Mary and the Witch's Flower

Mary's moved to the English countryside, to her great-aunt's manor, and while following a pair of cats in the woods, finds the mysterious Fly-By-Night flower, which only blooms once every 7 years. Not long after that, she finds an old broomstick at the base of a tree, and she's soon carried into the clouds to a witches' college. For Mary, the nice part there is that everyone thinks she's a prodigy. The bad news is, her power is a result of the flower, and that's what the headmistress Madam Mumblechook and the chief researcher Dr. Dee are really after.

The designs of the buildings and some of the creatures are fantastic. The small cottage the broomstick eventually brings Mary to looked wonderful. I especially liked the different forms Dr. Dee's experiment at the end kept morphing into. Some were just large, gelatinous versions of animals, like frogs, and others were these strange monstrosities.

At one point, when Mary delivers the flower, Madam Mumblechook uses magic just to unscrew the thermos it's in. I started to suspect that, if the people at the college used magic for everything, then Mary's advantage would be that she was used to doing things without it. All their protections and defenses would be designed against magic, and rather than try to blast through a barrier spell over a door, Mary would just. . . turn the knob. That didn't turn out to be the case. Another prediction wrong. It would have been funny, though.

At the beginning of the film, we figure out two things about Mary. One, she's self-conscious about her red hair and how much it makes her stand out. Then she gets to the college where her red hair is a sign of her immense potential and everyone tells her how great she is, which leads to her not getting the heck out of there faster (that and the threat of being "transformed" if she's an interloper). The other thing we learn is she really wants to be helpful and useful, but struggles to do anything properly. A little overeager most of the time. I'm not sure what the payoff was for that. Her being determined to stop Mumblechook and Dee from experimenting on someone, and she sort of managed that, perhaps. She didn't stop trying to help, and she got it right this time.