Some series exist to push product. It’s true in Western animation and it’s true in Anime as well. Usually, the product in question is some manner of toy; I’ve covered a fair number of anime shows based on card games or plastic models, so this blog is no stranger to the sometimes desperate product tie-in side of the art form.
Yet even given that, Wish Upon the Pleiades is weird. Subaru – the car company – apparently decided that they needed an anime outing to their name, and got Gainax of all studios to put it together for them, first as an ONA in 2011 and then as a full-run show in 2015. The latter is what we’re looking at today.
But, okay, while a car isn’t the kind of purchase that most viewers would just make based on an “eeh, it looked cool in the show” sort of impulse the way a gunpla kit or starter deck of trading cards might be, it’s not like upping your reputation can’t work in a company’s favor. In most things, even major purchases, a lot of consumers will look first for names they know, so having Subaru just become a better known name would presumably pay dividends.
All the same, what would you think an anime by an auto-maker to promote their cars would look like, or be about? Well, I at least would have guessed it would feature cars. Maybe it would be about racing, whether formal or street. Maybe it would be an adventure, getting all sorts of wonderful places in one or more cool cars. Maybe it would be a spy thriller where you could trick out real auto bodies with all the James Bond gadgets you could imagine. Well, it’s still the month of May and I’m still doing Magical Girl May, so suffice to say that no, instead somebody decided that the presumably company-promoting anime produced by a car-maker would not be focused on cars and would instead be a Magical Girl outing more familiar to something like Nanatsuiro Drops or Cardcaptor Sakura.
I’m saying it a lot this month but… What.
It’s not as though it’s doing anything wrong, but the very choices that resulted in this show existing at all are just so bizarre, so out of left field, that I pretty much had to see it to believe it. So that’s what I did, I went out of my way to see this thing, and this is what I saw
Wish Upon the Pleiades stars a girl named, what else, Subaru. She’s your typical kind-hearted, pink-haired Madoka-esque lead, with her initial unique traits being that she’s rather socially awkward and clumsy, and that she seems to like astronomy, with the first major movement being that she wants to see a meteor shower and needs to take her telescope back to school to watch it from a good vantage point.
However, nothing’s going to go quite right for her, since she finds she can apparently open doors onto mystical otherworlds, first finding and conversing with a strange red-haired boy (Minato), and then (after being accosted by a strange meeping little blob creature) opening the door to a club room filled with a quartet of girls in witch outfits, including Subaru’s old and rather former friend, Aoi.
The group explains, or tries to explain, their business: they’ve been recruited by the blob thingy (who they refer to as their company president), an alien who is stuck on Earth. Their goal is to use the Magical Girl powers they’ve been given in order to recover the missing fragment’s of the alien’s spaceship engine so it can go home. The problem is that these engine fragments take the form of shooting stars racing across the night sky, and are rather hard to catch and seal into a recoverable form.
Well, a fifth member would help that effort out a good deal, and Subaru seems to be powering up without even comprehending what’s going on, so they get on their magic broomsticks (called Drive Shafts, which voom with motor sounds) and fly off to catch a falling star while showing the newbie the ropes. This marks a partial success, as they do harness it, but only get away with a tiny piece after a strange interloper comes knocking with dark magic (Seemingly Minato from earlier, not that either he or she react like it. So at least related?) and steals the rest.
We keep doing this, sparring with our horned caped fellow and trying to collect star-like engine fragments by flying really fast in formation, for some time. In the process, we do at least get to know more about the girls and their situation. There’s some complex talk about why them, little slices of weirdness, but the important part is following Subaru’s emotional arc. She feels like she’s useless or holding other, cooler people back, but when she stands up for her friends she’s also reassured that they, too, have worries and foibles in similar lines, whether they’re really capable of doing this – or anything.
As we start to focus on the various girls (First with an episode on yellow – Hikaru – and her musician parents as well as her habit of never finishing what she starts) we also get more setups around the fact that their magic doesn’t just let them fly, it lets them fly in space! We touch the edge of space in one episode, and then in the next it’s off to the moon! Of course, no space physics make sense but it’s literally magic, I’ll take the opportunities for cool-looking scenes.
Case in point, the next fragment warps everybody to Saturn’s rings for some fancy flying as we deal with the conflict-averse Itsuki. After coming back with that fragment, though, the alien “ship” begins to manifest as a band of light across Earth’s sky, presently still invisible to normals. Yeah, their ship is pretty esoteric, and it’s explained that they’re more or less using Infinite Improbability Drive, so go with it. Antagonist uses one of his fragments to get a lock on the girls when they recover it, and in the process we confirm that he doesn’t seem to be Minato, as neither is aware of the other, they exist at the same time (though there has been parallel world talk in this show), and their special earrings have some slight differences.
The conflict results in the girls ending up with all the fragments, Minato and the dark mode version briefly meeting, and Minato’s conservatory later being found empty and desolate but for a single flower.
After some deserved moping we find that Minato is now living as a normal (new transfer) student, and that his dark doppelganger is still active when we work out some more Aoi-Subaru issues where, in each of their pasts, they were left behind by the AU version of the other not realizing it wasn’t meant like that… and also spar for a fragment across the surface of the Sun.
After that, it’s time for the last of the girls whose name I have not called, alien-interpreter Nanako, to get her focus. A fragment has been detected in the Oort cloud, but without some eyes on it magic instant teleporting won’t work like it did for the Sun and Saturn. Instead someone, namely Nanako, must be launched at relativistic speeds to take the three month (Earth time. It will be half a day for her because the writers remembered time dilation exists) journey through the cold void of space in order to flag that connection and let the rest teleport out there and back. In the meantime the alien, having learned to parrot a couple earthling phrases, will morph into her likeness and stand in for her with school and an overworked yet seemingly caring single dad.
As she journeys into the twisted light-cone of relativistic flight, Nanako considers her past, her mother and little brother having left her behind globe-trotting, and in her acceptance of lonliness she’s at first unable to use friendship magic to call everyone to her when she encounters the fragment out in orbit of a dark and unknown planet. However, as the light given off by the fragment she fails to capture alone shines upon it, she realizes she would like everyone to see such a thing with her, and her thoughts get through.
Because magic they end up returning to a point half a day after Nanako’s departure rather than three months, but sure, whatever. I guess we couldn’t have a show while skipping the school culture festival, the leadup to which is used to heavily ship Minato (a magic-user himself) and Subaru, even getting a strongly implied kiss on the backdrop of a literal supernova before they have to return from their stellar jaunt without really remembering it.
Then, when Minato is alone with the hidden Fragments, they react to him, and we kick into something of an endgame. He transforms into wizard mode (even though we saw them in the same place at the same time. The backstory that comes out here is complicated) and takes all the fragments, hoping to complete his wish and disappear into a new world. This is because he was apparently a sickly kid who should have died, but had an encounter with the alien(‘s previous form) and helped gather lesser items… until his true nature was revealed. Thus, he ended up separated, a spirit pursuing the fragments and a boy kept alive outside space and time by the lesser shards, until now.
Subaru faces him solo and through the dangerous gambit of undoing her Magical Girl transform in space, gets through to him and brings him back to the nice side… only for Minato to be seemingly killed. To make matters worse, the heartbroken Subaru seems to have become disconnected from magic.
To cheer her up, they decide that the culture festival show must go on. In the wake of that, the alien and the other four leave to pursue the final fragment while Subaru is left straining for what light she can find. The team ends up in the depths of distant space, with galaxy filaments among the blackness, and Subaru discovers one last hint of magic that brings her to Minato at his real body and allows them both to ascend once more, with palette-swapped transformations at that. The warp-jumping team collides with Subaru, and thus she joins them on the last hunt.
Naturally, since we’ve been having ever-escalating space stuff, this ends with messing with a black hole for the last fragment. It takes Minato’s help (secured via kiss from Subaru) but the fragment is retrieved and the Infinite Improbability Drive repaired to continue its journey to another universe. As a last gift, the girls are sent into a chance to decide what world-line they would like to live on, what they would hope to become. They all decide to be themselves, except Subaru who also wants to make Minato (physical body: still implied to be a vegetable) happy. Thus, we follow Subaru as she ends up back at the start of the show, before anything magic happened.
This time, she’s able to talk to Aoi, and meets her original world-line’s versions of the rest of the gang, inviting them all to see a meteor shower with her. We even briefly see Minato, still hospitalized but not on the same hardcore life support suggesting that maybe he has a future this time around. The end.
Wish Upon the Pleiades remains a baffling show. I have no answers as to why this thing exists, much less why it takes the form that it does. Why magical girl? While all this stuff about outer space and the threads of fate and quantum-ish possibilities? But at the same time I can’t begrudge this show its existence.
The characters are… fine. There’s not much special about any of them in the wider panoply of characters, but at the same time they’re not boring. They all have decently defined identities, a couple of notes, and a very watchable screen presence. The plot isn’t much, but it is stronger than some other entries I could name. And Gainax did do what you would expect of such a bespoke studio. When asked to draw magical girls flying through space and interacting with the Sun or Saturn’s rings or what have you, they did a good job. Maybe they didn’t bring their absolute unlimited budget “pulling all the stops” A game, but they at least brought their solid B game and made the cool stuff look cool.
The easiest comparison show is Nanatsuiro Drops, which I referenced at the start. Something about stars, catching troublesome magic things that zip around, a rival who just does catching, and a love interest with complex and possibly life-threatening circumstances who lives a double life relative to the leading lady.
But where Nanatsuiro Drops had weak imagination propped up by trying desperately to do romantic drama, Wish Upon the Pleiades is at least visually creative. Its story is more standard, but I’m not sure that’s a bad thing here. The show clearly wants to be a very safe, very approachable magical girl outing, hence why it goes with a non-combat objective, a sympathetic rival, and no giant blob of evil at the end. Technically there are stakes, as if the spaceship stays broken it will bring very bad things to Earth given the relative sizes, but it’s still about as low-key as you could want for an adventure.
And the show achieves its goal. That’s what it is. Baffling origin and backing aside, it’s pretty much the picture of a Mostly Harmless outing. The visual wonder drags it up to a B-, but no higher. I guess I’d recommend it more than I wouldn’t, if you like Magical Girls and also Space, but that’s really as far as I go.