For a while now I have been a fair person when it comes to my reviews and the subjects in question but a lot of times I have to be "That guy". W.I.T.C.H. sucks, and I'm sure there are fans of this knockoff anime using tropes from a equally washed up idea but I stand by what I just said. But maybe I should make my case reasonable to illustrate my point.
Right out of the starting gate is the title, W.I.T.C.H.. It sounds cool I mean too cool for some westernized Sailor Moon clone to be called until you later realize the title makes very little sense. With W.I.T.C.H. as your title, logically the show should be about a team of spell casting WITCHES with a creative story and whatnot but the characters are designed to look nothing like that...at all. And you will get this impression from the opening alone. So why is it called W.I.T.C.H. in the first place you ask? Well all the first letter in each of the main characters names spells witch. So rather than come up with a design that better reflects the title or come up with a title that makes a LOT more sense they went with this.
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| Witch indeed... |
The show itself tries to invoke some Lord of the Rings imagery with the tone and the setting but it barely works when more often than not they prefer to use the more modern setting than their more fantasy based setting. They had something more interesting than Sailor Moon and they wasted it. Unlike Sailor Moon they had a better mystery to work with since their "princess" character wasn't a part of the team and nor was it obvious who it was. The main problem with most of these copycat shows is that their plots require a lot of stupidity to work and it doesn't help when the show uses a summoning gimmick worse than Captain Planet.
Unlike Captain Planet who needs all 5 characters alive and healthy to save the day, our "W.I.T.C.H." girls need the leader present to transform and the leader requires her necklace to start the transformation. So the villains plan of attack should have been to get rid of her or steal the necklace but they try each plan once and give up.
And the logic around the diversity of the cast is a little off. While Anime magical girl show all the characters are Japanese (of course), the westernized shows have this habit to give each character an ethnicity. The reason why it so odd is that two of the characters are Asian. They have the obvious Chinese/Japanese (I know she's Chinese but usually the writers of similar shows can't choose) and the other is African/Asian (to be honest it's not clear). So what I was thinking is that they only needed one possibly the African/Asian since it's unique and have some other ethnicity represented but that's just me.
The first season was a passable little romp but the second was where things got stupid. Somehow the original leader of the Guardians (its like they went out of their way to make the title meaningless) returns to take over the world or worlds (there's More than one apparently) and to me it felt like they handed her everything with without any resistance. After everything comes ahead the show just swaps her out for the villain(s) from season one. Its like seeing Goku fight Freeza for 3 hours only to replace him with Raditz or something. They sequel baited a third season but it never fell through. I don't blame them since this show blows. Winx Club has better marketing and more blatant pandering, Angel's Friends has a more interesting premise and both shows title makes MORE sense.
All this show is a washed up cash-in on a idea that sucked to begin with.
