2017-2018 modern fantasy, shounen manga adaptation, 24 episodes:
AniDB.
Unwanted orphan Hatori Chise is bought at auction by the monstrous
magician Elias Ainsworth, to be his apprentice… and his bride. vt The
Ancient Magus' Bride.
There are some very obvious issues of power asymmetry and consent
there, which the anime deals with by completely ignoring them. (Also
ignored: why Ainsworth wants a bride in the first place.) This is
eight volumes of manga compressed into about nine hours of video, so
maybe that sort of detail got lost in conversion; I have to review the
show I watched, not the show plus a bunch of extra information.
What I watched was a beautifully-drawn setting of (mostly) rural
England as imagined by Japanese artists who have probably never been
there, plus properly inhuman fairies, dragons, and other
strangenesses, and plots that are rather on the bitty side, not so
much episodic as seeming to skip over large chunks. It's certainly
possible to keep track of what's going on, but it's hard work at
times, since some episodes deal with just a short series of events
while others are clearly skipping through or past significant events.
Character designs are solid and readily recognisable, though, and
while I don't normally notice soundtrack music, here it's very
effective at setting a mood.
So it's strange, and disjointed, but that fits the magical strangeness
of the tales being told; many characters get less time than I'd have
liked, and perhaps a pure anime production would have shrunk the cast
a bit, but they're all interesting. The pace of story-telling is
sometimes perversely slow, and this certainly isn't an all-action
show, though it has its share of fights. It demands a certain amount
of engagement, but also rewards it.
No sequel has been announced.
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