I enjoy the Magical Girl genre. I really do. But between dubious choices and disappointing outings, that hasn’t shown much in this year’s Magical Girl May, has it? Well, to avoid going out on a sour note, I’ve sourced just the girls for the job. Sure, the service involved is something a little different, but it’s still deeply tied to traditions. A sterling aesthetic that can blend its genres and deliver – it’s time for Magilumiere Magical Girls Inc.!
Magilumiere takes place (as the opening of most episodes will remind you) in a world where Magical Girls are… a fact of life, necessary to deal with a hostile natural phenomenon known as Kaii – mostly when said phenomenon manifests as gribbly monsters with too many eyeballs. “Girl” might be a bit of a misnomer, though: these are working professionals, college graduates living in the real world and not teenagers looking forward to growing up. It’s… an interesting twist. Given how anime characters are drawn, you could tell me that most of the “girls” in this were in the traditional 14-18 bracket and I’d believe you. Take a look at main character Kana Sakuragi.
Put her in a sailor outfit and sure, in the land of animation she passes as a middle schooler. In a business suit? Fresh college grad. All the Magical Girls in this look essentially like you’d expect of Magical Girls. But in terms of themes, it’s more different even than you might expect since it bucks the usual fantasy. This is something that, if used well, could be pretty smart. Now I could probably wax thousands of words long on what a Magical Girl means and how Magilumiere playing with that creates a disconnect from its peers, what that might mean for both this and other shows and what we can learn from it, but I’m going to try to stick to the script this time.
So, how about that Kana? At the start of the show, she’s a fresh graduate entering the job market. We learn that she’s been bombing interviews left and right, despite the fact that she always does her homework, researching to the max and putting her brain to work in order to prepare. She heads off to another interview, but the company in question has been skimping on their Kaii cleanups, causing a monster to manifest in the interview room. The company calls a Magical Girl outfit that’s fast and cheap, getting the emergency services of the titular Magilumiere and their presently only Magical Girl, meathead Hitomi Koshigaya.
The situation on the ground turns out to be pretty off-kilter, and since Koshigaya doesn’t care about little things like “not involving civilians”, she asks for help, just someone to reload her as she fires a barrage of magic at the Kaii. Kana steps up, despite the local corporate scumbags telling her not to. Not only does she perform a basic assist well, it turns out she’s studied the magitech that Koshigaya is using and is able to overcome her nerves to offer actual suggestions, helping take the monster down and win the day.
Suffice to say, Kana is no longer interested in working for that particular major firm. Instead, she’s got another job offer on her plate since it turns out Magilumiere is hiring.
Thus, she basically follows Koshigaya home and gets introduced to the eccentric crew. The most normal of the lot is the perpetually smiling and hypercapable sales rep Kaede Midorikawa, but there’s also the in-house magical engineer Kazuo Nikoyama (who is about as avid yet also about as good around strangers as you would expect from your typical socially anxious techie) and the Boss, Kouji Shigemoto.
What’s even funnier than the fact that this huge guy always wears a frilly pink dress on the job is how most people react on first meeting him. And funnier than that is that he’s essentially a straight-man character, not a comedic one. Completing the Shigemoto ensemble would be tired eyes and a resting frown, and most of what he says is deadly serious (or at least completely serious, the situation is rarely deadly). He’s mission control and has the firm hand and guiding principles to support that.
Naturally, Kana is… perhaps impressed in the wrong ways, but after getting a taste of Magical Girl life, she takes the job and starts to get situated with how Magilumiere does business.
And for an arc here, if you took out the “Magical Girl” aspect, you could still have an effective emotional arc since you’ve got Kana who is young and naive but also uptight and used to how the big industry leaders do things learning to fit in and enjoy her life with a quirky start-up that prides itself on having this more personal touch.
Most episodes of Magilumiere will work in a Kaii battle even if they aren’t focused on one. The action is a pretty solid part of the show’s DNA, and it actually does its action quite well. The monster designs are solid and thematic, the powers do as much as they need to, and they put some real drama in the fights as we deal with Kana’s personal issues, the needs of the environment, and the plot device of Kaii mutation (by which Kaii can randomly become drastically more dangerous and gain new abilities on the spot, which is said to be an increasing and emerging threat in-setting). They show off the value of both Koshigaya’s brute force and Kana’s careful observation and intellectual approach. But for all that the show also has a good deal of slice of life focused on corporate culture, and I would argue that at least in the first and currently only season, that’s probably a bigger component than the fighting. The show is about a weird job with weird fun co-workers. Kaii extermination is just part of that job.
Contrasting Shigemoto and his idealistic start-up is Kei Koga, an old frenemy of Shigemoto’s who is now the CEO of the biggest Magical Girl company in the industry, AST.
So, he’s the real “antagonist”, right? Not really. He’s more of what I presume to be a plant for future plot. We cut to Koga and his take on things quite a lot, and he gets a fair amount of screen time, but in terms of this season? He doesn’t really do anything. I think there’s precisely one scene where he actually interacts with any of the characters we care about, pretty much as a brief little bit of setup given the ominous lines exchanged between him and Shigemoto. The review would feel naked if I didn’t mention him, but at the same time there’s little reason to bring him and AST up except as a contrast to Shigemoto and Magilumiere.
The first stage of Kana’s growth comes to a head with that contrast when Magilumiere is called to deal with an infestation in a local shopping district. Kana initially pushes for deploying wide-area blasting given the data, but the rest of the company insists on surveying the site before deciding on a plan of attack. When they do it, Kana realizes the reason. The shopping district is old, practically historic, and deploying wide-area powerful magic would likely wreck it good. Even if the people all have their Kaii insurance up to date, it’s likely many of the storefronts that have existed for generations would never come back. Thus, rather than taking the AST-style by-the-book efficient approach, Magilumiere (thanks to insight from Kana) devises new magical patterns on the spot to attack the rapidly spreading and mutating Kaii through the sewer system it’s lurking in, obliterating it across the district without shattering any historic buildings.
After a spacer arc where Kana is buddied up with a friendly Magical Girl from another company to learn more ways of doing things, we find out this Shopping District Magic might be even more special than was initially let on with a company visit to the Magical Expo, where Magical Girl Companies and presumably those that support them from the backline show off the latest and greatest in magical tech.
This arc is actually more focused on Nikoyama. Initially, he’s unable to even speak to other engineers impressed by the magic that Magilumiere has shown off in the field, and we get his backstory where he was an idealistic hobbyist who was all ready to give up on magic when Shigemoto scouted him, leaving him able to do what he loves but terrified of being scorned for it.
At the Expo, another company plans to show off their system for suppressing Kaii mutation. They’ve even prepared a live demo with a harmless-enough plant Kaii. However, the induced mutation goes out of control, far beyond what they expected from testing, and their system isn’t up to the job. Thus, Magilumiere steps up to the plate as the venue is evacuated for reason of being overrun by an angry hedge.
Ultimately, while Nikoyama is up to the task of modulating and crafting spells on the fly for Kana and Koshigaya, his laptop isn’t. This is when a group of fellow engineers step in, offering their computers and services. In this, we get to see their wonder at Magilumiere’s in-house tools, allowing rapid magic construction far beyond anything else in the industry. This not only wins the day, but earns Nikoyama the ability to talk with colleagues and Magilumiere a unique opportunity to sell their know-how and middleware as a system for handling the brewing Kaii mutation crisis.
This leads to our last arc where an early adopter sends one of their Magical Girls to work with Magilumiere for a month, receiving practical training on how they do business and how to best make use of the techniques and tech that together make up what’s dubbed the “Alice System”. And it’s Kana who is assigned to be this girl’s mentor during her stay.
The arc ends up being framed around one particularly dangerous Kaii extermination, when a routine bust of little electrical goobers reveals the presence of another Kaii in a thankfully under development and thus uninhabited housing project
This fiery behemoth takes everything to take down, and along the way allows Kana to learn that she can take pride in her ability as a field leader and the new girl (who relates that Magical Girls have traditionally flown solo, with no help from either peers or mission control) to truly understand both the power and necessity of teamwork. It’s mostly an extended action sequence once the fire Kaii appears, but it’s a good one and one that feels fittingly like a climax to play us out.
Thus, with a tail seeing Kana and the new girl becoming friends before she goes back to her own company and a direct statement that the second season is in the works, the show ends.
I’ve said most of what I have to say about this show in the middle of reviewing, but for the sake of having a proper tail, I’ll summarize.
Magilumiere’s greatest strength is its balance. It has a headline slice of life, quite a lot of good action even if it is lighter action, and a little comedy to keep things rolling. The show juggles all these considerations extremely well, and thus the final product is watchable, fun, and engaging.
The characters are a mixed bag. Most of them are quirks, but they’re good quirks, and Shigemoto and Kana in particular have some depth to them, the former with a lot of implications about his past and the juxtaposition of his aesthetic with his office, and the latter in her growth from fish-out-of-water newbie to a full fledged Magical Girl able to stand on level with her senpai Koshigaya. And sometimes, when you’re sketching an assist character like Koshigaya or any of the assorted random folks we meet, all you need is a quirk. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, but flat or static characters are tools that it’s important to use well, just as much as deeply rounded characters.
The final experience of Magilumiere is slightly marred by a few notes. Towards the end, they lay on pretty heavy that there’s some conspiracy or coming storm about Kaii mutation and a Kaii-based catastrophe that Shigemoto, Koga, and others were caught up in over a decade ago. I know it’s got to set up for the second season, but with how much this one is focused on the slice of life, the vague important talk doesn’t really jive, and instead starts to distract by making moments seem like they’re trying to sound more epic than they are. Further, while I think the show manages a “Work-life balance”, I will admit that on review… not a lot really happens. Kana learns the ropes, we do the shopping district, she pals around with a Magical Girl from a cosmetics company, we do the expo, we do the finale. If you’re looking for a tight plot, you have to look elsewhere.
Similarly, while the Magical Girl transformations and designs look good, there’s a degree to which most of them are… a little sterile. The greats among Magical Girls and their transformations strongly evoke deep traits of the characters while also creating a unique and resonant aesthetic. This is something that Magilumiere can’t do because being a Magical Girl here isn’t a deep reflection of a girl’s soul or psyche, it’s a job – one that any girl can take up or quit. As such, while there are a few magical girl costumes, all of them and especially the ones for our leading pair are pretty stock, as are the transformations. It’s an unavoidable artifact of Magilumiere being more a show about Magical Girls than a Magical Girl Show. I know that might not sound like much of a difference, but it’s the same difference that separates Occult Academy, a show about “The occult” as a whole that is therefore obliged to present all its tropes on board, and Boogiepop Phantom, a show that deeply tapped into the feeling of the occult so as to be more of an occult show. For this comparison, I’d say that Magilumiere is to Magical Girls as Occultic;Nine is to Occult. It falls somewhat, unavoidably, into the trap of having to represent its genre rather than living the experience, but manages it with at least some grace.
The Kaii are a little weaker still in that I don’t think they’re as forced. Now, this is something where the show has a lot of room to grow. The last Kaii, the fire monster, showed way more character than what we dealt with for most of the rest of the show: amorphous globs with eyes and a variety of projectile/tentacle attacks. Since the story is flagrantly not finished, perhaps the creators were holding back on giving us some really wonderful and creative Kaii because they wanted later-stage mutants to feel special. If that’s the case, the bulk of the Kaii being rather generic and uninteresting can be forgiven, as at least they have unique powers and circumstances of battle. I guess there’s a degree to which the setup could also have informed this as well. Kaii are… job-tier hazards, and they’re basically just special magic pollution results, not reflections of anything really important or esoteric, so they’re not going to be as wild and crazy as Madoka’s witches or as threatening as the Vertex .
One thing I think is notable back on the plus side is that Magilumiere has at least some bite to it. There’s real danger in the Kaii battles, and while it’s strongly implied that most exterminations are routine, the fact that Magical Girl is a job that, in addition to being glamorous and highly paid, is a job in which somebody can get hurt or killed in the line of duty is not ignored.
Now, when I’m familiar with a show’s source material, I try to leave that at the door in reviewing the anime. At the end of the day, the anime has to stand on its own. But I wanted to bring up one little element that I think the anime did smartly for trying to retain drama. The scene that introduces Koga shows him firing an AST magical girl, and he’s very harsh with her, basically throwing a few dollars at her, declaring that’s all the profit she’s been worth and it’s a few seconds of my time so get out of my face, even as she breaks down and pleads for the chance to do better. It quickly establishes him as ruthless, even heartless in his pursuit of manufactured perfection and efficient success, focused on money to the detriment of people.
In the manga, there’s a little end of chapter blurb where we’re told the fired girl was scouted literally as soon as she left the building and is happy in her new position, with a message about finding a job that’s the right fit for you. In the anime, this postscript is omitted, and I think it comes up stronger. The scene on its own is emotional and makes a strong establishment of a character who is clearly supposed to be important in the long run. The “PS she’s okay” bit could read as an attempt to make that moment more harmless, defanging it and removing its power in a way that doesn’t really respect the audience. It’s an extremely small moment, but it actually made me worried for the writing in the manga (since it’s never good to be afraid of your audience) and was part of why I hadn’t gone past volume 1 before watching the show. I think from the later major arcs it’s clear that my worries were ill-founded, but I wanted to address it because it left an impression.
In any case, I’d ultimately rate Magilumiere as a B+. It;s an easy watch and if you’re looking for your Magical Girl fix, you will get it after a fashion. And I, for one, am interested to see where it all goes from here.