Well it’s time to look back at Little Witch Academia, that cute half hour cartoon that was better than 7 books of Harry Potter….(goes on to ramble about issues with the Potter franchise).   After people fell in love with the first 23 minute animation, in 2013 studio trigger put up a kick starter for a longer sequel, and in 2015 the hour long sequel came out. So let’s look at this fun little  animation before I have to tackle the anime series.

As mentioned this animated sequel is over twice the length of the first animation. Also if you were hoping to go back into the mystery of what happened to Shiny Chariot and have Akko find out her teacher is in fact her inspiration in disguise… well that doesn’t happen in this. Also this was the end of the shorts timeline as the anime series is its own thing so she never finds out in this.

We start off with, despite Akko saving all the witches from the dragon in the last movie, she’s still kind of bad at magic, and the mixing class results in her, Suzy (best girl) and Lotte (glasses girl) fused into a giant mushroom that runs amok. Right away we are getting the tone and it’s still that fun whimsy of the original. Yep not suddenly deciding to get dark and edgy here (proceeds to rant about live action DC comics adaptions). Ahem… after being de-fused thanks to Diana their teachers decide to punish the 3 and decide that they need discipline and put them to work on an annual parade that is meant to represent the witch hunts. Fortunately not going into great detail on that and doing a fantasy version that had a lot of less killing of innocent women.

We get 3 major new characters in this animation. Amanda O’Neil, Constanze Amalie von Braunschbank Albrechtsberger and Jasminka Antonenko. We get a short introduction to these girls, Amanda is a self styled rebel with who excels with flying on a broom (and does so a bit pole dancer like). Constanze uses machines (and remains silent) while Jasminka eats constantly. These 3 and our 3 leads work on the parade and Akko in her ever positive nature decides to rework the parade into something positive while also accidentally destroying a family heirloom of Lotte’s and Suzy having to call her out on her selfishness of not thinking about her friends that much.

Although it’s only an hour long, the characters are very well displayed when it comes to who they are, their expressions , their body language all seems to tell a story (and maybe one day we will get a Suzy spin off). We do get some of Ursula and Diana in this but they aren’t as prominent as they were in the last animation but their characters still remain.

Definitely a good watch and even more so if you enjoyed the first animation but don’t leap into this expecting any answers you felt the first one didn’t answer. Much like it, it’s a self contained story. But if you want answers, there is an anime series, and I did just get round to finishing that on Netflix.

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