Character · Little Witch Academia
Atsuko Kagari
A girl with no magic in her family talks her way into a witching academy on the strength of one stage show she saw as a child.
In Otakana the clue reads: Non-magical girl at a witch school
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Little Witch Academia
- Letters
- 4 · Hard
Atsuko Kagari, Akko to everybody, watched a witch called Shiny Chariot perform when she was small and decided on the spot that this was the job. The difficulty is that magic at Luna Nova runs in bloodlines and hers has none. She cannot fly a broom. She fails the basic transformations. She stays anyway, on pure volume, and the school cannot work out how to be rid of her.
The series is about the gap between the stage show and the institution. Luna Nova is a declining academy teaching a declining art to the daughters of old magical houses, and Akko wants it to be the thing she saw when she was seven: loud, generous and open to anybody. Most of the staff consider this childish. The show quite firmly does not.
Studio Trigger made Little Witch Academia in 2013 as a twenty-six minute short for the Young Animator Training Project, funded a sequel through Kickstarter in 2015, and expanded it into a twenty-five episode television series in 2017. Yoh Yoshinari directed all three. It is one of very few anime franchises that grew out of a government animator training scheme.
Spelling AKKO
AKKO is four letters with a double K, and that doubling is genuine Japanese rather than a translator's flourish. The writing uses a small tsu, the mark that holds a consonant for an extra beat, so ak-ko really does have a gap in the middle. The name is a nickname built from Atsuko, which means the game wants the four letters of AKKO and not the longer form.