Omishi Mahou Gekijou: Risky★Safety

I won’t say I don’t like Risky Safety. It was fine. It’s just that this anime is just kind of like any other light-hearted slice of life show. Sure, there’s stuff about love, jealousy, and depression, but it doesn’t consume the story enough to actually make it a big part of the story. If anything, it’s subtext. Basically, Risky Safety is just yet another light-hearted comedy anime with a few more emotional or darker themes thrown into it. The music may be the best part of this anime. Honestly the ending theme may just be the best part of this whole thing. Risky safety wasa cool concept though, even if on paper it seems overdone. It’s another one of those shows where a regular person has a supernatural thing come into their life, yeah that’s pretty normal, but the thing that comes into her life is an angel and a devil. When you say nice things or feel happy the devil turns into the angel, and if you’re sad and say bad things then she turns into a devil. The angel is Safety and the devil is Risky. I like that concept. I just wish they did more with that concept than what they did. Some episodes used it better than others. Risky safety is a fine show, but I think there’s a reason nobody talks about it. It just isn’t interesting enough to talk about or recommend. It’s just slightly above average.

A common concept in Japanese media is the concept of "Gaiden", it is usually translated as "side-story" or "spin-off", but the philosophy behind it is deeper, being a concept that accommodates multiple stories about a certain media that don't necessarily line-up in a necessarily or that might even contradict one another. I suppose that it is because of being used to "Gaiden" that Japanese audiences might've been more open to the idea of adaptations of manga that largely alter their source materials, being pretty much original works some times. Risky Safety is one such case. The original manga (Or, at the very least, the first three chapters, whichwas all I could find) seems to be a collection of short (One-chapter long) stories (Indeed, Omshi's, the author, magical theater) whose elements either get repurposed or cameo'd in the anime (e.g. The design of a character in the first chapter being re-used as the design for the "Great Angel" character in one of the later episodes, the characters of Fazzy and Kyouta from chapter two appearing as a cameo at the end of the anime's second arc, etc), meaning that, for all intents and purposes, the anime is an original story, and while it is tagged as "Shounen" due to it's original manga, I would argue that the anime was made to appeal to a more "Shoujo" demographic (Bear in mind that it started airing one and a half years after the airing of CardCaptor Sakura and it aired alongside it in the same day of the week one hour later). Our story follows Risky, an apprentice shinigami, and Safety, an apprentice angel. Both, due to an incident, share the same body and are trying to gather enough points to become full-fledged versions of themselves, Risky gaining control of the body whenever someone nearby expresses negative emotions, and Safety whenever someone nearby expresses positive emotions. It also follows their relationship with Moe, a middle-schooler that dates a boy younger than her, and the small "happinesses" and "sadnesses" of her life. That might feel like a boring premise, but it really isn't: Risky Safety often has interesting shots, shot composition, cuts, or something happening on-screen in it's yashikei vibes. Indeed, while watching it I kept thinking on how LITTLE a lot of modern anime moves or does interesting things by comparison. It might alter between the simple joys of seeing Safety writing a letter using a pen that is comically large for her size, to episodes about sci-fi battles presented in the form of kamishibai, or even an episode told completely like a silent movie. Perhaps due to it's episodes being a third of the length of an ordinary anime episode, it creates this effect of it being "calm" and "fast paced" at the same time. There are three main reasons why someone might discover or be drawn to Risky Safety: 1: Being one of the earliest roles of Sakamoto Maaya in which, similar to the earliest roles of Mizuki Nana, she has a voice different than the one often associated with her nowadays. (Also, if my "Shoujo" argument is still not convincing enough, guess who was singing the CardCaptor Sakura third opening, which was playing during the exact months that Risky Safety was airing) 2: Being an early moe work. 3: It's color palette. No, seriously, it's what made me watch it, I absolutely adore that low-saturation palette that some works of that era had. Without getting into spoilers, I might ask people to be patient with the Fazzy arc (Episodes 7-10), which feels the most "detached" from the rest of the series (And I say this about a series that has episodes about Moe with her school friends... and episodes about Kaijuu battles), but other than that, it's a series with a good unexpected humor (From a Japanese folklore story suddenly having spaceship battles... to an episode which features a pet monkey dressing like Terry Bogard that runs away from home to search for stronger opponents. No, I'm not making this shit up.). Other than that, lovely character designs with a good sense of three-dimensionality to them and a good performance by Iwatsubo Rie, who managed to make pretty distinct voices and ways of speaking for Risky and Safety.