Magical Sempai (and that is the
romanization they go with. I’ll try to stick to it.) is a mildly
ecchi comedy about high school students populating a club dedicated
to stage magic. The show mostly follows the point of view of
Assistant (he doesn’t get a name) as he deals with Sempai (she
doesn’t get a name either) and her attempts to put on various magic
tricks despite her many failings. These failures are always
embarrassing in some manner, often involve a self-inflicted wardrobe
malfunction, and I’d be lying if I said they weren’t at least a
little bit funny some of the time.
The center of pretty much all the
show’s comedy is Sempai. She’s the only member of the Magic Club at
the start of the show and… they say she has crippling stage fright,
but it’s more often treated just like she has crippling incompetence
since she has no problems getting up in front of audiences, whether
just Assistant or actual crowds, to fail time and time again.
Whatever the cause, the effect is that Sempai screws up every trick
she attempts, usually in an overwhelmingly pathetic manner. For
instance, she can attempt a rope escape only to end up more securely
hog tied than she started out, throw the coin she wants to make
disappear (at which point she falls over herself trying to get it
back), forget her marked envelopes for a ‘mind reading’ trick, and
the rest of the cast quickly learns to not lend her any money for
bill cuts. When it comes to putting on a really wonderful magic
show, Shiny Chariot she ain’t.
Sempai, as a character, is one that
would be really easy to get wrong. A common failure state for
comedic goofballs is that they never suffer and can’t feel any
embarrassment or pain. After all, they need to keep putting
themselves in these situations! However, if the character can’t feel
any pain or never receives the consequences of their actions, it’s
hard to make them funny. In those cases, someone else has to be the
victim who suffers from the goofball’s antics. Sempai, however,
isn’t like that. True, as often as you knock her down she just gets
right back up and at it again, but she does feel every blow and react
to them in an appropriate and funny manner. We don’t feel too bad
for her, because these screw-ups are pretty much all her fault, but
we feel bad enough that there is something to laugh at, rather than
nothing. Often, a sketch will cut and she’ll ‘recover’ off screen
before the next one, which gives you the sense that she’s this
irrepressible character without the unfortunate sense of her being an
invincible character.
Any comedic goofball needs a good
straight man, though, and Assistant is… serviceable. His reactions
are mostly sensible and deadpan, which is what you want to play
against Sempai’s excessive enthusiasm and staggering idiocy. Since
he doesn’t get wrapped up in her nonsense, he has an easy time
exposing it. Between Assistant and Senpai we have a very classic
smart person/stupid person comedic duo, where the idiot character
will say or do something moronic, and the smart character will call
them on it. It works well enough.
More specifically, the comedy between
Assistant and Sempai reminds me somewhat of some of the comedy in The
Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, except Sempai is combining Haruhi and
Mikuru’s roles as the instigator and the victim. As such she’s much
more dysfunctional than either of them, and more of a purely comedic
character, without a lot of room for dramatic growth or honest
emotional moments. And that’s okay, because Magical Sempai isn’t the
kind of show that wants drama, growth, or honest emotional moments.
It is a goofball ecchi comedy, and an extremely fast paced one at
that. Each episode of Magical Sempai consists of several vignettes,
each one addressing a single scenario, How many? It does vary, but
in most episodes there are five essentially separate comedy routines,
meaning that each one is only a few minutes long. Sometimes multiple
skits will string together into larger arcs, like several skits about
trying to recruit new members for the magic club, or an episode where
all the skits string together to create a day at the beach (because
of course there’s a beach episode) but by in large each is a
disconnected incident that’s not particularly tied to anything that
came before it and won’t really matter for anything later. Again,
there are exceptions to give the show a sense of continuity, but it’s
rather loose.
However, Magical Sempai would certainly
run stale if it kept to just Sempai and Assistant forever. While the
cast remains small, a few other characters are introduced. There’s
Sempai’s equally airheaded supportive big sister (who happens to be
Assistant’s homeroom teacher), but she really is a bit role. There’s
also Madara-san, the shark-toothed head of the chemistry club, who
becomes something of a friend for Assistant, but she doesn’t get a
lot of screen time. More important are Saki-chan and Ma-kun, the duo
that become fellow members of the magic club.
Saki-chan is basically Sempai #2, gyaru
(glamorous fashion-gal) edition. She (and Ma-kun with her) is more
of a street performer than a magician, her specialty being balloon
animals and related tricks, and she’s better at her act than Sempai
ever was… but she’s not immune to (usually fanservice-inducing)
screwups and has a far more warped personality than Sempai, centered
around an excessive and perverse interest in her little brother,
Ma-kun.
Ma-kun mostly exists as a punchline for
Saki-chan’s jokes, because the brother she’s so obsessed with is a
massively overweight guy without a whole lot personal magnetism. He
doesn’t speak on his own very much, but when he does he actually
delivers a funny joke or two. You see, Ma-kun is a wannabe
psychologist, and will often ‘analyze’ a situation, coming to
painfully wrong and usually over-the-top conclusion as to either
what’s going on or what course of action he and/or others should take
in the scenario.
It may not seem like Ma-kun and
Saki-chan add a whole lot, but simply expanding the cast gives way
more dynamics for the comedy to work with. Including the two of them
means that you can have cat-fight rivalries between Saki-chan and
Sempai, conspiracies and secrets shared by at least two characters
against a third, cases of mistaken identity or property, and so
forth. There’s a lot of humor to be had in these situations that
wouldn’t be possible with only two characters.
Let’s talk about the actual jokes in
Magical Sempai. By in large, I didn’t really laugh at this show…
but I did smile. There were funny jokes here. Some were far too
predictable, but at other times the show did play with your
expectations about how a particular trick would fail. And,
especially after Saki-chan and Ma-kun are introduced there are
options for character-driven comedy rather than just prop comedy, and
the show does now and then take advantage of it, telling jokes that
aren’t directly related to magic tricks. Even before, there are a
couple sequences of jokes that are more character driven with Sempai,
showing her going into a strange and obsessive spiral in order to
keep Assistant (and through him, the Magic Club) around. The Ecchi
content is in an odd but not uncomfortable place. Certainly, if you
can’t stand ecchi, or even if you don’t enjoy it, you probably won’t
enjoy the show because there is a good deal of that. However, while
it’s throughout the show, it is relatively mild. The way the show is
shot, I didn’t feel ashamed to be watching this as can happen with
more intense ecchi. And while there’s usually a side-dish of
fanservice, the focus on the comedy is more on Sempai getting herself
into some crazy failure state than on the fact that the failure state
involves flipping up her skirt or what have you. That’s there too,
and some jokes absolutely will be predicated on showing you Sempai
(or occasionally Saki-chan once she’s introduced) in an implausibly
sexy position, but more of them are based on the getting there and
not the end state, and the process is funnier than the result.
And, if you don’t like a bit in Magical
Sempai, don’t worry – in five minutes or less, you’ll be on to
something else. In my mind, it’s a very good thing that Magical
Sempai consists of such small vignettes. It gives the show a much
greater margin of error since if a joke bombs, it’s not wasting a
whole lot of running time. And these jokes wouldn’t work as well if
you felt the need to draw them out. They are, by their nature, quick
jokes that can be set up and delivered comfortably in the time
they’re given. Comedy dies if you ruin the pacing by forcing it to
fit more or less running time than is appropiate, and the show is can
do more in an episode because even if the next sketch is connected to
the previous one, it cuts and starts again rather than forcing you to
watch the clean-up between acts.
And, shockingly, while there’s no plot
in this show, it can have a little heart. Just a little, mind you,
but it’s there. There are some good scenes with Madara-san. She
doesn’t particularly like magic, but that’s because she dislikes the
dishonesty of the act; when she performs some science tricks, she
does them with a sense of wonder that’s just as wide-eyed as
Sempai’s, but a lot more calm and low key. Those scenes also have
some feeling to them. Assistant may clearly be into Sempai, but he
and Madara-san make great friends. This is honestly down to the
delivery; they’re still talking about the ‘trick’ on display more
often than not, but because we’re dealing with a down-to-earth
character rather than a theatrical goofball, it’s allowed to be more
earnest.
There’s also one really good scene
that’s not really a joke, and it has to do with Sempai. The last
vignette in episode four starts with Sempai putting on a magic show
in the club room. The camera is focused on her as she goes through
her tricks in high energy, and doesn’t flub a single one. She makes
pigeons appear and disappear, performs a bill cut, and then goes for
the rope escape… only for the camera to pan out and show that she’s
totally alone when she calls for Assistant to tie her up. At this
point, Sempai thinks she’s done: Assistant has left to join some
other club, and the Magic Club is going to be shut down, the vehicle
for her dreams ceasing to exist. She scoffs at the idea of being
lonely (clearly lying to herself) and claims that she’s used to it,
and that the great thing about magic is that she can do it on her
own. She’s clearly devastated by the situation around her, but her
reaction to that is to keep trying to power forward, and perform her
heart out even though (or perhaps because) no one is looking. That’s
kind of tragic and at least somewhat poignant. Of course, things
turn back around to comedy when Assistant appears, having gotten
leave from the chemistry club (next door) to be a member in name only
to retain his overall good standing while still helping Sempai with
her magic. It’s not very long and is immediately followed by a very
flustered conversation with one party tied up (and very bad at
escaping), but that one sequence does, like the Madara-san scenes,
has a lot of heart to it.
On the whole, Magical Sempai is
harmless fluff. It’s a little bit funny, just a little bit raunchy,
and I don’t begrudge it any of its running time. It’s a C+ and no
more, but that’s enough to keep the Magic Club alive in my book.