Little Witch Academia Episode 8: Sucymania

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I absolutely adored this episode. I was waiting forever for a Sucy episode, and it was strange, wacky, confusing, fun, and just very Trigger. I don’t even care that this episode had absolutely nothing to do with plot, I love Sucy!

I’m sure there were many references that I completely missed. The only one that I can clearly remember was seeing Sucy as Obi-wan, and of course the Sleeping Beauty parody. There was just so many things going on at such a quick pace that had me laughing that it was hard to catch every single thing happening.

So this episode, Sucy is lost in a deep sleep after she drank a strange drink she had created in order to boost her magic powers. The next morning, Lotte and Akko find Sucy with mushrooms around her, not stirring a bit. Lotte figures out that Sucy is in a Sleeping Witch situation and that one of them has to be go inside of her and wake her up in there. Since Lotte is the only one of them that can cast spells (they can’t call the professors or they’ll get in trouble), Akko volunteers to take the mission.

We saw so many sides of Sucy that I was surprised. On the outside she seems cynical and mysterious, and she is, but we learned that she has these other sides of her that she hides away from people. Some are more stranger than others like the alpaca one, the stereotypical angel and devil, the cutesy one that wants to dote on cute small animals. And there’s even a Sucy that wants to get into night fall. But Sucy kills off these many sides to her but Akko doesn’t like what she sees and frees the many Sucys, but that just causes disorder and craziness ensues with a terrifying monster. I’m not sure if anything was accomplished this episode because the whole journey through Sucy’s mind was treated like it was a dream, but Sucy and Akko seemed to have remembered everything in the end (like Akko carrying Sucy’s books for a month). Either way, this episode we got to see what went on in Sucy’s Mushroom Kingdom head and the many facets of our mysterious witch.

As usual, this episode gave us lots of comedy that had me laughing out loud, but one moment actually touched my heart. The black and white silent film depicting Sucy’s memories was my favorite part this episode. For one thing, the animation was adorable and extremely well done. It was drawn with an early 1900’s American/Steamboat Willie cartoon style that gave me so much joy and made the mini showing so innocent and charming. Sucy’s memories were shown, with everyone shown in a certain style telling us how she saw that person. Such as, Diana was tall and had a long nose because Sucy thinks she’s snooty and all that, which made Akko laugh. But then we see Akko, who’s small and funny looking, and we see her messing up and Sucy playing pranks on her. It’s only Akko in this funny style as we saw Lotte and Sucy herself looking normal and cute in the art style. Even though it appears Sucy is being mean to Akko, it made us see just how much she treasures her time with Akko and Lotte. They’re all fun and funny moments, but then we get the scene on the bridge from the first episode, when they first met. For a moment the cartoony art style changes to a detailed anime style, showing us just how important that was to Sucy. Even if Sucy won’t say it out loud, she loves her friends, and it’s sweet.

Akko manages to wake up Sucy and everything is back to normal. This episode was mainly to build character for Sucy and I think they did well. It was still a little strange though, and so was the ending. But I applaud Trigger for the outstanding animation. They switched between many art styles, had crazy action moments, the facial expressions were as hilarious as ever. This is probably the best episode yet, at least for me. I love you, Trigger!