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"Let's all have a happy time!"
Akko Kagari.

Little Witch Academia: The Enchanted Parade is a Japanese animated film and the second installment of the Little Witch Academia franchise. It premiered for Kickstarter pledgers July 3, 2015note  and was released for the general public on October 9 of the same year.

Akko, Sucy, and Lotte are tasked with planning the annual Witch Parade, a parade that commemorates the Witch Hunts of the middle ages after they have once again caused trouble. They are not the only troublemakers tasked with the "prestigious" task as they are joined by Amanda O'Neill, a wannabe thief; Constanze Braunschbank Albrechtsberger, a Magitek Gadgeteer Genius; and Jasminka Antonenko, a Big Eater. However, Akko, not approving of the shameful and humiliating nature of the Witch Parade, decides to completely transform it into a fun and wondrous parade that celebrates magic in the vein of her idol's shows titled The Happy Time Project. However, her overambitious ideas and insensitive tendencies end up causing tension and conflict between the main trio, which culminates with a falling out between them after Akko accidentally tore up Lotte's music sheet. Can she manage to get the parade working with Amanda, Jasminka and Constanze, will the trio resolve their conflict and be friends again and more importantly, can they stop an unsealed giant from ruining everything?

The film was notably crowdfunded by an incredibly successful Kickstarter project, which mananged to reach its primary goal of $150,000 in only 5 hours and by the time the project ended a month after, it had raised over $600,000 overall, four times its original goal.


Little Witch Academia: The Enchanted Parade provides examples of:

  • Admiring the Abomination: When the giant reveals its full self in, Akko's reaction isn't freaking out but rather "Whoa, this is a giant...?"
  • All Part of the Show: A combination of factors releases a magical rock giant during the town festival. Professor Ursula plays it off like this a show that the Wizarding School is putting on, and has them cheer encouragement as Akko, Lotte and Sucy defeat it. Funnily enough, Akko did want to put on a show like this earlier, but it fell through.
  • Apathetic Citizens: When the group of witch-hating bullies that had attacked Akko and company earlier on return and sabotage the parade, no one lifts a hand to stop them.
  • Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: Amanda O'Neill is being punished for breaking and entering the school vaults and attempted theft of an artifact. Constanze is being punished for smuggling, producing, and selling hi-tech contraband on school grounds. Meanwhile, Jazminka is being punished because she won't stop eating in class.
  • Art Shift: The scene turns for a couple of seconds into an 8-bit Shoot 'Em Up featuring a witch on her broom. It's revealed to be a game that Constanze is playing on her laptop/robot familiar. The scene goes by so fast that one can barely process it. Also, the representation of how Luna Nova's magic stone works have a simpler style than the regular animation.
  • Beauty Equals Goodness: While there are no real villains in The Enchanted Parade, the mayor is a diminutive caricature of a man with an ego several times his own size and directly responsible for the giant's awakening.
  • Big Damn Heroes: Lotte and Sucy return in time to save the day when things are looking bleak.
  • Breaking the Fellowship: Akko's ideas and tendencies ends up causing conflict between her, Sucy and Lotte that ends with them temporarily breaking their friendship and Lotte and Sucy leaving Akko. They do ultimately come back to save the day though and become friends with Akko again by the end.
  • But for Me, It Was Tuesday: Played for Laughs. Akko and company have been brought before Finnelan so many times they have lost count, and when trying to recall the actual reasons, Sucy and Akko start admitting things they haven't actually been punished for.
  • Catapult to Glory: Akko gets into a jury-rigged catapult, due to being unable to fly a broom, and launches herself onto the unsealed rock monster to try and free Thomas from its grasp.
  • Chekhov's Gun: The Luna Lana spell and Lotte's ancestral song in The Enchanted Parade.
  • Covers Always Lie: One of the very first teaser posters for the film appears to have been made back when the film was in its development stages as it features an incredibly somber Akko with her belongings leaving Luna Nova in winter, which never happens in the film proper.
  • Crush Blush: Thomas, the ringleader of the band of kids who harass the witches, sports some of this when he's rescued by Diana.
  • Demoted to Extra: Diana doesn't play much of a role in the film compared to the previous film and the later TV series, only appearing in a few key scenes across the entire film. Her Girl Posse, Hannah and Barbara, also only appear once in the film compared to the previous film.
  • Die Laughing: Akko and Sucy, during class, manage to make a giant mushroom monster that releases a type of gas that causes those who breathe it in to collapse in laughter. Later Sucy, when discussing how to make the parade more enjoyable, suggests using an army of them on the town. The idea is rejected as bioterrorism.
  • Disaster Dominoes: Akko throws a broomstick in frustration... which knocks over the other broomsticks, which leads to the accidental premature activation of the float.
  • Dude, Where's My Respect?: Despite saving the whole school from a giant magic-eating dragon that nearly consumed their sorcerer's stone, by the time of The Enchanted Parade, Akko and her friends are back to being the unpopular weirdos... and are on the verge of being expelled for causing relatively minor problems.
  • Establishing Character Moment: The film introduces Amanda and her team's personalities by showing what they got in trouble for. Jasminka wouldn't stop eating to establish her as a laidback Big Eater, Constanze gets in trouble for trying to use Magitek, and Amanda got in trouble for trying to steal an artifact which almost worked thanks to her great skills on a broom.
  • Everyone Has Standards: Even Diana, a person who is normally a advocate for preserving traditions, is against the traditional witch parade as she finds it to be humiliating and disgraceful to witches and wishes to get rid of it altogether.
  • Face Palm: Amanda does this after Akko beans Lotte with her broom.
  • Flat-Earth Atheist: The mayor has shades of this, wanting to tear down a stone monument that legends say act as a seal to great misfortune. Considering that magic exists in this world, and there is a literal magic school less than a mile away, scoffing at said "misfortune" seems to be incredibly stupid, arrogant, and short-sighted.
  • Gadgeteer Genius: Constanze is a tinkerer who uses her wand as a literal Magic Tool and uses it to create and power various inventions such as a little Robot Buddy or even a laser gun. She's forced to work with the girls for selling technology within school grounds.
  • Genre Blindness: The town mayor decides to bulldoze a seal planted by a witch to make room for a statue of him. Despite the fact that the witch school is nearby, he doesn't stop to ask them if it's real and blows off the foreman's concerns.
  • Gorgeous Garment Generation: In the climax of their fight against the rock monster, Sucy, Lotte, and Akko's outfits turn into some variation of Shiny Chariot's before they launch their final attack.
  • Gratuitous Foreign Language: The incantation for the "Luna Lana" nullification spell, "Ein Sof Ohr", is Hebrew for "infinite light".note  For what it's worth, "Luna Lana" itself is made of the Italian words for "Moon" and "Wool".note 
  • Gravity Is a Harsh Mistress: Akko and Sucy, while flying a broom in tandem to avoid the giant's hands, manage to evade its attacks by rapidly climbing upwards... only to find that the giant has swatted their broom away from them.
  • Hard-Work Montage: Akko gets one halfway through The Enchanted Parade as she tries to get the Happy Time Project to work.
  • Insult Backfire: After the disastrous trip to town, Diana spots a forlorn Akko and hits her with a "The Reason You Suck" Speech... except that she makes the mistake of mentioning Shiny Chariot, which ends up getting Akko's spirits up instead.
  • Jerkass Has a Point:
    • While Akko was undeniably being a insensitive Jerkass about it, she is right that Lotte should have spoken up about her feelings instead of bottling them up and being quiet about it, which Lotte does acknowledge, before she does just that.
    • As much of a total Jerkass Diana was towards the forlorn Akko, she is right to call out Akko for her selfishness and failure to recognize the fact that nobody really wanted to follow her plans in the first place. Akko's lack of retort suggests that even she knows it.
  • Left the Background Music On: Near the end, Chariot's theme starts playing, and then switches to being broadcast by the speakers on their parade float.
  • Losing the Team Spirit: After Akko accidentally tears in half Lotte's ancestral music scroll, Lotte gets pissed off and goes her own way, and Akko splits from Sucy too. Noticeably, for the next few parts, it's the new girls who give Akko help, while Lotte and Sucy are nowhere to be seen.
  • Mayor Pain: The Mayor is mainly the Quimby type. He is more concerned about puffing up his own ego and earning tourist dollars than he is with things like good sense and reason. With incontrovertible proof that both magic and witches are real, he decides to remove a rock that is specifically labeled as a seal to a great evil to place a statue of himself. When the inevitable happens and a giant attacks his city, he blames the witches and only backs down when he starts thinking of the tourist revenue. Even a witch supporting him from a great height on her broom is not enough to dissuade him even when she gently tries to remind him exactly whose fault this whole fiasco is.
  • Muggles Do It Better: At the academy, the Sorcerer's Stone allows the witches to use magic freely. But its effects don't reach all the way out to the nearby town, greatly limiting the number of magic witches can use, which proves troublesome when Akko and co. go there and get beset by a bunch of witch-hating hooligans.
  • Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Akko rattles off a number of variations on "I mean no harm" after she accidentally tears Lotte's ancestral music scroll in half and drives a wedge between herself and the rest with her refusal to compromise. Her aggressive fangirling of Shiny Chariot has clearly scuttled potential friendships with other students, Diana most of all.
  • O.O.C. Is Serious Business: After Akko accidentally tears Lotte's ancestral music scroll in half, Lotte gets visibly angry. Sucy points out how pissed off she must be for the normally gentle girl to get mad.
  • Ocular Gushers: Akko cries a river after Lotte returns for her.
  • Our Titans Are Different: The enemy of The Enchanted Parade is called a giant. It's incredibly powerful and able to turn objects into monsters as well as fuse them to itself to create armor, and unlike the dragon cannot be destroyed, only resealed.
  • Parasol Parachute: Sucy creates an umbrella out of a mushroom.
  • Pet the Dog: After being a jerk towards Akko across the last film and this film, Diana ends up begrudgingly admitting to Akko at the end that she is impressed that she had managed to successfully pull off a stronger spell than even she could pull off. Though she quickly berates her for her sloppy performance afterwards.
  • Plot-Mandated Friendship Failure: After building tension prior, Sucy and Lotte end up abandoning Akko after she accidentally tore up Lotte’s lyrics. They do ultimately make up at the end after the two come in to save Akko and stop the rampaging spirits and Akko ultimately apologizes to Lotte.
  • Proud Warrior Race Guy: Diana tries to get the witch parade canceled because she finds the whole thing is offensive to witches.
  • Sealed Evil in a Can: The Giant is sealed in rocks by Jennifer the Witch. The rocks are later revealed to not be rocks at all but the giant's hand, with the rest of him buried under the town.
  • Shout-Out:
    • The fake noses worn by the (very unhappy) witches in last year's parade resemble those of another tried witch.
    • Akko's attempt to dance with her broom recalls the infamous Lightsaber Kid video, down to the lightsaber sound effects.
    • As for Akko's attempts to make the brooms themselves dance, she seems to have learned how from a certain Sorcerer's apprentice.
    • While the girls are shopping in preparation for the parade, a small sign for some magical/poisonous mushrooms Sucy is looking at identify them as Purple Haze.
    • The dancing figures the brooms turn into during the parade resemble the dancing bombs from Robot Carnival for a shout out going back 30 years!
    • Rebecca Sugar and Ian Jones-Quartey, who had recently visited Studio Trigger, were spectators in the parade. Joining them are Connie, Mabel, and Dipper.
    • Akko's White Mage costume at the end of the film resembles Sapphire's prince garb.
    • Amanda's thief outfit is identical to that of Catwoman.
    • One of the boys in Thomas' gang eerily resemble the titular character of Eddsworld; double points for the former's name being the more formal variant of "Tom".
    • Among the pile of electronics Constanze is shown fiddling around with, one can see a Furby, a Game Boy and a Super Famicom/PAL SNES.
    • The mayor's statue depicts him as a towering man with a finger pointing upwards, much like Kamina's statue in the middle of Kamina City.
  • Status Quo Is God: While Akko does keep the Shiny Rod from the first film and the events of Akko using it from that film are shown in a flashback during Diana's speech about Chariot towards Akko. None of the events from the first film really has had an impact here as Akko, Sucy and Lotte are still treated as the school losers (Despite having saved the school from a dragon) and Diana, Hannah and Barbara are as haughty and bitchy towards them as they were last film.
  • Tempting Fate: Professor Ursula really didn't have to say "I just hope nothing bad happens..."
  • Witch Hunt: The eponymous witch parade is a reenactment of old witch trials (which were quite rare in England, the show's apparent setting), with witches being "volunteers" from Luna Nova. The unlucky witches are paraded before the townsfolk to be pelted with tomatoes, dunked in a pool, and rolled in barrels all while wearing silly fake noses. Small wonder the whole event has become a disciplinary measure. Needless to say, Akko is horrified; Diana wants to get the tradition ended altogether.
  • Your Magic's No Good Here: The witch students discover that outside their academy, there is very little magic in town and while magic can be used, it is limited, as when away from the Sorcerer's Stone, the wands operate on a magic battery that quickly depletes after use. Unfortunately for Akko, Amanda, Constanze and Jasminka, they discover this the hard way as their wands end up depleting during a tomato fight with Thomas and his gang, losing their advantage over them.

 
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Alternative Title(s): Little Witch Academia 2

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Lotte is angry at Akko

After Akko rips her scroll, Lotte becomes very angry at Akko and throws her out.

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