Terrific news, everyone. Another month has come and gone, and so it’s time at last for some more Ojamajo Doremi. With Chihayafuru’s second season in the past and third season waiting in 2019, Ojamajo Doremi has once again assumed the mantle of my chief comfort food anime, and it serves that role with absolute distinction. On a plain aesthetic level, Doremi is simply a very good show – excellent characterization, simultaneously beautiful and charming art design, carefully crafted stories, etcetera etcetera. But beyond that, Doremi’s faith in the decency of people, and its gentle sympathy for its heroines’ struggles, is an oasis in a turbulent world, a sunny reading nook that I’m always happy to escape to.

Media that simply comforts you, whose principle goal is to make you feel safe and content and loved, gets a pretty bad rap in many critical circles. Obviously Ojamajo Doremi is intended to offer more than straight comfort food, but I personally feel the general disdain for “pleasant” or “unchallenging” media is fundamentally misguided. This is a very painful and complex world, and after dealing with all our daily challenges, sometimes we don’t want the shows we watch to actively squabble with us, to make us feel pain or attack our worldviews. Sometimes it’s been a long day and we just need a friend who’s there and happy to spend time with us, no expectations, no anxiety, just the natural contentment of being in a place you feel you belong. People deserve media that acknowledges that need, and media which makes us feel loved doesn’t have to be any less insightful, artistically compelling, or emotionally resonant. There is space for joy in the world and space for joy in art, and I’m happy to return to a show that is so willing to share its joy with us. I’m happy you’re all here, and I hope things are going okay. Let’s settle in for an episode of Ojamajo Doremi.

Episode 34

We open with a young girl finding a shell in the sand. Doremi’s backgrounds remain as compelling as ever, finding a minimalist beauty in a composition that’s essentially all composed out of different shades of sea green. The overall effect makes this sequence feel less like an immediate experience and more like a treasured memory – in memories, key moments are often framed in one specific tone or color

And yep, it’s a memory – Aiko’s memory, specifically. A day at the beach with both of her parents. Welp, looks like this episode is gonna break my heart

I take back what I said about comfort food and pleasant shows, Doremi is the worst

Granted, another strength of a show like Doremi is that it’s able to talk about death in a frank and empathetic way, more interested in genuinely engaging with the lived experience of losing a loved one than emphasizing its own dramatic seriousness. Teenage audiences see death as dramatic seasoning, and their stories treat it accordingly – shows aimed at children only use death when they actually mean it, and thus end up with more thoughtful mortality-related narratives

We open on some woman’s high heels and skirt, as she waits outside Aiko’s house for Aiko herself to leave. So is this a story about Aiko’s dad getting a new girlfriend, and Aiko coming to terms with her own feelings regarding that relative to her mother’s absence? There’s certainly a fine story there

Aiko and her father continue to have a truly wonderful rapport. In contrast with Doremi’s classically “ugh I won’t wanna do chores” relationship with her folks, or Hadzuki’s also relatively conventional “beloved daughter of a high-class family,” Aiko and her father essentially act like best friends, playing off each other’s gags and sniping and laughing at each other. It’s both a welcome validation of a very valid parental relationship, and also a convincing and natural way for their relationship to develop. From her mother’s departure onwards, Aiko hasn’t really been able to see her dad as an invincible, distant figure – they share a common vulnerability, and that allows them to laugh like this at each other

Some nicely dramatic shots and new angles conveying Ai’s walk to school, as we’re now adopting the new perspective of this woman following her

It looks like this might be her actual mother

“I Want to See Mom!” Yep

The direction this episode seems unusually focused on fragments of moments – we get lots of close shots of hands, legs, and idle objects, making this episode feel a bit more intimate, and in turn bolstering the characters’ sense of vulnerability

I’m absolutely a sucker for episodes that are constructed to feel like collections of incidental moments until their overarching narrative takes shape, as opposed to laying out their intentions and dramatic arc from the start, and this episode certainly qualifies, even if it’s clear enough what all these disparate little moments are building towards. I just really, really like shows that see incidental but emotionally charged or evocative moments as inherently valuable

This episode is also naturally adding some personal texture to Sugiyama, a classmate who’s never gotten focus before and isn’t truly the focus of this episode, but still gets to express himself through his role as a facilitator of the meeting between Aiko and her mother

Oh my god, this moment is so painful. A panicked piano melody comes in, and then we just silently watch Aiko check the letter, check the clock, and then look entirely crestfallen. Aiko’s emotions are treated so well

Aiko gets briefly furious at Sugiyama, but it’s not his fault. It’s nice that this show allows characters to have emotional outbursts without having them be considered genuine flaws or traits that need to be corrected

Aw jeez, has her dad been hiding her mom’s letters? That’s quite the breach of trust

Yeah, time for that conversation. “I thought you’d be even sadder if you saw them” isn’t much of an excuse, and he seems to know he’s deeply in the wrong this time

And her dad can only default to their normal banter in the wake of her deciding to leave. Aiko’s dad is a very imperfect parent, and a much better character for it. He’s very bad at teaching Aiko things, and can only level with her in certain, often superficial ways. He has too many of his own insecurities to be consistently honest with her, but he is trying

Thankfully she runs into Doremi’s mom, who seems like a much more together parent on the whole

We’ve gotten a variety of shots from both above and below stairs and banisters looking up/down, which is both a consistent Doremi depth-fostering trick and also consistent with this particular episode’s focus on well-observed little moments

“Adults are so hard to understand.” I hear you Doremi

Dear lord. Aiko blames herself for her parents’ divorce, and actually has reason to – she can vividly remember them arguing about who would work and who would take care of her

Of course, as we saw in the previous Aiko-focused chapter, her parents have never really had the most peaceful relationship

“Do you think those old people are more important than your own child!?” God, using his daughter as a weapon to critique his wife’s career choices. This is a brutal episode

Aiko stayed with her father because she thought he’d need her more, and her mother actually agreed, accepting the loss of her daughter for his sake. This story is absolutely merciless

And so they decide to simply fly to Osaka, the sensible solution

I appreciate how as we’ve gotten further into Doremi, the scale of conflicts they’re able to tackle both personally and with magic has naturally expanded. Something like flying by broom to Osaka or using Magical Stage to find Ai’s mom might have been a genuine episode climax a while back, but is just an incidental conflict now

I also still love how Magical Stage never directly solves their problems, it just provides some random push that serendipitously leads them towards the solution. I appreciate magical systems that acknowledge magic itself is a force with personality and a sense of whimsy, not just a supernatural supply of energy

Aiko hiding behind Hadzuki when her mom appears is adorable

Oh damn, her mother remarried, and even has a new baby. We’re really plowing through some tough material here, and giving Aiko’s feelings the space they need all along the way

Ai runs away, and the episode comes full circle – we get a near exact repeat of that initial composition of Aiko on the beach with her family, except the foggy sea green of her memories has been replaced by a melancholy autumnal twilight

Oh those assholes, it’s actually someone else’s baby

And the resolution is ultimately pretty subtle, and not directly tied to Aiko’s relationship with her mother – instead, she realizes she’s actually okay, and that’s in large part because she has such supportive friends beside her. Sometimes our sad stories don’t have neat endings; sometimes we just realize we’re still alive, still have people who love us, and still need to keep on walking

And Done

Ahaha, the moment after I comment on what an emotional lift Doremi provides, we get one more utterly harrowing Aiko episode. I’m certainly not complaining, though – the episodes that are directly centered on our leads’ most personal feelings tend to be the strongest, and Aiko in particular has a family situation that perfectly lends itself to Ojamajo Doremi’s style of frank and sensitive storytelling. In this episode’s case, I’m most impressed with the fundamental, inescapable messiness of this situation.

Aiko’s father has made serious mistakes, but the episode didn’t resolve with him paying those mistakes back. Aiko desperately wants to meet her mother, but the episode also didn’t give us that reunion. Instead, we simply closely followed Aiko’s muddled feelings through a very tough series of personal events, as she lashed out and broke down and searched around for an answer to her vague feelings of guilt and loneliness and loss. Blaming her father didn’t make her feel better, but when she got to Osaka, she wasn’t certain that meeting her mother was what she wanted, either. The complexity of Aiko’s feelings, and this episode’s dedication to respecting that complexity, meant it felt vividly real at all times, and its minor victories felt that much more meaningful. Ojamajo Doremi continues to be a tremendously thoughtful character drama with a laudably light touch.

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