Fairy Musketeers (Otogi-Jūshi Akazukin). Starring Nobuyuki Hiyama, Rie Kugimiya, and Motoko Kumai. Directed by Takaaki Ishiyama, et al. TV Tokyo, . 39 episodes of 24 minutes (approx. 940 minutes). Not rated.
Available on Crunchyroll.
In the post-Madoka days when most magical girl anime is about blood, guts, and misery, or else full of snarky “irony,” I like to look back on an earlier, slightly more innocent time when magical girl stories were about giggly, fidgety females who saved the world in between shopping trips and junk-food binges. And when I look back on that time, I like to watch Fairy Musketeers. Fairy Musketeers is not the best-written magical girl show, nor is it the best animated, nor the best edited. But it has an intriguing premise, a likable collection of characters, a satisfying conclusion, and a sweetness that avoids becoming saccharine.
Originally produced as an OVA (that is, a straight-to-video production, which doesn’t have the same stigma in Japan that it has in the States), Fairy Musketeers was later expanded into a 39-episode TV series, which is the more readily available version. Merchandising heavily dictated its content, and the show has a few out-of-place props and plot swerves as a result. Although it drags at times, it’s consistently fun. It is one of my all-time favorites, and it’s clean enough to let the kids watch.
The Premise
According to the mythos of Fairy Musketeers, sometime in the distant past, man mastered both science and magic and thus became conceited and arrogant. To punish man for his hubris, God split the universe in two, dividing the world of science, Erde, from the world of magic, Phandavale. But he also left two keys in the keeping of inhabitants from each of these worlds, capable of healing the breach.
In Phandavale, which is occupied by fairy-tale characters, Cinderella suffers tragedy after a forbidden love affair with a man from Erde. Thus, she has become the evil witch Cendrillon and is determined to take vengeance on God by uniting the worlds and conquering them both: To that end, she has created an army of mutant monsters called Nightmarians, which have overrun all of Phandavale thanks to the efforts of her minions Hansel, Gretel, and the Musicians of Bremen. The only ones who can stop the advance of Cendrillon’s evil army are Phandavale’s greatest warriors, the Three Musketeers, who must travel to Erde to find the one who holds Erde’s key, who just happens to be an otherwise ordinary Japanese schoolboy named Souta (voice of Motoko Kumai).
The Characters
The first of the musketeers is Red Riding Hood (Yukari Tamura), who, given her mode of dress, probably should have been named Red Bike Helmet. She wields a pair of swords shaped like giant scissors and does wire-fu. Her familiar is, of course, a talking wolf (Nobuyuki Hiyama). When she isn’t battling the forces of evil, Red Riding Hood is usually seeking her next meal, preferably paid for by someone else.
After arriving on Earth, she rescues Souta from the monsters out to get him, and then she crashes at his house. Soon joining Red Riding Hood are the second and third musketeers. The second is the proud and prissy Snow White (Shirayuki Hime), who is a master of water magic and a clotheshorse. Somehow, her hypersensitivity to fashion doesn’t prevent her from thinking it a good idea to hang modular pouches from her dress.
The third is Briar Rose, who can make thorns and briars grow instantly out of the ground, and who can also shoot a vine out of her wrist and use it like a whip. However, she is (this gag was inevitable) narcoleptic and falls asleep at inconvenient times. Though amiable while half-asleep, she’s cold and rude when fully awake.
The dark magical girl Gretel (Sayuri Yahagi) has also come to Erde looking for Souta, and she’s armed with a gigantic sword capable of altering gravity. Naturally, she and the Musketeers have to duke it out.
For no particular reason, Snow White immediately throws herself at Souta as soon as she first sees him, and Red Riding Hood, although in a more subdued fashion, also expresses interest in him. Souta’s jealous tsundere childhood friend Ringo (Rie Kugimiya), who gets caught up in the magical shenanigans, works to fend the other girls off. So the show has a harem-comedy element, though it never goes anywhere. As usual for harem comedies, the girls’ obsession with the protagonist is inexplicable; Souta is decidedly milquetoast, and, for that reason, he’s the show’s weak link. I’ll discuss this more later.
Perhaps the most notable thing about the characters is their extra-cutesy “puni plush” design, which can easily confuse the viewer into thinking they’re younger than they are supposed to be: When I watched it the first time, I got through half the series before I realized the protagonists were supposed to be fourteen and not in grade school. In any case, it doesn’t much matter since, considering how loose anime tends to be with characterization, they probably wouldn’t act (or look) much different even if they were supposed to be in grade school. As the series progresses, we eventually meet characters who look more adult and are drawn in a more angular style, signaling the development of a more serious tone.
The Plot
Lots of magical battles ensue, ensue, usually accompanied by a lot of off-the-cuff magical girl phlebotinum that could probably disorient anyone unfamiliar with the special brand of make-it-up-as-you-go illogic that characterizes the genre. The first few episodes set in contemporary Japan are a warm-up; the show improves considerably after the action moves to the fairyland of Phandavale, where the Three Musketeers, along with their earthly companions Souta and Ringo, must hunt for Cendrillon’s castle to rescue Phandavale’s kidnapped king. Although the animation is stiff and often full of shortcuts, the environmental designs are elaborate and lush, and their beauty is better displayed by Phandavale’s ring-shaped clouds and cluttered forests than by Tokyo’s skyscrapers.
For the most part, Fairy Musketeers follows a monster-of-the-week formula, each episode climaxing with a fight against some creature commanded by one or more of Cendrillon’s minions. At first, it mostly avoids recycling the same magical girl attacks over and over, and it gets creative with the way the musketeers combine their powers during a battle. Over time, however, it falls into a rut, especially after Red Riding Hood gets a power-up and a new weapon. Nonetheless, the action sequences, though never exceptional, are competently handled, and Riding Hood and Gretel have one swordfight that’s worth the price of admission.
Discussion
Although Fairy Musketeers makes several fairy-tale references, it isn’t an anime version of Into the Woods or Once upon a Time. The characters have only a slight resemblance to the fairy-tale figures they’re named after. This becomes more apparent as the show progresses and all the major characters have their backstories developed; only the story of Hansel and Gretel much resembles the fairy tale.
Two things weaken an otherwise solid series. First and most immediately obvious is the merchandising, which partly drives the plot; one product placement, in particular, is quite distracting—the “Sweet Phone.” The Sweet Phone is a device the Musketeers use to generate their magical weapons, and it’s incongruous with the setting and premise.
Second is the jammed-in harem-comedy element; the show can’t quite decide if it wants to focus on Red Riding Hood or on Souta as the main protagonist, and Souta has a bad habit of taking center stage even though he does not have the personality to support such a role. Souta is bland even by the generous standards of harem-comedy losers. He’s a generic nice guy without even a quirk to make him endearing, and he has no interesting abilities. As the Key to Erde, he can talk to flowers, which is possibly the lamest superpower I have ever seen. There is simply no reason for three chicks, including two magic-powered action babes, to be all up ons for this guy.
But, sugary though it is, Fairy Musketeers has slightly more on its mind than at first appears. The premise of a divided world, although not unique, is handled in an interesting way. Somewhere in the background is God, who never appears in the story and whose motives the characters can only guess at. Rather boldly, the series opens with a theological discussion: Souta is aware of a folktale describing the dividing of the world; when confronted by a scoffing villain, he defends God’s actions, claiming the split between Erde and Phandavale must have been to protect humanity from a worse fate. Cendrillon is a sympathetic villainess whose misery is the direct result of the dividing; but although her rebellion against God is presented as wrong, there are hints that the uniting of the worlds will eventually happen with God’s blessing and that Cendrillon may at that time find redemption.
