#a really wonderful orchestral soundtrack. enchanted parade especially is great. still one of my top anime movies

[bixels]

LWA was the first anime I watched and became really attached to back in high school. There's a lot I could say as an intro to it (I highly recommend the OVA film and The Enchanted Parade Film, both are some of the most perfect short anime films [spot the MLP reference in the OVA!]. The main anime series is pretty good but is mostly no-plot shenanigans), but I wanna highlight the designs of background characters as an appeal for you to check it out. Because by god, the crew really cared about developing a fun, diverse cast of students that actually captures teenage girlhood pretty well.

Here's a cool fact: every student in the background of the anime has a name, nationality, and personality (and possibly backstory and relationships). A lot of love went into designing each individual student, and 90% of them have no speaking roles or major screen-time.

This is only half of the student body too. More under the cut.

Some students of note:

Aisha, a Middle Eastern student who wears a hijab (and a niqab in some concept material).

There's actually also a female teacher who wears a niqab, but she's unnamed and only a background character.

(In fact, all the teachers in this line-up only appear in backgrounds, yet look how crazy and inventive their designs are!)

It'd take too long to list/show BIPOC students; there are African students (Wangari, a side character and school reporter, from Kenya), BIPOC students from the UK, Latina students from South America. There are these twins from India (Rajani and Rashmi) who're both very protective of their smaller, shier roommate and will often argue over how to better care for her.

There's a great amount of diversity in facial structures, nose sizes, heights, and body types that you just don't see in anime. Stocky builds, large foreheads, double chins. And traditionally "unattractive" character designs are not designed to reflect bad qualities. Alma (1) from Austria is insecure about her flaws and enjoys talking, sometimes a bit too much. Verochka (2) from Russia is constantly paranoid about everything going wrong, yet manages to be friendly to everyone. None of this is relevant to/used in the actual anime, but it's there and it's fun.

In regards to the main cast, there's a girl from Russia named Jasminka who's unapologetically fat and loves to eat and it's never questioned and everyone is friends with her. There's also Amanda, an American tomboy who's canonically butch and crossdresses as a man to sneak into a boy's school (the LWA game also reveals that one of Akko's bullies, Hannah, has a crush on crossdressing Amanda. The game also reveals Amanda's crossdressed on multiple occasions before). There's Constanze, a nonverbal girl from Germany who loves mechanical engineering and hacking game consoles.

Not to mention our main protagonist, Akko, who's very clearly neurodivergent and commentary on how schools treat ND students. Akko is a non-magical girl who desperately wants to become a witch. She enrolls in the elitist magic academy Luna Nova despite having no magical lineage and is afforded zero accommodations or sympathy. She is constantly belittled and bullied by faculty and peers for being lazy, stupid, incapable, and untalented when in reality, she is working twice as hard as everyone else to get a barely-passing grade. We see her fall into the oh-so-relatable loop of staying up late and sacrificing free time to study, only to fall asleep in class and wind up with even worse grades. Luckily, she finds a teacher who truly advocates for her, and it's so satisfying seeing her earn magical powers on her own terms. Even more satisfying seeing her snooty aristocrat rival, Diana, realize that she was wrong about Akko this whole time and being a bully. (No exaggeration when I say they were the original Lumity.)

Akko is also a Marxist who becomes her school custodial staff's labor union chief secretary in striking and negotiating for fair pay.

At the risk of sounding preachy or assuming too much about the crew, this is what happens when you truly care about a world and its presentation. You make good characters –– even unimportant ones –– who become good reflections of real people and identities. You can tell the designers hoped that each background character would be someone's favorite. And it's genuinely nice to see an anime create a cast of teenage girls who are actual teenage girls, with interests in sports or films or gardening and both positive and negative personality quirks. And again, 90% of them exist as only set dressing. Yet they took the time to make each one a real character.

If you're craving good modern-fantasy magic school media with original concepts, a great art direction, and fun characters, check out LWA.

Reminiscing about Little Witch Academia.