Anime review: Magi
Magi is an oddball when it comes to shonen anime, because it’s constantly changing what it’s all about. Starts as dungeon crawling, proceeds to be about defeating evil rulers, then it’s about what it means to be a good ruler, then how can a nation can co-exist with other nations, then how to form an alliance and stop an evil force from destroying the continent. The formula constantly changes, the scope broadens, and the stakes increase.
It sounds like it should be regarded as one of the best shonen anime of all time. And yet it’s not since it was quickly forgotten by everybody, and even after the manga ended almost nobody cried about it. When a complete pile of garbage like Bleach ended, tens of thousands lost their shit. When this subversion of the shonen formula did the same, it had no impact at all. What happened?
The presentation, basically. From inconsistent animation quality, to some pretty questionable design choices, Magi was not made to be mainstream. It’s the same reason why other shows like Toriko and Bobobo never managed to be very popular. They were too weird for the average viewer. Magi was more focused on character tragedies and cosmological concepts, than being a good action or adventure. It was not exciting, it was not fun, and you were just tolerating its whimsical plot and setting.
Of course, not being mainstream material is not really a minus. Shinsekai Yori is also weird in its presentation, yet it packs enough interesting content to be memorable. Magi on the other hand is all over the place. You constantly get mood whiplashes, since the story is full of tragedy and death that get constantly interrupted by silly boob jokes. Also, the characters deform to chibi doodles when something funny happens. There are many who hate that. FMAB, the best shonen of all time, is disliked by thousands of people just because of a few seconds of comic relief deformity in every episode. It feels ten times worse in Magi, with its not as good production values, and its way more frequent comedy scenes. Also, because of the ass fetish everyone working in A-1 Pictures has, the camera keeps zooming on women’s buttocks for some really low brow fan service.
It’s also very hard to like the protagonist. He’s ridiculously optimistic, even for shonen standards, and has a creepy boob fetish from the age of 10. He’s basically a happy-go-lucky chuuni, completely out of sync with the grim setting he is living in. Worst part, the show refuses to point out how wrong he is. Instead, it validates every obnoxious action he takes, as if the power of friendship is all you need to fix any problem. On top of that, it also gives him a super powerful genie that easily defeats any non-genie opponent he comes across. And since there are only a handful of genie users, he’s overpowered from the very beginning. He’s what constantly breaks the immersion and ruins all the good ideas of the show.
And no, he’s not the only one, as most of the villains are one-dimensional light novel villains, who laugh like maniacs and love to torture innocent people just because. The victim card is overplayed in almost every episode, so the obnoxious chuuni protagonist can jump in with his ridiculous optimism, save the victimized innocent peasants with his genie-ex-machina and talk about rainbows and unicorns. Despite the great sociopolitical ideas it has from time to time, the characterization is shallow, most battles are silly, and the way everybody resolves their issues, is by pulling magic trinkets out of their asses. And then the camera zooms on said asses to further point out how much respect you are supposed to show them.
If the protagonist and the genies did not exist, if the main characters were instead Ali Baba and Morgiana, and if A1-Pictures didn’t have to show an ass every 5 minutes, Magi could have been a great shonen. Instead of that, we are left with a forgettable mediocrity.