Ah, now I understand. Just like Mahou Shoujotai, the episodes of Arusu the Adventure are directed by different people. Now everything makes sense: the major difference between Mahou Shoujotai and Arusu the Adventure is that there seems to be hardly any communication or cooperation between them. The bad point for this is that there’s now way to get a good continuous storyline out of it. The good point is that now, every director can go for something that he or she finds important. Episode 1 went for humour, while forsaking any storyline. Episode 2 went for flashy graphics and symbolism with rushed storytelling, and for the third episode, the storytelling and direction rocks, but the art style is all over the place.
It’s interesting: when you paste all these good points together, you get what I loved so much about Mahou Shoujotai, and I suspect that the final three episodes will only confirm this. It’s quite interesting how each episode had felt so incredibly different, and yet similar somehow, because of this. While the previous episode felt rushed, this episode knew exactly how to use its time. The two highly ranked witches run into a new kind of sprite that just hatched, though they can’t yet deliver it to the sprites-tower because it’s too young and it couldn’t be used for magical ingredients yet.
The sprite is a very delicate one, and needs careful attention if it needs to grow up, so the two witches decide to take care of it until it’s fully grown. This proved to be a more difficult task than they imagined, as they can’t get it to eat. They then heard of some rumours that Sheila once took care of the same sprite, and with that they get enough pointers to take care of it well. In the process, they get really attached to it.
As it turns out, when Sheila took care of her version of the sprite, it turned into a huge disaster. It turns out that she did transfer it to the sprites’ tower, and after that it became incredibly angry at her when they took away its horn, and went on a rampage. Because of this, Sheila’s superiors ordered her to take the sprite away as soon as it developed its horn.
Overall, this was a lovely episode, and you can really see that the director of this one really liked to experiment with his shots. There were some really creative shots there, and they’d even make the art direction in Hakaba Kitarou and Mononoke look uninspired. Seriously, I’d wish that more other series would adopt such a daring style of direction that’s all over the place. It’s another reason why I fell in love with the original series. Still, I think that the director took a few too many liberties with his messy art-style, as Arusu, Sheila and Eva look a tad too disproportionate at times. I now understand that it takes a while to see the real charm of this OVA, and after the disappointment of the previous episode, I’m hungry for more!
