Trivia / Little Witch Academia (2013)

• Anime First: The short film is the original material, but it received a couple of manga adaptations on Ultra Jump and Ribon.
• Breakthrough Hit: For Yoh Yoshinari.
• Channel Hop: The short film was originally watchable through YouTube and Crunchyroll before it got removed from both and moved to Netflix in 2015, where it remained til it got removed in late 2019.
• Two Voices, One Character: Interestingly, unlike the other dubs, the Latin America and Brazilian dubs had two different voice actresses play the roles of Ursula and Shiny Chariot as opposed to one voice for both identities, with the Latin America dub having Carolina Villanueva and Doris Cuevas and the Brazilian dub having Miriam Ficher and Flávia Saddy as Ursula and Shiny Chariot, respectively. This only applies to the short film however as the TV series would have one actress play Chariot/Ursula like the other dubs, with the Latin America dub replacing both voice actresses entirely with Gigliola Mariangel. However, Flávia Saddy did briefly reprise her role as Chariot in the Brazilian dub of the first episode, before being played by Miriam Ficher for the rest of the TV series.
• What Could Have Been:
  • A booklet released with the film's Blu-ray release, goes into several ideas and concepts that never made it into the final film, including Sucy's original characterization (who was supposed to be portrayed as a loser before Yoshinari gave Sucy her current mischievous Deadpan Snarker characterization in order to have a character that can play off and comment on Akko and her actions) and background, a scene that would have featured Akko studying to get into Luna Nova prior to attending it and a Darker and Edgier tone, amongst other ideas.
  • There were plans to have a vampire student known as Elizabeth◊ who would have served as a mischievous antagonistic figure in both this film and early plans for what would become Little Witch Academia: The Enchanted Parade. Though she was ultimately scrapped in both films, elements of her would end up going to Sucy and the idea of an antagonist would later be revisited in the TV series via Croix, though she's very different from Elizabeth.
  • The promotional poster for the film features several unused characters (two of which are detailed more below), as well as early designs for the main cast and the dragon that look very different from the final film's designs.
  • The Japanese only book Little Witch Academia Chronicle talks about several unused ideas:
    • Diana was much meaner and not The Ace that she became. She would have also opened the iron maiden thanks to Elizabeth's involvement.
    • Besides Elizabeth, there were two other students that never made the cut, a tomboyish student who fought with a sword called Samantha and a mad scientist character called Monica who is shown to use Magitek in concept art. All three were cut as the team found them unnecessary. Elements of the other two unused characters though would go to Sucy and later Amanda and Constanze and they do appear on the above promo poster (Samantha being the girl with the short green hair and Monica being the girl with the red spiky hair). Concept art of Samantha and Monica has also been posted on the Enchanted Parade kickstarter, which can be seen here.
    • Along with it being Darker and Edgier, the film was gonna incorporate a lot more Black Comedy than it ended up doing.
  • Sucy's mom was gonna appear in the film at one point◊, though for unknown reasons, she got cut out of the film. She did eventually appear in Chapter 4 of the Teri Terio manga a couple of years later, however, albeit with a very different design from the planned design.
  • One of Sucy's early concepts was the idea of having her body parts be prone to splitting off from her, with Sucy sending some of them to do a part time job as a magic show assistant on her behalf and her head occasionally falling off as a Running Gag. This was all cut out, however, as the team felt that this would make her stand out a bit too much.
  • Concept art reveals that Ursula was originally a smoker at one point and that Nelson would have sported an eyepatch, as well as a unique plane-based broom.

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