Star vs. the Forces of Evil

Plot description from English Wikipedia:

Star Butterfly is a magical princess from the dimension of Mewni and the heiress to the royal throne of the Butterfly Kingdom. By tradition, she is given her family’s heirloom wand on her 14th birthday and was known to be the most energetic and silly child through the royal family. After she accidentally sets fire to the family castle, her parents, King River and Queen Moon Butterfly, decide that a safer option is to send her to Earth as a foreign exchange student so that she can continue her magic training there. On Earth, Star befriends student Marco Diaz and lives with his family in suburban Los Angeles while attending Echo Creek Academy. Going on a series of misadventures using “dimensional scissors” with the ability to open portals, Star and Marco must deal with everyday school life while protecting Star’s wand from falling into the hands of Ludo, a half-bird, half-man creature from Mewni who commands a group of monsters.

Tonight we continue season 2 with the following segments:

• “Star vs. Echo Creek” — Star destroys police property and runs from the cops.
• “Wand to Wand” — Ludo learns to use his own wand.
• “Starstruck” — our introduction to Mina Loveberry, a Mewman on Earth and Star’s idol, currently homeless but aspiring to rule the world. I’m surprised we haven’t been introduced to her yet.
• “Camping Trip” — Marco desperately wants to show Star a nearly-extinct geyser, but things keep getting in the way.

Little Witch Academia (2013) + Little Witch Academia: The Enchanted Parade (2015)

Little Witch Academia is an anime workia created by Yoh Yoshinari as his directorial debut, and produced by studio Trigger. You may also know Trigger for such works as BNA (also directed by Yoshinari), Kill la Kill, Inferno Cop, Space Patrol Luluco, Promare, New Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, etc, or for being seen as a sort of successor to the legendary anime studio Gainax. Trigger’s “DNA” more specifically is identified with the former Gainax employees who worked on Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann and Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt, with the studio’s founder, Hiroyuki Imaishi, being the director of these two anime.

As for Little Witch Academia’s creator: Yoh Yoshinari cites Gennady Tartakovsky, Craig McCracken, and Lauren Faust as some of his favorite creators within Western animation, and this definitely shows in Little Witch Academia: When I first watched LWA, I was very much struck by how My Little Pony-ish it felt. In fact, the Little Witch Academia TV anime from 2017 was literally the thing that turned me from a brony into an anime fan to begin with, and with that ushered in a new chapter in my relationship to femininity in media. References to and influences from Western animation in LWA don’t stop at Lauren, Craig and Gennady, however: Little Witch Academia also contains characters named Avery (named after Tex Avery), and Hannah and Barbara (named after Hanna-Barbera), so like many other works of Trigger (and Gainax before it), Little Witch Academia wears its Western influence on its sleeve.

My own first time watching LWA started with the TV series, but for this watch party I’ll be showing the works in chronological order, starting with the 2013 short film and then the 2015 feature film. We’ll start the TV series two weeks from now and continue it until the end of the year.

The 2013 short film is notable for being created for Anime Mirai 2013, part of the Young Animator Training Project funded by Japan’s Agency for Cultural Affairs in order to, well, the project’s name is pretty self-explanatory. Almost like the Japanese government understands the importance of soft power or something! Piss on the Yasukuni Shrine, by the way.

The 2015 feature film was originally going to be another short film, but a Kickstarter was set up to fund it, and it received enough funds to double its runtime. People really liked the 2013 short film and wanted to see more of it, evidently.

The movies do not necessarily have full continuity with each other.

Plot description for the 2013 film, from Anilist:

For young witches everywhere, the world-renowned witch Shiny Chariot reigns as the most revered and celebrated role model. But as the girls age, so do their opinions of her—now just the mention of Chariot would get a witch labeled a child. However, undeterred in her blind admiration for Chariot, ordinary girl Atsuko Kagari enrolls into Luna Nova Magical Academy, hoping to someday become just as mesmerizing as her idol.

However, the witch academy isn’t all the fun and games Atsuko thought it would be: boring lectures, strict teachers, and students who mock Chariot plague the campus. Coupled with her own ineptness in magic, she’s seen as little more than a rebel student. But when a chance finally presents itself to prove herself to her peers and teachers, she takes it, and now it’s up to her to stop a rampaging dragon before it flattens the entire academy.

Plot description for the 2015 film, from Anilist sourcing MAL Rewrite:

You can tell witch training is not going swimmingly for the young sorceresses Akko, Lotte, and Sucy—they face expulsion for screwing up one class too many, and their only way out is if they successfully organize their academy’s annual parade through a nearby town. But when they stumble upon the momentous discovery that the objective of the parade is to humiliate witches and commemorate their past subjugation, Akko decides it is time for a change: It is time to show the world how fantastic modern witches truly are! However, with the other girls struggling to keep up with Akko’s grandiose ambitions, and everything from mischievous boys to slumbering giants getting in their way, maybe pulling it off will require not only all the magical prowess the pupils of Luna Nova Magical Academy can muster, but also a miracle.

Content warnings for Star vs. the Forces of Evil include:

• FLASHING LIGHTS (all episodes)
• Children in peril (all episodes)
• Copaganda (Star vs. Echo Creek)

See also DTDD and IMDb.

Content warnings for Little Witch Academia (2013) include:

• Blood and gore

Neither DTDD nor IMDb provide any notable content warnings for Little Witch Academia: The Enchanted Parade, which is rated TV-Y7.

Star vs. the Forces of Evil was made on Tongva land

Star vs. the Forces of Evil was animated at Disney Television Animation’s studio in Tovaangar, the unceded homeland of the Uto-Aztecan-speaking Tongva people. More specifically, the animation studio in question is located in Glendale, Los Angeles County, near the historical Tongva villages of Wiqanga, Tujunga, Hahamongna, Ashwaangna, and Maungna, between the Verdugo and Santa Monica mountains whose springs had long provided fresh water for the Tongva.

The streets of Los Angeles were built by the slave labor of Tongva people arrested by settler police for “vagrancy and public drunkenness” after Seppoland annexed Tovaangar without treaty. The Tongva people today are still unrecognized by the governments of California and Seppoland, while the California Natives who did sign treaties with Seppoland never had those treaties ratified. This lack of Indigenous treaties in California presents unique legal challenges for the state’s Natives compared to Natives elsewhere in Seppoland.

The economic prosperity of Los Angeles that allowed an animation industry to develop in the city necessarily has its basis in the continuous and systemic disposession of Tongva people from their land. The Tongva had no say in approving the construction of Disney’s animation studio and sees none of the profit generated by the cartoons drawn on their land. And although piracy avoids putting money directly into the pockets of settler capitalists, unpaid fan labor such as pirate uploading still contributes to the overall values of the intellectual properties in question, just as any other labor adds to the value of any other commodity.

Tongva people still exist and still live in Tovaangar today. The Tongva still fight, as they have for centuries, to exercise their sovereignty over their homeland and resources. The Tongva are not a monolith nor in any way static: they are stratified by class like any other nation under capitalism; they adapt new technologies to their needs like any other nation; and also like any other nation, they have individual members intersected by every axis of oppression and each with their own individual perspectives.

Here’s a relevant charity:

• https://www.tongva.land/

I would also recommend listening to “An Indigenous Perspective On The Chicano Movement”, as it is very relevant to the topic of Mexican colonization of the Southwest and its lingering impact on the settler-colonial contradiction in e.g. Tovaangar today.

SOLIDARITY WINS THE FREEDOM OF NATIONS!