You know how when there are people in your life who're struggling in one way or another and you want to help them so you find a secret special collections room in a library run by a probable witch and copy a spell to summon supernatural mice to help those struggling succeed?
Good. Glad I'm not the only one.
Hilda, the animated adaptation of the graphic novel of the same name by Luke Pearson, is a delightful show that children and adults can enjoy. At first it seems like a quaint romp through a world where humans and otherworldly creatures cohabitate, but the story effortlessly unfolds into one of friendship, growing up, and taking responsibility for one's actions and how they affect others. In "The Tide Mice," the eighth episode of the series, Hilda learns such a lesson when she tries to help her friend David audition for the Warblers and help her mother find some success as a graphic designer. Her intentions are good, but spells don't care about the intention of the user. They just do what they do and Hilda quickly learns about the consequences of magical interference.
But I'm not here to talk about consequences. I'm here to talk about the sweet special collections room Hilda and her deerfox Twig discover at the Trolberg library! One might argue it's a special collections because the books are all based in magic and therefore cannot be trusted to the greater Trolberg public, but if they didn't want people to access it then they shouldn't have made it so easy for deerfoxes to find! It's basic logic, people! The hidden room is really only seen this one time in the entire series, so it doesn't make a huge impact on the story as a whole, but it's nice to know that, in a pinch, there's a little magic available to Hilda and friends at their local library.
Let's talk about the Librarian as well because this goth/witch librarian/reference archivist is everything my little teenage heart would have loved growing up. The hair, the outfit is everything and they should never change unless they want to because that's their prerogative. They're overworked, but still helpful and pretty chill about most things...ya know until a precocious ten-year-old wants to take a spell book home for reasons. It's not their fault Hilda found a loophole in their ironclad plan of keeping the book in the library by making a photocopy of it with the copiers present in the building. This is really just a cautionary tale for those working at libraries and archives.
Never let precocious children use copiers.
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