That Feeling
You know that feeling when you watch the first three or four Harry Potter films in a row? It’s warm, adventurous, full of friendship. The perfect emotion, really. But good feelings fade, like everything does. And then I found a way to bring it back.
The trick is simple: take the warmest, coziest parts of Harry Potter—the part that still glows a little even though the whole thing’s dimmed—mix it with something else you love, like Sailor Moon, and suddenly you’ve got something new that’s packed with all those old feelings. And if you need proof that works, there’s Little Witch Academia.
If I had to explain it in one sentence: Bunny Tsukino at Hogwarts. That’s it. That’s the show.
The series centers on Akko, a 16-year-old who gets sent to Luna Nova Magical Academy to learn magic, except she can’t do magic. She can’t even ride a broomstick. Her classmates are all naturally gifted. She’s a complete disaster.
But she’s got two best friends now—Lotte and Sucy—and Diana, who’s insufferable in that specific way privileged people are, and a mysterious teacher named Ursula. And with their help, Akko starts to figure out that there’s more going on at Luna Nova than anyone realizes. Old mysteries. Bigger things. Things that matter.
What makes it work is how small everything feels. Akko goes on tiny adventures around the academy. She meets dozens of weird, specific characters—Constanze, this grim German girl who builds robots instead of learning magic; Jasminka, a Russian girl who eats everything; Amanda, this loudmouth American who causes problems for fun. The world is colorful and full of details that make it feel lived-in, even though it’s just a magical school.
Akko herself is basically a brunette version of Sailor Moon—impatient, mouthy, the kind of person who stuffs her face with cake when she’s stressed. Her temperament gets her into trouble constantly, but it also solves problems. She finds secrets that would’ve stayed hidden. She makes impossible situations work.
Luna Nova is Hogwarts, but for girls only, and crowded with new mysteries and dark secrets and ancient legends. The episodes are scattered all over the place—one minute Akko’s dealing with her mysterious past, the next she’s looking for an angry yeti, then rescuing a skeletal ghost, then saving people from a moss plague. There’s always something happening.
And under all the small stuff, there’s this larger secret that haunts everything. You can feel it looming.
The thing that gets me about Little Witch Academia is that it understands what made early Harry Potter feel alive—which is that magic doesn’t matter as much as the people, the friendship, the warmth of being somewhere safe and strange at the same time. Akko’s pure optimism helps a lot. She’s naive in a way that actually works because it’s genuine. Without that, it’d be half as good.
If you love Sailor Moon and Harry Potter, you love this. It’s that simple.