Mysterious and Reassuring

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I'm so old.

Negima! (2005) Source: Manga | Genre: Harem, Drama | Studio: XEBEC

SUMMARY A 10 year old wizard boy is assigned to be a teacher in a Japanese middle school. Perhaps someday, he will partner with one of them and find his long lost father.

THOUGHTS

Way back in the day, when I was first really getting into anime, middle school me had an intense urge to watch Mahou Sensei Negima. I was already addicted to Love Hina, having read it at the local library. Now you're telling me the creator made Harry Potter Love Hina with 31 girls this time?

Even before I had an internet connection to pirate fansubs, I found myself printing out pictures of this Negima thing at the library's printer. I was just that interested in eventually looking into this thing.

It wasn't until at least a year later before I was allowed to watch Negima. When my family moved and finally upgraded past a land line connection. I believe I was so early into my years as an anime fan, I watched it on YouTube 3 parts per episode over torrenting.

Needless to say, the original Negima anime holds a lot of memories for me. It was one of the first series I bought volumes for on DVD as it came out. The soundtracks were a staple for what was on my mp3 player. I posted Negima fanart on DeviantArt.

I think XEBEC Negima created an image that falsely represents what the Negima series actually is. It's more what the suits wanted Negima to be than what Akamatsu would later shift it into. It's tame.

Because of that, it has a pretty poor reputation in the fanbase. It doesn't follow any of Negima's intricate magic theory over anime original nonsense. It's not the grand scale battle shounen the series would eventually develop into.

XEBEC Negima was greenlit very early into Negima's years because Love Hina was a big success. They made short pilot animations as early as after the first year of the manga's publication. When the first TV series was made, they really only had 6 out of the 38 volumes to work with.

This was a time when anime original endings were very common in anime. A time before it was acceptable for anime to just say "Okay, our 12 episodes are out. Bye." XEBEC's Negima basically works with these 6 volumes, rearranges them, and makes the thing a complete work.

For the most part, it is a pretty straight adaptation. It might stretch out shorter plots to full episodes and shuffle things around to where it works better for TV, but it very much is the first 6 volumes.

It's not a very high quality adaptation. It looks like a long running early digital kids show. It's not all that different from XEBEC's Rockman.EXE adaptation that was actually still running at the same time. (In fact, it even aired during the daytime.)

I don't think it really captures the appeal of Akamatsu's designs all that well. There are episodes that look better than others depending on the animation director, but rarely, can you say it looks amazing. (Part of why SHAFT's adaptation blew me away.)

That said, it has a vibe. A very good vibe that really captures my initial impression of Mahora Academy.

Mitsumune's soundtrack here really sets the tone. They made a good call bringing him back after Love Hina Again. There's a sense of melancholy I get when listening to this that perfectly accompany this adaptation's more wooden colors.

The UQ Holder anime often goes into nostalgia bait mode with the good old days at Mahora. When it does, I think of this. I think of the specific atmosphere XEBEC's Negima adaptation provides.

Sure, SHAFT did a more straight adaptation of Negima as OVAs later down the road, and those get Akamatsu's sense of humor way better. But there's something I like about XEBEC's maturity. Perhaps it really does represent what "Mahou Sensei" actually means.

XEBEC's grit shines the most when it goes the anime original route. When it deals with death, both with Sayo's backstory Akamatsu himself never got to, and Asuna's.

Getting into spoilers, I think what people will remember most about XEBEC Negima is the fact main heroine Asuna actually dies. They spend two episodes mysteriously building up to this, one for her funeral, and it runs for half a cour.

It goes all in showing how the class deals with this, how Negi tries to hold himself together before breaking apart, and kicks in drama the source has been building up on, but never got to yet with an alternative script.

This drama always really gets me. It's what makes the adaptation, even if it breaks a lot of rules the manga later establishes.

Only down side to this is how the arc concludes. It's too cheesy for me to look at after seeing how serious the battles get later into the years.

It is a fact XEBEC's Negima did more harm than good. If it didn't exist and they let Akamatsu cook a while longer, we might have a long running anime much more faithful to the source.

Negima exists in this weird sphere where there's this anime, an anime that's a complete AU, a drama that's an AU, straight OVAs that take place way later into the series, an alternate ending movie, and a "for dummies" abridged version of the sequel series.

The way the Negima anime is formatted is greatly disliked within the fanbase, and this series alone turned a lot of people away from digging deeper into what Negima actually is.

Maybe it is a bad thing, but also, I like how many different takes of Negima there are to try. It's better than being consistently mediocre like, say, Fairy Tail.

I didn't actually rewatch the whole show yet for the 20th anniversary. Just a selection of random episodes. I've seen this show more than enough times though that I can just spout this stuff off the top of my head.

Really, I just want to talk about Negima, so I'm repeating the same stuff I always do. If I'm talking about how I'm feeling right now, I think the show looks very dated, but at the same time, it's a reminder of why I'm an anime fan in the first place.

I'm hoping Akamatsu posts something, but I kinda doubt it. He didn't even have time to draw a Christmas illustration this year and just reposted old stuff. (He just made it for New Years though.)

There was surprisingly an event where the cast/staff gathered some years ago for a talkshow thing. I don't think there's a recording of that anywhere, so... yeah.

Negima as a whole means a lot to me. After the XEBEC anime, I became a regular on a Negima forum, and met some cool people there, one of which led me to the theme song artist for ETERNAL. I became a member of a scanlation group that covered some of the later years of the manga as their credits page guy. Negima is one of the few series I just own the entirety of on my shelf. I can go on for days talking about this series.

It all really started from this anime, even if I wasn't there when it originally aired. (My first fansub I torrented was the SHAFT anime though. And Kanon as those were airing Fall 2006.)

I think there are certain expectations I get from anime that I get from this. Like when I see people cry at Kimi no Na wa or something and just go "Really?" This show's one of my fundamentals.

More recent memory with this show. The ED got a new cover in 2017, which was... 8 years ago. Christ. That's not new.

Played a LOT of Breath of the Wild to keep me sane during lockdown, and now playing Age of Calamity and having a lot of feelings about that gap of 100 years in between…