A Legend Retold!note
"There are millions of people living on our vast planet, and there are many more meetings and partings between them. This is the story of one of those encounters and the events that followed. We met in the spring of my third year in elementary school. This is the story of our beginnings, an insignificant, but precious story about how we all found each other. "
— Nanoha Takamachi
Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha The MOVIE 1st (少女リリカルなのは The MOVIE 1st Mahō Shōjo Ririkaru Nanoha Za Mūbī Fāsuto) an Alternate History remake of the original Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha covering Nanoha Takamachi'search for the Jewel Seeds and her encounter with Fate Testarossa. The movie does not replace the first season's place in canon but retells it, existing as a sort of alternate universe. It was released on January 23, 2010.
It exists within the original continuity as a semi-biographical movie created after the events of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS, with Nanoha and Fate themselves as consultants.
The MOVIE 1st provides examples of:
- Adaptational Angst Upgrade: The Comic-Book Adaptation continuity. This is especially noticeable in the part after the movie's events where, in contrast to the anime where she's pleased with the outcome but somewhat worried about Fate, she believes in the movie manga that she failed to help anyone. At the beginning of their mock battle in the manga, Fate believes that since she caused Nanoha trouble, she doesn't deserve to be friends with her.
- Adaptational Backstory Change: In Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, Precia Testarossa's fall from grace and the death of her daughter were stated to be the result of an experiment she was performing causing a massive explosion. The movie continuity changed her to an Ignored Expert and the explosion was due to a reactor she was designing that was activated before it could be properly tested. Given the Recursive Canon nature of the movies, Fate probably insisted on these changes so that her mother would be portrayed more sympathetically.
- Adaptation Distillation: This film, which took the first season, removed a lot of the less plot important bits (such as a huge chunk of the earlier episodes), cut out nearly all the secondary characters, made it more consistent with later seasons (The Staff and Cannon modes are now previously installed in Raising Heart, as opposed to being forms that Nanoha thought up), animated a lot of the more important All There in the Manual stuff (Like the full backstory of Fate), and showed the entire Start of Darkness of Precia as opposed to just hinting at it, turning her to a more fleshed out Tragic Villain.
- A True Story in My Universe: Sound Stages reveal that this film is an actual movie being produced in the Nanohaverse about the childhood of Nanoha and Fate, with those two serving as technical advisers to make sure that the facts are reasonably accurate and that the battles are as realistic as possible.
