As the opening to Amagi Brilliant Park is keen to point out: this isn’t a fairytale. The series certainly has fairytale elements to it with a princess, a castle, magic and a prince, but as Philip Pullman pointed out in interviews after his reimagining of Grimm’s fairytales:
there is no backstory, no complex motives, no internal life.
And those are things that Amagi has in spades, almost to its detriment. The story of an ailing theme park and the challenges faced by Seiya Kanie in bringing it back to popularity is, at it’s core, an old underdog tale. There’s the time limit to achieving the goal - 50,000 yearly guests by the end of July - the motivation - Seiya knows the owner of the park from his childhood - and the quirky, offbeat cast. To its credit, the series tells that story remarkably well and by the end of the twelfth episode you could leave feeling like you’ve experienced a jolly old yarn. Odd then that the series is in fact thirteen episodes long…
Looking over the list of anime Sunrise have produced, it's clear that sequels and continuations are their bread and butter. Before them however there must be a seed, a rare series that sparked the continuations and alternate universes and other tortured ways of wringing all possible money from an idea. My-HiME is one of those sparks, a precious mixture of innovative ideas and superlative execution that, as is so often the case, much better than the follow ups and subsequent adaptations.
one of the most gloriously over-the-top underwear focused episodes ever conceived
Mai and her brother recently obtained scholarships to the prestigious Fuka academy but while travelling to the school, their boat is attacked and eventually scuttled. It transpires that Mai is a HiME - an obtuse acronym for Highly-advanced Materialising Equipment - a valkyrie able to summon a beast forged more of metal than flesh, a Child, and tasked with fighting wayward monsters known as Orphans. All is not as it seems though when the source of the Orphans is defeated: prior alliances begin to crumble and the school becomes a battleground. As the fighting intensifies, a distant star draws closer and threatens to bring a cataclysm to Earth.
