. Including Yuuna, who while looked very odd with her hair down in the manga for whatever reason, looks quite swell in this movie. Here is an actual quote said by me during the viewing:
And while every other character could’ve been dropped off the face of the planet and no one would’ve noticed, I have one thing to say to this movie. You have Natsumi going through her troubles. You have Ayaka going through her troubles. Chisame, Haruna, Chachamaru, going through their troubles. But! Do not get me started on a certain character who almost died of a terrible disease, had to sell herself and her friends into slavery to afford the medicine, get treated harshly by the enslavers and shocked (at first), discover the one person she’s emotionally dependent on and in love with does not exist, watch the new friends who eased her experience suddenly die off and...you know I could keep going with this...and YET STILL only have a minor role in the movie with no closure at all.
One problem I’ve always had with Negima and the endings is how idealistic it is. I myself am a very idealistic person, and I thought this manga/anime/whateverthehellitis was too damn idealistic for me. No one dies. All your enemies become your friends. No one is actually bad, just well-intentioned extremists. No one will ever get hurt, just stripped. If someone gets impaled in the chest they will get better. If someone gets impaled in the chest it will never be one of those untouchable classmates. If they happen to actually get hurt the blood is actually fruit juice. If someone suffers through a horrific ordeal they’ll end up in the permanent status of “Angst? What Angst?” when they should seriously be suffering some intense form of PTSD. Everyone who was “killed” is merely stoned or turned into fluffy feathers and you can find a reset button for everything. If you graduate it’s okay, your teacher is teaching English the next year too! You might be a ghost but the reason you’re a ghost is never revealed because that would be too sad for the perverted children reading this manga or watching this Anime. If you have to be put to sleep for a hundred years for the sake of the survival of a world you can just leap into a separate timeline and continue your happy existence there. If you share a love interest with several other girls there will be no permanent jealousy or consequences that will ensue because your love interest will never ever reveal who he actually likes ever, and even if he does you will be okay with it despite your life revolving around this person for years. The one person in the class who is not a pedophile is instead subjected to horrible horrible abuse, then relegated to a role of being a Negi Molester #4 with little or no closure whatsoever.
...Negima's pretty sexist, huh?
Welp, that was the movie. The end of the end, no more Negima to come because that is all. Manga is over and animated Negima is over. The plot was bad and the plotholes were many. The animation was kind of iffy, but I think all the negative news that came about with the SHAFT crew seriously screwing up with the deadlines of the movie and then only releasing 2/3rds of it in theatres was already troubling as is. I can’t understand how badly they handled this series. It wasn’t just mediocre bad, it was really, really, really glaringly and blatantly horrible. I think my experiences with Negima is the reason why I never ended up watching more Anime because the experiences were so disappointing I preferred pursuing a different medium. I must stop now because if I don’t my rants on this series will be ENDLESS. So this has been Spotto, good day, and that is all for the movie, OAD, Anime, and manga that was Negima.
But the other day I was organizing my trusty external and moving a whole bunch of series I've gathered into it. I found a whole bunch of old Negima stuff, so I decided to finish watching the last OAD and movie I never got around to watching. I was going into the movie with low, low, looooow expectations and told myself to STAY CALM AND COLLECTED while it I watched. So yeah, now that I'm finished with it...REACTION.
First of all, due to watching Nichijou and falling in love with Mio's voice, I paid extra attention whenever Natsumi spoke. Interestingly enough she did get some decent amount of screentime compared to the others (especially my favourite and lovable MISCELLANEOUS group) But anyway the movie starts off ZOOMING PAST all the actual canonical action throughout a dozen or so chapters in the manga, just summarizing it all like a silly slideshow or something. Basically everyone dies but then Negi shows up and everyone is okay again and then he’s friends with Fate and they beat up that Lifemaker dude and then Fate dies but no one cares and then three months or whatever later we’re back in the classroom HOORAY!
It’s graduation time.
Negi is called into the Headmaster’s office and Kazumi is accompanied by the annoying twin duo to go eavesdrop. The big news? HE MUST CHOOSE A PERMANENT PACTIO PARTNER if he is to become Magister Magi, and those who are not chosen lose their memories of magic foreeever. So a majority of the movie is spent angsting about this consequence. The fighty people go fight Negi one last time, the lovey-dovey people go kiss him one last time, the main main characters discuss and wonder what it’ll be like with some classic Ayaka/Asuna action ho yeah. For some reason several characters who are not known to be jumping on top of and thus molesting Negi in some dogpile of sexual harassment doom are doing so. Near the end Chachamaru and Ako are part of this group for some reason, which I don’t see them doing so I’m going to wager a guess that SHAFT does not give a crap about keeping characters in-character.
Anyway after all that happens Mars suddenly appears, decides to wreck havoc thirty years earlier than Negi had planned for the ultimate fix of the Magic World. So in order to stop it from eradicating all life as we know it, he must destroy its fancy barrier and then fuse Mars into Earth. I actually have no clue what hell kind of BS plan this is, but in order to have enough power to do so this instant he needs to choose a permanent partner NOW. So Negi decides to choose everyone because IF HE CAN’T HAVE HIS HAREM, THEN THE WORLD IS NOT WORTH EXISTING. So then they jump on a giant magic circle of doom and try to stop Mars. Every student who has offensive pactio powers aid in Negi’s giant beam of doom (for example, Makie’s incredibly crazy gymnastics ball! THAT IS SO GOING TO BREAK A PLANET’S BARRIER!) which indeed implodes the barrier but the whole fusing Mars into Earth thing unfortunately fails.
So we get a few minutes of OH MY GOD WHAT DO WE DO and then Chao appears! Hooray! Because Chao is here, and therefore all of Negi’s students, they are able to do the fusion spell and save their worlds! Everyone is then happy, we go to their graduation and then it ends! Huzzah!
You know, as terrible as all that sounded I think I preferred it to the end of the manga. I think I was bitter for weeks after the end of the manga. I’m somewhat more relaxed about it since it ended in such way due to Akamatsu’s dispute with his publishers, but I dunno, I think part of the reason Negima can’t get a faithful Anime adaptation and that the manga ended like it did is the fault of the mangaka himself. He didn’t see through that companies wishing to adapt his manga would do a good job or not. He let them milk all the money possible and destroy all resemblance of his characters and even he could not do justice to the manga he created. See that’s the thing, with the adaptations of Negima I already expected it to be bad or at least not faithful. The saving grace was always “at least the manga’s still good!” So when the manga ended with quite possibly the worst type of ending ever, it of course would be rage-inducing. I had nothing left to fall back on because the source material itself failed.
Oddly enough the movie itself is actually quite an appropriate conclusion for all of the existing animated works of Negima. The beginning where the movie scrolls past all the canon manga stuff is a parallel to the OADs, which while mostly faithful shoved a lot of stuff into such a small time-frame, just like it was in the movie! The ending with everyone using their pactios to achieve a great cause reminds me of the retarded ending of the XEBEC Anime. The bathhouse scenes call back to the incredibly fanservicey OVAs, and everything else is the SHAFT Anime, since the SHAFT Anime threw away all plot and just used the characters for its own plot, which is exactly what the movie is about.
Nonetheless, it did give some decent closure. Basically my review of this movie is “IT WAS BAD” but it could’ve been worse because us fans of Negima are used to WORSE, what with being everything else. At least we get to see some of our favourite characters in their pactio outfits, and some decent action along with it. I found Ayaka at first fighting over Asuna with the possibility of Negi picking her was fitting, and then right after that when Ayaka wanted Asuna to be picked, what with everything that has happened...that was very in-character and sweet of the class representative. I also like Natsumi’s scenes with Kotaro, She brought up a good point that even if she didn’t forget, the memories are pointless if everyone else forgets. It was another pretty touching moment, I must say. I don’t care about the love octagon triangle harem thing at all and also I didn’t find Yue and Nodoka’s scenes all that deep so I have little opinion of that. The fight scenes were good, but maybe my memory is bad...wasn’t it only Ku Fei that wanted to duel Negi? Why would Mana and Kaede want to? I don’t remember those two having a rivalry with him. With each other yes, but not with Negi.
That leads to...miscellaneous! They just threw every other character with each other, and funnily enough my favourite characters are among this group. (Chisame, Haruna, Chachamaru, Eva, and the Konosetsu scenes were largely kind of meh) Because this movie is only an hour and fifteen minutes long (even less so in the initial screening, eesh) we can basically crush and press the rest of the characters together into ONE CHARACTER. They are the generic students who like Negi! They don’t have their own personalities or problems or insecurities or anything like that! Oh no not at all!
Okay, I might be exaggerating there. We do have Yuuna acknowledging her father for about two seconds in the movie. Kazumi just does usual journalistic scoop stuff, but really these characters are pretty shafted in the movie. Oh well, largely expected. I wish they had a budget, a company and a creator that CARED so this movie could be hundreds of times longer and actually have some resemblance of proper plot and care thought into every single character. Did Zazie only get one line? Is the fat girl’s only purpose to serve food? Misora might’ve been the most forgettable student there! Sayo’s voice actress is quite the veteran and I think she probably could’ve been paid five dollars for her service in this movie.
See, when I started reading this manga there was one issue that never escaped my mind. THERE ARE SO MANY DAMN STUDENTS. How was Akamatsu going to go through them all and give them all unique characterizations!? Then more and more other characters are introduced for the purposes of the plot, and half the class is left forgotten in the wastelands of Mahora. Then the story ends, so pretty much my issue never got solved in the first place. I am always against anything that has too many characters. I thought the first season of Digimon had too many chosen children, but they managed to pull off a pretty good show anyway.
Anyway let’s go to my superficial comments on the movie!
Due to the bathhouse scene, several characters are shown with their hair down. Including Yuuna, who while looked very odd with her hair down in the manga for whatever reason, looks quite swell in this movie. Here is an actual quote said by me during the viewing:
“Yuuna should really have her hair down more ...wait Negima ended. FUCK!”Yes the only reason I want to see a continuation is more Yuuna with her hair down.
And while every other character could’ve been dropped off the face of the planet and no one would’ve noticed, I have one thing to say to this movie. You have Natsumi going through her troubles. You have Ayaka going through her troubles. Chisame, Haruna, Chachamaru, going through their troubles. But! Do not get me started on a certain character who almost died of a terrible disease, had to sell herself and her friends into slavery to afford the medicine, get treated harshly by the enslavers and shocked (at first), discover the one person she’s emotionally dependent on and in love with does not exist, watch the new friends who eased her experience suddenly die off and...you know I could keep going with this...and YET STILL only have a minor role in the movie with no closure at all.
One problem I’ve always had with Negima and the endings is how idealistic it is. I myself am a very idealistic person, and I thought this manga/anime/whateverthehellitis was too damn idealistic for me. No one dies. All your enemies become your friends. No one is actually bad, just well-intentioned extremists. No one will ever get hurt, just stripped. If someone gets impaled in the chest they will get better. If someone gets impaled in the chest it will never be one of those untouchable classmates. If they happen to actually get hurt the blood is actually fruit juice. If someone suffers through a horrific ordeal they’ll end up in the permanent status of “Angst? What Angst?” when they should seriously be suffering some intense form of PTSD. Everyone who was “killed” is merely stoned or turned into fluffy feathers and you can find a reset button for everything. If you graduate it’s okay, your teacher is teaching English the next year too! You might be a ghost but the reason you’re a ghost is never revealed because that would be too sad for the perverted children reading this manga or watching this Anime. If you have to be put to sleep for a hundred years for the sake of the survival of a world you can just leap into a separate timeline and continue your happy existence there. If you share a love interest with several other girls there will be no permanent jealousy or consequences that will ensue because your love interest will never ever reveal who he actually likes ever, and even if he does you will be okay with it despite your life revolving around this person for years. The one person in the class who is not a pedophile is instead subjected to horrible horrible abuse, then relegated to a role of being a Negi Molester #4 with little or no closure whatsoever.
...Negima's pretty sexist, huh?
Welp, that was the movie. The end of the end, no more Negima to come because that is all. Manga is over and animated Negima is over. The plot was bad and the plotholes were many. The animation was kind of iffy, but I think all the negative news that came about with the SHAFT crew seriously screwing up with the deadlines of the movie and then only releasing 2/3rds of it in theatres was already troubling as is. I can’t understand how badly they handled this series. It wasn’t just mediocre bad, it was really, really, really glaringly and blatantly horrible. I think my experiences with Negima is the reason why I never ended up watching more Anime because the experiences were so disappointing I preferred pursuing a different medium. I must stop now because if I don’t my rants on this series will be ENDLESS. So this has been Spotto, good day, and that is all for the movie, OAD, Anime, and manga that was Negima.
