Magilumiere Magical Girls Inc.

Episodes 1-2

The Magical Girl genre is a standby that's a lot of fun on its own, but also fun to see how it can be twisted and permuted in different ways. Having magical girls "grow up" often takes the form of making them dark and deconstructive or just graphically adult-oriented, but other times it means simply letting the girls themselves grow up. Magilumiere Magical Girls Inc. leans into the latter—these ladies are transforming into pretty outfits with sparkles and fighting bad guys with blasts of magic but they're also clocking in and out, reading manuals for their magical gear, and dealing with government oversight on their efforts. Magical girls are a business, and business is a-boomin'.

This "What if Ghostbusters but Magical Girls" concept is kind of a home run to start Magilumiere out on, with the first episode mostly coasting on the cool factor of it all. It helps that the first featured magical girl, Hitomi Koshigaya, is extremely cool herself. Being a magical girl may be her job but she's still going to have fun doing it. As far as subversive genre stylings, I'm simply never going to be immune to a delinquent-coded gal who flips around on her mechanical magic BROOM, stands up on moving motorcycles, and blasts away monsters with a shit-eating grin the whole time. She's just too good.

Koshigaya is not the actual focus, however, with newly hired magical girl Kana Sakuragi being the real focal point. She serves the POV role well, being a pointedly observant young lady who brushes up on all the mechanics of how these on-the-clock magical girls work. She's also something of an against-type voice role for Fairouz Ai, but I'm always happy to hear her, regardless. Sakuragi embodies the ideas endemic to the particular approach of Magilumiere—how we intersect with our employment, the need to be needed without being exploited, and taking satisfaction in a job well done while also being fairly treated and compensated.

"Do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life" is a false truism, even as it would be nice to strive for, conceptually. Sakuragi's remark in the second episode about magical girls being a "legitimate career" that everyone dreams about speaks to the fantasy of this story. Who wouldn't jump at the chance finding out they had the talent for such a cool job? Sakuragi, however, has to first have it made clear to her that she even has that talent. It's rare in the world of employment to find something you enjoy, are good at, and can be paid to do, and sometimes it requires some unexpected interpretation of your skills. Sakuragi's incredible ability to observe and memorize material may seem rote, but as both Koshigaya and company president Shigemoto point out, it's the ways in which Sakuragi can apply those abilities that make her valuable to the job—and being valued feels good.

Thus far Magilumiere is focusing on the cool factor of the magical girl job as performed by the titular company, but I think this premise will do even better once it expands to broader ideas of how this all works in this world. Magilumiere is characterized as a scrappy startup that's challenging the in-universe conventions of the magical girl business, meaning I'm curious to see just what the "normal" for that business is like. What are they doing differently from their competitors, and how do competitors interact with each other? This also crosses over with the aforementioned government oversight and anything the anime will have to say about government regulation on businesses like this. My earlier Ghostbusters invocation wasn't for nothing.

It means that by the second episode of Magilumiere, as with the first, the show still feels like it's coasting on its concept. It's an extremely cool concept, mind, and while the production is uneven, it knows where to put its most powerful efforts—with a lot of them going into the transformation sequences, naturally. Many of the magical battle scenes, by their nature, consisting of characters sitting in one spot just blasting monsters limits that inherent cool factor, even if they're finding ways to dress it up with various effects. But I'm going to need more stuff like Koshigaya zipping around on her BROOM to dodge enemy attacks and less girls standing in rooms fiddling with iPad apps as this anime goes on. I'm hopeful it'll get there! As magical girls find new ways to grow up, I'm excited to watch Magilumiere grow itself.

Rating:

Magilumiere Magical Girls Inc. is currently streaming on Amazon Prime.

Chris would 200% work for a magical girl company if they were real, but he'll settle for writing reviews and ad copy instead. You can peruse more of his views over on his blog , or catch him retweeting art of anime girls (magical and otherwise) on his Twitter.