Anime Summer 2024: DAHLIA IN BLOOM: CRAFTING A FRESH START WITH MAGICAL TOOLS, Turning Heartbreak Into Brilliance

Starting over can be a good thing.

Dahlia in Bloom: Crafting a Fresh Start with Magical Tools
The first two episodes are now streaming on Crunchyroll. Subsequent episodes will debut every Saturday.

Evidently living an unremarkable life, Dahlia dies in the first few minutes of the show and is reincarnated in a world in which magical devices are being conjured up by craftsmen, bestowing, in effect, 21st century technology upon a world that is roughly analogous to Europe in the 17th or 18th century.

Dahlia grows up as the precocious daughter of Carlo Rossetti, a magical-device craftsperson. Inspired by her father, young Dahlia wants to be a magical-device craftsperson too, and soon comes up with her first device: a hair dryer!

The first episode concludes on a happy note. The second episode continues its lighthearted and joyful tone; as an adult, Dahlia is still focused on her craft and her relationship with her father. The magical-device business is going well, thanks in part to Carlo's partnership with a trade group, run by longtime friend, Orlando, whose son, Tobias, becomes an apprentice with Carlo.

Tobias is quite straightforward in all his affairs; he's not a dreamer, like Dahlia. Nonetheless, when Carlo and Orlando propose a marriage between their two children, both readily agree, more for business purposes than anything else.

That will lead somewhere else, I'm sure; the trailer for the series, embedded below, ends with another character popping up, for reasons that will no doubt become apparent for those of us who have not read either the light novel series by Hisaya Amagishi, first published in 2018, or the manga adaptations, published in 2019.

Produced by Typhoon Graphics and Imagica Infos, the anime series is directed by Yosuke Kubo, with scripts written by Yuichiro Higashide, character designs handled by Satomi Kurita, and music composed by Kow Otani. The world is beautifully designed and animated, making for quite a good series through the first two episodes.

Dahlia is a single-minded woman who complies readily with Tobias' very manly directives, which may be a result of the world in which she is living, but I don't see that continuing. (At least, I hope not; the official premise suggests that it won't.) I'm looking forward to seeing how her story develops.

Summary: More magical devices, please!