When Angelica sends Chise a pile of books to help with her magical studies, Chise is surprised to discover a children’s picture book among them that she once owned years ago as a child. She tells Ellias the history of how she first came to own the book; of her neglected childhood and a magical library hidden in the forest that once gave her relief from her unhappiness.
This is how I got Karen to start watching the series. It’s beautiful and bittersweet, an excellent introduction to Chise’s past. It gave Karen a lot of context to work with as someone new to the series.
The OVA is absolutely stunning, and while it is bittersweet, it’s framed in current Chise’s retelling. We see first from her lens as a child, the horror, the terror, the beauty, and then is gets recontextualized with her newfound knowledge.
