Today (more like yesterday in Japan, to be fair) there was a Little Witch Academia-themed talk show event with director Yoshinari, character designer Handa and producers Otsuka and Tsusumi. Pictured are the shikishis they gave as prizes. Here are some of the things they talked about



In the case of a second season, these are some of the things they would like to do:

-Jasminka episode

-Hannah and Barbara episode

-Wangari episode

-More episodes about the mysteries of Luna Nova

-A dungeon crawling episode similar to the Anime Mirai OVA

-Explore the nature of magic

-Showing Sucy’s nice side.



-Slice of life episodes



Some of the things forbidden by producer Tsusumi:

-Panty shots

-Changing the skirt length

-Basically fanservice of any kind

-Romance



Adding to the comments regarding the skirt length, this is what Handa said about Diana’s skirt:

-Diana’s skirt seems a bit shorter than the average but that’s just because she has long legs; Akko and Amanda are the only ones who deliberately make their skirts shorter.



Adding to the comments regarding romance:

-Producer removed blushes from Akko towards Andrew in episode 10 because she didn’t want Akko to seem like the kind of girl who would be happy with any ikemen (handsome guy) doing whatever he wanted with her

-Going back to the original concept of a love story between Akko and Andrew: it was an idea from series composition writer Michiru Shimada and Yoshinari had agreed with it at first but it wasn’t just Tsutsumi (although she was the one with the power to deny it) but the entire staff in general who opposed the idea of having a love story in LWA.

-They decided that it’s better for LWA to not have romance because it’s not that kind of show and it would have overwhelmed the rest of the story.

-Episode 10 was sort of a compromise. Yoshinari says that it’s the episode that feels the most like Michiru Shimada; he thinks he couldn’t do something like that. As said above, producer Tsusumi made modifications to episode 10 and in terms of relationships to the opposite sex she tried to remove romantic implications as much as possible. She thinks that was shown is already the limit she is setting.

-Regarding any kind of romance, fans are free to do whatever they want; Yoshinari thinks that even if they’re not doing it in the work it’s fine.



The changes to the love story setting were also made to change Andrew from some defined by the role of being “a man” to instead being someone who exists in a world different from Akko and that holds a conflicting world view. So the axis of their interaction isn’t romantic but rather a friendship between humans who stand in different positions and talk to each other from their respective points of view.



Episodes 19-20 and 25 were the most complex in terms of scenario because they needed to get Diana just right.

-In AnimeMirai Diana was someone a bit pretentious who talked big and didn’t really show much for it; in the TV anime she is more complex and more adult-like.

-Maybe they will be able show her childish in the future and perhaps have her quarrel with Akko a bit more.

-So Diana is someone who forced herself to grow-up fast in order to protect the tradition of her family and the ideals of her mom but at the same time she understood that she was “binding” herself and she was discarding what she loved and what she wanted to do.

-So Yoshinari thinks that Diana couldn’t really bring herself to “deny” Akko’s way of thinking from the bottom of her heart. After all, Diana actually shares Akko’s inclination and feelings towards magic. But in order to protect the heavy burden that she herself feels she is carrying on her back she started to think that she needed to practice self-control and hide her own emotions and the feeling of “I can’t do that” became strong in her heart.

-In fact, there was a bit of a gag story to take place in the space of episode 19-20 about Hannah and Barbara aiming to become the new “Diana” of the school but in the end they’re glad they didn’t do it and went with the route of making them genuinely care about Diana.



About Akko’s transformation magic:

-It’s deliberately cartoony to show off Akko’s personality and that her magic isn’t perfect.

-The designs were all made by Sushio and they were all inspired by old anime and cartoons.

-They decided that Akko would only transform into cute-looking animals. At some point, the draft for episode 20 had Akko transforming into a gorilla to help Diana but they discarded that and settled for the elephant and a turtle.



Among the staff Chariot and Diana are by far the most popular characters. Since Hori drew a lot of Chariot scenes everyone thinks he draws the best Chariot.



Sources:

https://twitter.com/turezure11/status/888741616759865344

https://twitter.com/urigayaketa/status/888719213992570881

https://twitter.com/truetomb/status/888766190633467904



https://twitter.com/truetomb/status/888766190633467904

