The Winter 2025 Anime Preview Guide

Magic Maker: How to Make Magic in Another World

A man who dies in the modern world while harboring a longing for magic is reincarnated in another world as a baby named Shion. Hoping that magic finally exists in another world, Shion is disappointed when he discovers that magic also does not exist in this new world. One day, while visiting a lake with his sister Marie, Shion witnesses a mysterious phenomenon that is "like magic." Shion then decides to be a pioneer of magic in another world and starts researching magic.

Magic Maker: How to Make Magic in Another World is based on a light novel series by Kazuki Kaburagi. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Wednesdays.

It seems my esteemed colleagues who painstakingly craft This Week in Anime each week were somewhat precipitous with their recent column on incest, because this show has it. Our protagonists are brother and sister, and when sister Marie has a meltdown over the fact that she can't marry her younger brother, he vows that he'll adopt a child to be his heir, and they can stay together forever. Then suddenly, magic light begins to glow between them. If you've watched the episode, you'll know that a similar light is part of a local fish species' mating ritual, so the implication is pretty clear.

It's also this scene that's likely to make or break the show for some viewers, because the rest isn't terribly exciting or different from other similar stories. The big hook is that the point-of-view character isn't Shion, the one who's been reborn from another (presumably our) world. It's Marie, his older sister, and her take on some of the weird things she sees her little brother doing actually do a decent job of contextualizing his isekai'd state. Things come to a head when he asks his father about the existence of magic after Marie's seen him pretending to cast what we recognize as typical spells in the yard; Shion is visibly struck when his dad has never even heard the word “magic.” Even though he hasn't said as much, we can see that he's not terribly pleased with his isekai experience.

That's about the only novel element this story has to offer, though. Naturally, he discovers, alongside Marie and her friend Rose, that magic energy does exist, and that sets the stage for the rest of the story, along with his…romance…with his sister. Time skips happen at regular three-year intervals until Shion's nine, and everything is frankly fairly bland as we watch the kids act like an adult's idea of what kids are more than actual children. There are visual attempts to make things attractive, whether you consider the floating balls of fish-love-light against a violet sky or the fact that the kids' mother's dress is impressively low cut. There's still something a little awkward and uncanny about the children's designs; the proportions are off, and their heads look too heavy for their bodies to carry. There are also some odd details, like the fact that at one point, it looks like their mother doesn't eat with the family but stands beside her husband's chair while he eats.

This is one of Crunchyroll's simuldub titles, and the cast is just fine. It's not spectacular, but the children also don't sound too much like adults putting on a “kid” voice, and I think this really is one where your general preference for sub or dub will guide you in the right direction.

I'll tell you, after seeing that “Content Advisory” tag under Crunchyroll's synopsis page for Magic Maker, I spent the entire premiere wondering what kind of weird-ass nonsense was going to go down to earn it. I immediately defaulted to assuming that we were in for some kind of Made in Abyss type of tonal shift and that the darkside to Shion discovering how to use magic in his new isekai universe was that he was going to accidentally Cronenberg his sister Marie into a Mitty-esque abomination of anguished, wailing flesh. This has been a rather tame season, all things considered, so I honestly wasn't opposed to a cutesy-looking anime devolving into full-on body-horror phantasmagoria since that would at least give this show some kind of hook to latch on to because the bland visuals and aimless storytelling were otherwise doing it no favors. It was when we got to the ending scene, though, and Marie started throwing her tantrum over how unfair it was that sisters weren't allowed to just marry their brothers when they loved them as much as she loved Shion that I finally understood what kind of freak flag that this anime was itching to fly.

I'll be honest: I'm so desperate to be blessed by even a pinprick of light in the abyssal depths of these here isekai slop mines that I'm willing to accept “The One That's Just Unabashedly About Incest” as a break from the shows that don't even try to have a personality. Just…why did they have to be, like, six years old, man? I already said I was willing to meet you halfway and tolerate the damned sister-loving, dammit; why does Magic Maker insist on making them insufferably twee tykes, too? I'm assuming—or maybe the right turn of phrase is “desperately pleading”—that the show is going to timeskip us further along to a point where Shion and Marie are closer to fully grown because an entire season of “What if Max and Ruby could do magic and were also an abomination in the eyes of God and man alike?” would be absolutely unwatchable.

It's not like the show even pretends to give a crap about making the kids seem like real children anyways, which, yeah, is technically a really good thing, but it also underscores how cynical and transparent the whole premise of the show is. Shion can maybe get a pass for sounding like a twenty-year-old man trapped in a six-year-old's body, what with the isekai of it all, but then again, the fragile ground that the show is treading with its subject matter would shatter completely if we were ever meant to believe that Shion has the entire personality of the dude who died in Normal World living in his, and not just vague echoes of his memories. The point is, if we're giving Magic Maker whatever benefit of the doubt we can muster, Shion doesn't act like a real kid, and neither does Marie or that other girl we meet later in the premiere. It makes the whole show feel even weirder than it already does.

This problem is exacerbated by the English dub, which has one of the most unfortunate cases of “Obvious Adults Putting On Cutesy Little Kid Voices” that I've heard in a long time. I'm sure the actors were just performing the lines as directed, and even if the industry did make a habit of casting child actors for such parts, there's no chance in hell you'd want any of them within a hundred yards of this script. Still, the fact remains that, for as much as this show just does not work in its native Japanese, it really does not work in English. I will admit that the dub mellows out a bit once we get past the second time skip, but that only means it has gone from “unbearably cringe-inducing” to “generally irritating.” I don't think Magic Maker is worth a watch in any language, frankly, but if you must, stick with the original Japanese.

If you've been reading through the preview guide, you might have noticed that I talk a lot about “the twist” when it comes to anime in well-worn genres—the thing that sets it apart from its similar peers. Often, this comes in the form of a specific situation to be overcome or a change in the cliché structure that sends the story down a new path. However, “the twist” doesn't have to be something within the story—it can be something more metatextual instead.

That is the case with this first episode of Magic Maker. Objectively, the story is similar to numerous other isekai tales. We have a boy from our world reincarnated in a fantasy world full of nobles and monsters. However, the twist is how the story is told. Rather than the reincarnated Shion being our viewpoint character/narrator, we instead see the world through the eyes of his normal, fantasy world sister, Marie.

She knows nothing about Earth—nor does she know anything about the idea of what a Western-style fantasy world should be like. She has no concept of “magic” (much less the word itself) but she does see how hurt her brother is when he discovers it doesn't exist. With her limited child's ability, she does everything she can to make him happy. This outsider viewpoint on your standard isekai tale breathes fresh life into the story. It makes the well-trodden path seem far more emotional and novel than it would through Shion's eyes.

Now, will this be the case for the show going forward? Judging by the final moments of the first eyes where we suddenly shift into Shion's head, it doesn't look like it. However, taken alone, this episode was far more enjoyable than the vast majority of fantasy anime we've gotten this season—well, most seasons, if we're going to be frank about it. And as for the series going forward, this anime also comes with the secondary twist of a fantasy world where magic has yet to be discovered. Watching Shion and Marie as they try to create magic looks to be more than enough to keep this story watchable.

Oh and as for the dub cast (as this is one of Crunchyroll's simuldubs this season), they're fine. While I prefer the Japanese casts by default, there's no one who seems terribly miscast or out of place among the English voice actors.