Negi Springfield is more than just your average 10 year old boy. A certified genius who possesses a college graduate-level intellect and the degree to match, he’s also a real life wizard. Well, a wizard in training, anyway. Unlike his scholastic achievements, his magical training still hasn’t been fully completed, and in order to consider himself a full fledged sorcerer, he must complete one final task... Leave Wales and become a teacher at an all girls middle school in Japan! It’s on this unexpected journey that he finds himself at Mahora Academy, a massive, sprawling boarding school that covers all grades from preschool to senior high, and possesses more than a few magical secrets of its own. In his new position, he’ll be in charge of the notorious homeroom class 1-A, which is home to a wild assortment of quirky girls with varying interests, some of whom aren’t exactly as human as they appear. Most importantly, he befriends Asuna Kagurazaka, a brash, straightforward girl with a tragic past, and when she figures out his secret, their fate becomes tied together through the many challenges and surprises ahead. Negi may have magic on his side, but nothing can prepare him for life at Mahora Academy!

There really is no other way to say this; Studio Xebec may be one of the worst animation studios in the history of Japan. Their resume is borderline ghoulish, full of infamously hideous anime whose very names can induce a shudder up the spine of those who’ve seen them. They’re the kind of studio who saves most of their finances and effort for their many ecchi titles, and even those still come out fairly ugly. The 2005 Negima TV series, sadly, is no exception. You can tell right from the first episode that they were working with a miniscule budget, and they had no idea how to work around it, and that does make sense given the lack of experience in the director’s booth. Director Nagisa Miyazaki and Chief Director Nobuyoshi Habara both spent the bulk of their careers doing key animation and storyboard art, and while they had both stepped into a lead role before, it’s really nothing but OVAs between them, and anything beyond that is obscure as hell. And then there’s Negima, the biggest thing either of them took on major directing duties for, and while there are fleeting moments of competence from time to time, Negima is one ugly looking anime..

An interesting thing to note is that when it first aired on TV in the mid 2000s, Negima looked far worse than it does now. It had to be cleaned up considerably for home video, but even then, it’s still one of the worst looking anime I’ve ever seen. I’ve never seen the original televised broadcast, but I have heard from people who did that almost every single character had the wrong hair color, which immediately pissed off ardent fans who were looking for some form of accuracy from Negima’s first animated outing. This was also mostly fixed in the DVD release, but they didn’t fix everything. I don’t mind some of these, like Makie going pink, but Yuna going borderline blonde is an atrocity. Characters are constantly off-model, colors are dull and lifeless more often than not, and the pause button is not Negima’s friend, as these characters make some shockingly derpy faces sometimes. Even in the show’s best moments, usually when the writers are trying to strike a more serious or somber tone, characters' eyes are never set quite right on their faces, especially when multiple characters are in the same shot.

Just about every budget saving technique you can think of is on display at some point in Negima. There are occasional bursts of fluid movement, but they never last for very long, and they’re often shown on loop, while a lot of the shots before and after suffer as a result, basically becoming frozen frames with flapping mouths to compensate for that one shot. I’ve complained in my reviews before about shots where a character is running, but they have so little gravity and weight in the shot that it looks like they’re just an icon being dragged across the screen, and that happens a lot here, although they do put in the effort to expand and shrink that icon as the character moves towards and away from the camera. They also make liberal use of that age-old technique where you do a close-up on the face(s) of one or more characters, and just bounce them all up and down to make it look like everyone’s walking. I don’t know what else to tell you, man, it’s Xebec, and this looks like your standard fare from that now-defunct company.

The animation is so bad, in fact, that this is one of the only anime I’ve ever seen where the opening looked just as bad as the anime itself. Most studios put a considerable amount of money into their openings, because it’s usually the first impression most people will ever get of the show, but woof. The song is fine... It’s your standard upbeat bubblegum-pop tune, not really my kind of thing, but I don’t have any issue with it. Well, except when they start changing up the tune halfway through, then it starts to get kinda grating. The video has two main sections; First, a sequence of Negi’s class playing volleyball in bathing suits, and I suspect the people animating this didn’t know anything about the show, because there are a lot of girls acting out of character here, particularly the ones who are less than socially inclined like Evangeline and Setsuna. “Here’s a list of characters, have them do volleyball or something.” The other major section is just a montage of all 31 girls leaning in to kiss Negi, I’ll explain that in a minute, and while this segment does keep the girls a lot more in character, it also looks a lot more lazy. Although it did become a part of one of my favorite AMV Hell 3 clips.

The English dub is a mixed bag, but it is more on the positive side than the negative. This dub came out in the mid-2000s, and nearly the entire stable of Funimation voice actors from the time was given a role in it. Sometimes multiple. There are a few miscastings, like Setsuna, Ako and Satome, who were all assigned to relative newcomers who kinda sucked and wouldn’t really go onto anything significant in the industry. For the most part, though, the casting is pretty solid. Greg Ayres and Luci Christian were born to play the lead roles of Negi and Asuna, their performances literally perfect. Several actors play multiple roles, and in almost every case, their characters sound nothing like each other(the exception being Alison Viktorin, who plays twins). Most notable for this is Monica Rial, who holds the record at three characters, only one of whom plays to her usual type casting. Laura Bailey is absolutely stunning as both the adorable British villain Evangeline and the arrogant and haughty Ayaka. Out of the noteworthy individual roles, Kate Bristol gives a surprisingly heart-wrenching performance as Sayo, Leah Clark is adorable as Nodoka, and according to Brina Palencia, it was her performance as Yue that got her foot in the door at Funimation, and lead to her becoming one of the studio regulars. There’s a lot of negative qualities in this anime, but the dub is probably its strongest selling point.

If you’re familiar with the name Ken Akamatsu, you probably know him as the auteur behind such titles as Love Hina, Negima and UQ Holder, and if you’re a fan, maybe even the somewhat obscure AI Love You. You also may know him as that one manga author whose works have been notoriously difficult to adapt. Across his entire body of work(except for AI Love You, which was fairly basic), there are several quirks to his writing style that always seem to appear. First of all, and maybe the most obvious, he employs a level of fanservice that floats somewhere between a hard PG and a soft PG-13. From constant panty shots to steam-laden bath scenes, bare bottoms to barely concealed breasts, he uses this somewhat minor level of titillation to hold the attention of less mature viewers as he tells long, involved, sprawling stories full of seemingly episodic plot cul de sacs, with even the most lewd or silly storylines tying into the bigger picture of the narrative in some downright ingenious ways. There’s always some information being revealed, some character being developed, with very few genuinely skippable chapters that, if nothing else, provide memorable moments to less utilized characters.

The problem with all of this is, none of it is really conducive to an anime adaptation, or at least not a profitable one on TV. Akamatsu’s preferred level of fanservice is just a little too much for what’s generally acceptable on TV these days(probably would have been fine in the eighties or nineties) so he doesn’t have that crutch to support his stories, and his stories aren’t simple or commercial enough to get the episode counts they need... You’d generally have to be an established shonen action series to get an extended run over hundreds of episodes like your Narutos and your One Pieces, and Akamatsu’s tastes are definitely more on the esoteric side. To this date, the best Akamatsu adaptations were the OVAs that were only able to tell a small chunk of his stories, and the maerial that took his worlds and characters in a different direction, coming up with their own stories built on the back of what had already been established. This can catch the ire of purists who only want to see a faithful adaptation, and I do get that, but when the source material is impossible to adapt, well, lemons into lemonade.

Negima is, in my opinion, Akamatsu’s magnum opus. Not only is it my favorite manga of his, it’s actually my favorite manga of all time, although I’m not much of a manga reader in general so take that with a grain of salt. Even I have to admit, though, it’s a pretty fucking weird premise. But hey, if the story you’re telling involves magic and it’s NOT weird, you don’t know how to have fun. Unfortunately, in addition to being weird, it’s also a little creepy. Yeah, I’m not going to sugarcoat it, there are elements to this franchise that have aged incredibly poorly. Chief among them being, while Negi is stationed in Japan, he’s supposed to find partners, AKA allies he needs to recruit by gifting them with magical abilities and special artifacts tailored to their skill sets. In order to create this contract with somebody, he has to kiss them on the lips, and every single one of his partners is one of his students. So, not only is a teacher kissing his students, but a bunch of 13-14 year old girls are kissing a ten year old boy.

The only defense I can think of for this is the fact that kissing on the lips doesn’t mean the same thing in every culture, it can be perfectly innocent depending on the context, and that is true, and hey, they’re only kissing because they have to, so what’s the big deal? Well, first off, it is still a choice the writer made. He could have easily had the contract activate with a pinky swear or fist bump or something. Second, it’s not always innocent. There’s tongue involved a few times, and some of the girls remark on how good he kisses, and how soft his lips are. Several of the girls legitimately catch feelings for him, and while I was able to ignore this back in the day because “nah, they’re going to wait until he’s an adult to pursue him for real!” I also didn’t know what Grooming was at the time. Honestly, looking back at all of this from 2023, I don’t know if Negima is my favorite manga anymore... But then I think about all of the badass magic fights and epic story arcs that take place later on, and yeah, it is still my favorite, even if I do have to attach an asterisk to it.

That’s for the manga, though. This anime, on the other hand, doesn’t have the advantage of being awesome later on, because the anime really doesn’t get a later on.

While the manga may start off with silly hijinks and harem-level fanservice, all of that is mainly used to set up the best parts of the story, which come later. This anime, on the other hand, only really covers the silly hijinks and fanservice, and I feel really sorry for Xebec because that was a mistake, but it was a mistake that I don’t know how they could have avoided. Not only were they adapting the absolute worst parts of the manga, but they had to rush through them to fit them into a bare bones time slot, and they suffered heavily as a result. I’m not going to say they didn’t put forth a genuine effort to make all of this material fit, and keep it as coherent as possible, but there was only so much they could do while cutting so much necessary content out of each storyline. I don’t know what it would feel like to watch this anime from scratch with no knowledge of the manga, and I frankly never will know, but even when I try my hardest to look at it without my obvious fanboy bias, the story feels so random and disjointed. This is 100% bias on my part, but I can’t imagine a newcomer to the franchise enjoying this, in fact I can only imagine them sitting there slack jawed with bored, empty eyes.

Having said that, there are some actual bright spots to this adaptation, and like I mentioned in my review of the second adaptation, they’re all in the moments that were NOT in the manga. Yeah, I can kind of excuse the adapted content for failing to hit the mark, because the way Ken Akamatsu wrote them makes them impossible to isolate and reframe, but left to their own devices, these writers went HARD. For a few examples; One of the weaker manga storylines in my opinion was the first Chisame focus episode. Chisame is an anti-social computer nerd who’s secretly also a net idol, and the original version of her story, where Negi discovers this and exposes her to the class, always felt weird and invasive to me. In this anime, the story is stretched into a full episode that makes their interaction feel far more justified and even kind of necessary. Sayo, the ghost girl, gets an origin story in episode 19, to this day the only origin story she’s EVER had, and I’ll be damned if it doesn’t make me cry every time I watch it, it’s fucking incredible. The final five episodes are also anime original, and while I’m not going to spoil them, they honestly make for a stronger ending than the manga itself got. Holy shit, things just get epic out of nowhere.

The worst part of all of this... Worse than how badly the Kyoto trip story arc got fucked up, even... Is that the way this adaptation ends, it really feels like they were setting up for a second season, and while I may be off base with this, it feels like they were planting the seeds to base that season around my favorite story arc in the entire manga, the Mahora Fest arc, a story full of time travel, character development, epic battles that had me gasping every other page, a martial arts tournament with heart-pounding match-ups that left me on the edge of my seat, sprawling across several volumes of the manga, and which has never been animated, even though there’s more than enough content in it to cover and entire 26 episode series... But since this adaptation was such a massive critical and commercial failure, a laughing stock for it’s animation and relentless inaccuracies, this was the last Negima project Xebec would ever do, and the reins were so thereafter handed over to Shaft so that Akiyuki Shinbo could develop his now famous visual style on it. Yeah, that’s right, the Monogatari guy. So I guess you could say it has an important place in anime history, even if it has a mostly unfortunate place in franchise history.

Negima is currently available from Sentai Filmworks. To keep things brief, the second TV adaptation and two OVAs called the Spring and Summer specials are available from the same source, but the rest of the OVAs and the loosely-related finale film have yet to be picked up by anybody, and there’s also a bizarre live action series that’s difficult to find, but well worth the effort. The original manga is available stateside from Kodansha comics.

Everybody has that one franchise that they’re so obsessed with, they’re able to regale people with lists of useless facts and trivia that nobody else knows or cares about, and for me, Negima is one of those. I’ve spoken to plenty of people who flat out despised both TV adaptations, and have long since accepted the fact that they’re never going to get that perfect faithful adaptation they’ve always wanted, but for me? My opinion on this particular adaptation has varied over time... I’ve loved it, I’ve hated it, but ultimately my feelings have always been more charitable than most. It makes me cringe, it makes me cry, it’s a show that established Negima fans and newcomers alike will probably wind up feeling conflicted about. I personally prefer the second adaptation, which went in a totally original direction and just did its own thing, rather than try and fail to adapt Akamatsu’s work like so many others... But there are still elements of this first adaptation that I’ll still always love and treasure, and there is a certain charm to how hard the writers tried, striving against such difficult odds. It’s not a very good show, but there’s just too much good in it to ignore.

I give Negima a 5/10.