Sometimes there are creators that you will follow into any project just to see what they’re going to do as even their failures are intriguing. With a pretty lengthy career behind him, albeit with some big gap years, Yasuomi Umetsu is one of those directors that I pay attention to when it comes to anime properties. A lot of directors just work on adaptations and rarely work on their own material while some just dig into the same thing over and over again. Umetsu’s certainly known for the more fanservice-oriented aspects of his characters and their designs, but the draw for me has been the combination of that with the inventiveness of the direction itself. Working with Michiko Itou on this series, Wizard Barristers is a rather fun little twelve-episode romp that takes us into some interesting places even as it works a familiar pattern. It’s a series where both journey and ending are familiar yet still worth the ride as a whole.
The series centers around seventeen-year-old Cecil Sudou, a young woman of Japanese-Canadian descent who has become the youngest Wizard Barrister in history. This world has magic in it and it’s treated like mutant powers in a way where it becomes realized during puberty, you have to register with the governments around the world that you’re a wizard, and it’s prohibited from use through some elaborate legislation that looks to be universal. So, if there’s anything the world can agree on it’s not letting powerful people operate uncontrolled. The interesting and disturbing part of all of this is that actions involving magic are brought to the Magic Court where the defendants are allowed a defense under the purview of an all-powerful judge. None of them are wizards themselves and often the punishment for the use of magic is being sent to a facility where you await your turn for execution. These executions can take years to happen, but there’s such a simple and seemingly quick system in place for the actual court side of it that it feels very lopsided. A lot of this comes from the view by many people that Wizards aren’t that at all – people. They’re something else and almost like animals that when they go astray must be put down immediately.
Cecil has become a wizard barrister in order to get a retrial for her mother, who was accused of murdering a police officer six years prior in defense of Cecil. There’s a host of small complications that comes from this which are introduced early on and then kind of shuttled to the background for most of the series. We’re given that as her reason for being as intense as she is, in a cute comical seventeen-year-old way, and it largely works since she has to go through the motions of joining a firm called Butterfly Law Firm and going up the ranks before she can really take it back to trial, hopefully with new evidence. The material with her mother gets revisited towards the end as the truth of that time comes out, something that’s brought out in small doses along the way so that it works as a solid series of reveals. It’s a standard mystery piece with some larger trappings to it that the series doesn’t have the time to wholly invest in, but it’s layered well enough so that it makes sense as the Big Bad is finally revealed and all the motivations and actions connect and make sense. It’s a piece that could, admittedly, make for a pretty solid and engaging two-hour film that here just gets “padded” out with more character material to make it and the world more fully realized.
As you can expect from a series like this we get a decent cast of supporting characters who in the end are all about getting Cecil’s journey to where it needs to be. The members of the Butterfly Law Firm are certainly familiar types, from the gruff and only male member (with hilarious Umetsu-designed hair) partner named Seseri to the serious senior barrister with Ageha and partner who’s trying to make sure it all works together. Cecil gets to come on board at the same time as Hotaru, someone who is a bit older and far more serious and just a bit resentful of Cecil and her ways to some degree, and her time is made a bit worse by Sasori, the man-crazy sexual one here that’s all about being dirty. There’s also the curious Tento, a paralegal at the place who from the get-go just feels off – and rightly so.
What the show ends up doing overall, however, is having a good bit of fun. And sometimes that’s the more important thing than some deep or big overall storyline. The main cast operates well and it’s easy to get into them and Cecil in a positive way. Mind you, these are not fully realized characters as we don’t see anything outside of their business life side. But that also means thankfully that we avoid hot spring trips and other usual fluff pieces, so it’s a trade-off to be sure. But as most of us know, we only know most people through their professional lives so it works to bring us a good look at them and their personalities during all of it. The series works a pretty good forward energy and that helps to make it a lot more engaging and fun, especially thanks to some fantastic animation. There are a lot of neat things with the magic – even if they do go with the whole magical mecha thing that I just abhor – and the visual design for the magic is just striking and very well done. But the character animation and backgrounds are both quite strong as well and the end result is something that just clicks really well and helps to smooth over some of the rough edges of the story.
As a side note, the show does take an episode where Cecil goes home to visit her father, who has obviously been separated from her mother. In a welcome twist, he’s in Canada and she goes there to visit him with Hotaru. The fun part for me is that the plane trip takes them from Tokyo to Boston first and we see rarely used anime landmarks like the tower at Logan, which was nicely done. The reference pictures they used were great and I swear I can even pick out which part of the Red Line they used for the MBTA sequence. Small details like that are just captured well and it made me hopeful that they captured other areas well. The trip to Canada itself was done by car and this has its own little adventure along the way, but the Boston sequence done in brief was a wonderful little delight.
Wizard Barristers was a property that I was glad was more fun than anything else and that’s made it a bit of a weird comfort show. At the time of its release and the years since there’s been little chatter about it and that’s unfortunate, even if it does give it some small cult vibes among those that do know and enjoy it. The series works the interesting angle of laws of man when dealing with men and women of magic and it delves into a rather fun big event towards the end with some quick reveals and twists and a final episode that’s just essentially a single court battle with only a bit of magic. While Wizard Barristers won’t set anyone on fire, I definitely came away from it at the end I’m still kind of hopeful that we might get a continuation because it’s an interesting world and some fun characters and concepts.
