Dahlia in Bloom: Crafting a Fresh Start With Magical Tools

Episodes 1-3

Let's not beat around the bush here. This show looks bad. It has a good case for being one of the worst-looking shows of this season, if not the year. It bears every telltale sign of a production stitched together with too few resources and rushed out the door for the sake of a quarterly earnings report. The backgrounds are poorly composited, functional at best, and unfinished at worst CG. The character animation is minimal and stiff. It struggles to keep the character designs intact at the best of times. To disguise its many cut corners, the entire show is constantly coated in a fuzzy filter that looks like you covered the camera with Vaseline. Worst of all are the eternally distracting shadows placed over nearly every shot of the character art, in perfectly uniform diagonal lines that never line up with an actual light source. The show looks rough, to such a degree that it's hard not to get distracted by it while trying to focus on the story.

That sucks, because there is a good story in here, or at least enough solid ideas that could be used to build one. I am generally jaded towards the isekai gimmick but I rather like the way it's implemented here. Dahlia doesn't seem to have a full memory of her past life, but like Will in The Faraway Paladin, her final moments in that lifetime have left an impression that motivates her in this one. Rather than dying alone while slaving away at a thankless and unfulfilling job, she wants to live her life to the fullest. She's lucky enough to be born to a family that supports her, allowing her to build on her passion and ideas to become a skilled magical artisan just like her father—and their heartfelt relationship carries the first two episodes.

Unfortunately for Dahlia, living life to the fullest isn't always the clearest goal, and that's exemplified through her hilariously failed engagement. It struck me early on that Dahlia's reasons for entering the engagement have nothing to do with romance. It was partly business—ensuring a connection between her father's workshop and the Orlando trading company—but also a bit of bet-hedging on her part. She didn't want to spend her life alone again—and probably wanted to assure her father that she'd be alright when he was gone—and Tobias seemed like a safe option to spend her days with, even if there wasn't any spark to speak of.

Sadly, Tobias sucks. Specifically, he sucks in ways that are not outwardly malicious but are incredibly aggravating if you have to deal with him. He uses his insecurities as an excuse to control Dahlia's appearance and dictate how she should act while insisting it is necessary to keep their work going smoothly when he's just uncomfortable with her being taller and having a fashion sense. Then, when he finally realized that he wasn't happy in a relationship that was 60% business arrangement and 40% telling his partner not to wear such slutty, slutty glasses, he breaks things off mere seconds before they were set to marry and move in together. When Dahlia diplomatically agrees to move out so he can bed down with his new lady love (in a bed Dahlia paid for, naturally) it turns out he doesn't even have the money to buy her out of the deed. He's an unholy combination of your deadbeat roommate and the small business major you made the mistake of dating in college.

Dahlia's reaction to this is a lot of “ugh”—or at least, that's what I think it is. Part of the issue with the production values is that the characters are barely expressive, so any non-verbal emotions are hard to read. I have to infer from her reactions that she's mostly just annoyed at having to suddenly disentangle her life from Tobias on such short notice—moving all her stuff back, getting a notary to make sure nobody accuses her of stealing from his new fiancé, and just generally having to handle a whole bunch of crap that was dropped onto her lap at the last minute. To top it all off, she knows that if she doesn't handle it right away, it'll just become more of a hassle down the line. That's perhaps not the most dramatic way to take this story but it's a deeply relatable angle for Dahlia's character. We like to think of failed (almost-)marriages as these big, dramatic explosions, but more often they're a pile of paperwork that gets stacked on top of everything else you have to take care of in your life.

All that put together, in the wake of her father's death, makes it incredibly cathartic to see Dahlia brush off all the compromises she made to Tobias and embrace her craft and identity again. Or, well, it would be incredibly cathartic if the show could muster even a little bit of flair for what is almost certainly a defining moment for the whole show. What we get instead is so oddly muted that Dahlia might as well be deciding to have an omelet for breakfast. Much as I would like to stick to talking about the writing, the visuals of a visual medium are just as important as the script. These highly visible issues—like the bizarre texture they put over Wolf's character art at the end of episode three—can't help but dilute what's good here. Dahlia's personality is a strong enough hook to balance that out for now but I'm not sure how long that will stay true.

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Dahlia in Bloom: Crafting a Fresh Start With Magical Tools is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.