So the Rental Magica レンタルマギカ anime finished up recently. I have written about it on a number of occasions since it started in the fall of 2007 and I watched it throughout. Recently I questioned whether or not the strong finish that the series was heading for would rescue it from mediocrity. For me the answer was no because it ended out not having that strong of a finish. But I might as well start from the top.
Rental Magica レンタルマギカ 24 episode fantasy TV anime series which is based on an ongoing “light novel” series. For those who don’t know the “light novels” in japan are moderately short novels with a smattering of manga style illustrations which are typically serialized (I don’t know whether the novels are written in whole, then serialized, then published, or written in installments for serialization and then collected like manga is) in periodical anthologies similar to the well known manga anthologies. Some of the most popular anime series in recent memory, and a few manga series, have been based on light novels rather than manga or games which are more common sources (there’s not a lot of totally original anime). But that’s another story. RM just happened to have been a popular enough series at the right time (a time when a lot of light novel series are on the rise internationally and getting anime versions) to get an anime version produced.
Back to RM, as you might guess from the title it is about a company of magicians who get hired out for jobs, they are officially “magicians for rent” both for private individuals and jobs assigned by the “magician’s society”. This is not an original premise. Nor is the otherwise worthless male protagonist Iba Itsuki (family name first) who has a special power but doesn’t actually use magic, who somehow finds himself in the midst of a love triangle with two particularly competent female magic users. blah blah blah Itsuki takes over the magic association Astral even though he doesn’t know much about magic because his father is missing etc. etc. This series reminds me a lot of Negima with fewer female characters. The only things that are possibly original are the fairly wide variety of magic and magical phenomenon with the two mentioned female characters Honami and Adilisia using Celtic magic and the demons of Solomon/Goetia respectively. However the problem with some of this stuff is that there ends out being a lot off about it. At least it’s not just typical and vague white or black magic though.
So the show is mostly composed of short story arcs, some of which are single episodes, that give background on the main characters rather than a true overarching plot. For some reason the order of the episodes is not chronological though it is numerical. This at first put me in mind of the anime series Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuutsu 涼宮ハルヒの憂鬱 which is also based on a light novel series, however while that series basically just aired the episodes out of order RM actually
just seems to have a chronology that jumps around. I have no idea if this is the case with the original novel series or not but it’s kind of annoying and though it worked for Haruhi by adding an element of mystery (and subsequently really detracts from Haruhi if you watch it in chronological order) it didn’t really do anything for RM except always make you ask yourself “OK so just when is this happening?” and take away some of the suspense. Maybe it was pandering to fans of the original work by showing what they wanted to see earlier or something, who knows? In the end as is typical of anime now, the work does not stand alone as an original story based on another work and since that other work is still running RM doesn’t really end. In fact there isn’t a clear goal for the series at all though there are various potential goals like “fixing” Itsuki’s eye, finding his father and possibly defeating the shadowy group Ophion that seems to want something from Itsuki and so must be lead by his missing father or something contrived like that.
To be fair to anime, or perhaps japanese fiction in the first place, the weakness of serialized fiction of all sorts is that the producers are happy to let it go as long as possible even past the realm of completion if they’re making money. And for a creator if you create a big open-ended series that you like you don’t necessarily want to end it. But the problem is that you just end out with a lot of vague series that can drag on for years and maybe never end out finishing properly. More directly for anime series, you end out with a lot of works where not a lot ends out happening. I will probably readdress this when Shakugan no Shana II finishes since that’s an even better example.
Anyway in the end Rental Magica was a vague series that didn’t explain the right things at the right time or have an actual plot. It also didn’t have an actual ending but that’s what you expect from a series that’s based on an on-going work. I was reminded early on of Matantei Loki Ragnarok and Tactics (two manga series that have the same author and were animated and had questionable endings, with Loki in particular poised for a second work that has never come) and nothing happened in the course of this series to shake me of the similarities. It was possibly better than Tactics which was also pretty annoying though I liked Loki better personally even though it was really questionable. It does have some redeeming qualities though, it’s a pretty lighthearted and attractive series (the animation is fair, the characters are flat and attractive though not especially unique in that anime way) and even if the characters are a bit contrived they all have some depth and get developed properly through the course of the series. So if you can just take it as it is (which I can’t) it’s alright. But it’s boring, and it doesn’t take much advantage of being animated because the action level is pretty low (to be fair when you’re writing there’s not a lot of advantage to writing a lot of action since it takes a lot of space and effort to travel a short distance). To me the most interesting thing about the work is that I haven’t come across a single person who has writing much about it that actually liked it that much or thought it was anything but mediocre. But for some reason we all watched the whole damn thing anyway. So there must have been some kind of charm that the series had to get people to watch it even though they didn’t like it. Dare I say that the series possessed some kind of strange magic?
