Generally speaking, I try not to follow too many shows at the same time during a given season. It gets pretty exhausting trying to keep up with it all.
But this season, I'm making an exception, because there are so many great shows airing.
Spoiler alert: This is one of them.
When the person who kindly suggested that I start watching Shimoneta says "you should probably take a look at this", one immediately gets defensive. Fortunately for my sake, this was exactly what I needed to remember there is still good left in the world.
How would I describe Flying Witch?
Imagine if Hayao Miyazaki wanted to make a modern day Kiki's Delivery Service. Only make it a TV series, with a TV budget. That is this show.
This is something I'll likely get into some other day, but Miyazaki is the master of what I call the "non-story". It is very very very difficult to make something entertaining that is also not really about anything. A non-story in this case bucks the trend of traditional story arcs, which have lots of conflict and tons of action to resolve them. There's a big, overarching theme where usually a single event or person drives all of the conflict.
Now, while Miyazaki's films do have a common theme running through them, a lot of the times (with a few exceptions) that theme is "life happens, and then we move on".
My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki's Delivery Service, From Up On Poppy Hill and Whispers of the Heart, to name a few, all follow this rather unconventional convention. In my opinion, they can be said to be the origin of the "slice of life" genre - stories that are just a series of events which happen, and then end. People meet, and talk, and develop relationships to one another, and never really leads anywhere but it's so damned pleasant that you don't actually care.
Flying Witch has all of those hallmarks in it, and almost unabashedly rips the plot from Kiki's Delivery Service. A 15-year-old witch moves out of her parents' place, goes to a new town in the middle of nowhere to self-train herself and find her path as a witch. In this case, our main heroine (which is a strong word, since nothing major has happened so far!) has moved to this town so that she can finish high school, before moving on to being a witch.
Like in Kiki's, witches exist, but aren't relatively common. But neither do they hide from the world. They're rather reclusive, but don't go out of their way to hide their magical powers, and people generally don't seem to mind girls flying around on brooms.
Most of the show seems to revolve around just kind of showing what the life of a witch can be like, and how strange and wonderful the world can be. Unlike Mushishi, which follows some similar themes (but in a far darker tone), they use the character of little Chinatsu, the sister of our protagonist's cousin, to discover the wonders of the magical world all around us. There are a few other characters as well who serve this role, but none so much as Chinatsu, who develops a real fondness for the strange things after learning about how even scary-looking spirits are really just pretty swell dudes (thanks Harbinger of Spring, whose name sounds super intimidating!).
We meet people, we learn about what their lives are like, and then they go on about their lives. Normally I find this structure to be incredibly lazy, because it's an excuse to just draw cute girls doing cute things where nothing happens. In this case, there's an extra layer because while there are cute girls doing incredibly cute and genuinely funny and/or adorable things, that's not all there is to the show - because each episode is an exploration of the world they live in, and that world is way more interesting than the one we live in (in this writer's opinion).
It's a fun, lighthearted exploration of a concept nearly as old as anime itself, but the modern spin gives it a new breath of life that's rather refreshing.
If you're in the mood for something that just makes you feel good and smile, pick this up. You will thank yourself for it later.
Also, Chinatsu is totally almost as adorable as Nanako. THERE I SAID IT. NANAKO IS A GODDESS AND EVERY DAY AT JUNES IS GREAT I TELL YOU. EVERY. SINGLE. DAY.
Now if you'll excuse me I do believe I have to watch some things to counteract all of these incredibly good feels that Flying Witch has given me.
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