I'll be honest about my baseline: most of the cartoons that pass across our television I tolerate at best. I'm seventy years old. I'm not the audience, and I don't pretend to be. So when I tell you there's one I actually sit down and watch with my daughter, I'm not performing enthusiasm. I mean it.
The show is Little Witch Academia, a Japanese series from Studio Trigger. It started life as a short film back in 2013, grew into a feature, and became a 25-episode series you can now find on Netflix. The premise is simple. A girl named Atsuko — everyone calls her Akko — dreams of becoming a witch after seeing a magician called Shiny Chariot perform as a child. She enrols at Luna Nova, a prestigious magic academy. And there's a catch: Akko comes from an ordinary, non-magical family and has essentially no natural ability. She's clumsy. She fails, publicly and often. The other students, especially the brilliant and well-bred Diana, make her shortcomings obvious.
What makes the show worth my daughter's time is what Akko does about it. She doesn't quit. The series is built around one repeated line — "a believing heart is your magic" — and to my surprise, it earns that line rather than just decorating posters with it. Akko's progress is slow, awkward, and unglamorous. She gets there on effort and refusal, not talent.
That matters to me specifically because of what I did for a living. I spent three decades teaching adults — wine, mostly, at the school I founded. If there's one thing those years hammered into me, it's that talent is overrated and stubbornness is underrated. My best students were almost never the naturally gifted ones. They were the ones who kept showing up, kept getting it wrong, and kept going. The gifted ones often coasted and then evaporated.
My daughter is eight, in third grade, and she does brilliantly at almost everything she touches — which is precisely why I worry about the easy version of self-esteem. The cartoons that tell children they are already perfect, already special, already enough exactly as they are: I find those quietly corrosive. They set a child up to crumble the first time something is genuinely hard. Little Witch Academia tells her the opposite, and it tells it well: being bad at something is the starting line, not the final score. That's a more useful thing to believe at eight, and frankly at seventy.
We watch it together, which I don't do with most of her screen time. She explains the characters to me. I pretend to be confused so she'll keep explaining. It's become one of our small shared rituals.