The Fall 2024 Anime Preview Guide

Magilumiere Magical Girls Inc.

“Magical Girl”— A profession that undertakes the work of exterminating a kind of natural disaster called “Kaii.” Kana Sakuragi, a female college student who struggles with job hunting, is picked up by a magical girl startup company and…

Magilumiere Magical Girls Inc. is based on the Magilumiere Co. Ltd. manga series by Sekka Iwata and Yū Aoki. The anime series is streaming on Amazon Prime Video on Fridays.

I was rather weary of this one going in. Over the years we've gotten a few of these “fantastical concept meets corporate hellscape” anime. A few seasons ago we had Bullbuster which did the same thing as this anime only in regards to mecha fighting kaiju. Honestly, taking the worst things about modern life (e.g., worries about money, workplace drama, and customer-facing jobs) and mixing them with something that is supposed to be a fun escape just doesn't mesh well with me—unless, of course, the concept goes full comedy like Ghostbusters.

However, Magilumiere Magical Girls Inc. managed to get me on board despite my initial trepidation. How? Can I just say how nice it is to have a hero who is not only good at her job but has fun with it? Koshigaya seems to have a blast looking cool fighting eldritch monsters. Even in mortal danger, she's smiling—full of confidence and joy at the challenge. She's not a superhero doing it for money, fame, or obligation. She's where she wants to be in life doing exactly what she wants to do—and that is a dream we should all strive for.

On the other side of the equation, we have Kana, a recent college graduate amid job-hunting. Kana's issue is that her greatest strength is her greatest liability: her memory. This is a problem a lot of young Japanese people have. Passing the appropriate standardized test is almost always the only deciding factor for getting into high school or college—things like grades and extracurriculars are meaningless. Thus, in general, the entire Japanese school system is based around rote memorization instead of critical thinking—as that's what you need to pass the tests.

So when Kana, with her photographic memory, is going through the job interview process, she just repeats what she has planned beforehand—what she thinks the interviewers want to hear. This makes her come off as anything but authentic. And it doesn't help that Kana saying she's good at research and preparation can also be interpreted as “unable to think on her feet and do what needs to be done in a crisis.”

Of course, this is proven untrue as Kana alone steps in to help Koshigaya fight the monster of the week—and can use both her memory and quick thinking to turn the fight in their favor. While Kana may have never thought about going into the magical girl industry, or even a small company instead of a large one, both the job and the environment seem to be what she needs to thrive—that is if she can get past her boss crossdressing as a magical girl, anyway.

Being the jaded and cynical adult that I am, it's always fun to see a series twist the typical tales of magical action and adventure through the prism of soul-crushing capitalism and workaday mundanity. What's more fun than a Magical Girl anime? A Magical Woman Anime, where the magic BROOMS™ and fancy wands are hampered by overdesigned software interfaces and our heroines have to hustle for clients as they compete with the other 500 understaffed companies that are vying for the opportunity to earn some cash blowing up Kaii monsters that wreak havoc across Japan.

I knew Magilumiere Co. Ltd. was going to be a damned fun time by the time its first fun action scene wrapped up and its premiere continued to impress me with its cool world building and interesting characters. The Kaii are well designed monsters with a variety of forms and effects and I dig the ways that their menacing presence has become just another everyday worry for the adults of Japan to have to figure out in between scheduling job interviews and complaining about workplace maintenance compliance. Hitomi makes for a likeable, feisty magical heroine, while her new protégé Kana serves as an ideal perspective character. She's a recent college graduate who is tired of the job-hunt grind and just wants to find a place that won't inexplicably brush off her committed work ethic and her freakishly powerful photographic memory. It's easy to root for her to meet up with Hitomi and find her destiny as a Magical Girl.

If you need a perfect example of the good vibes that Magilumiere is delivering, we get a surprisingly well choreographed and animated transformation sequence for Hitomi, except her transformation totem is just…her work ID lanyard. I'm literally clutching my well-worn keycard badge as we speak in solidarity with my new working-class idols. Kill those monsters, queen, and maybe even squirrel away a few more yen for that 401k.

This season's second magical girl offering is Magilumiere Magical Girls Inc. In my review of the previous entry, Acro Trip, I complained lightly about magical girl series that originate in media outlets aimed at men. I just want you to know, the whole time I was whispering under my breath, “Except for Magilumiere, which is cool.” My familiarity with the source, a seinen manga, is limited to one volume, but that volume was a lot of fun, okay?

It's definitely better than this season's anime about startups, that's for darn sure.

Magilumiere's gimmick is that magical girls are more or less exterminators dispatched by companies of varying sizes for as-yet-vaguely defined magical phenomena known as Kaii. The setting fuses the magical trappings of the genre with technology, with transformations triggered by their corporate ID badges, mechanical brooms that double as their wands, and their powers controlled by tablet apps. It's a fitting twist for a more grown-up take on a space defined by its relationship to young girls, whimsy, and magic.

What makes Magilumiere shine, rather than feel like a cynical mockery, is it still finds space for whimsy but in a more subdued way. Hitomi, the startup Magilumiere's sole magical girl, may be a magical girl via an employment contract rather than anything supernatural, but she's still having fun with it. She banters playfully with Kaede, Magilumiere's salesman, and her broom is decked out with stickers. She dyes her hair blonde, as evidenced by the dark roots showing through, and overall comes across as an overgrown kid, if not a bastion of girlish innocence. That's fine though; experimenting with adulthood has always been a motif of mahou shoujo, and she's found a form of adulthood that works for her where she can still express herself. I love her.

She's not actually the star of the show; that laurel goes to Kana Sakuragi, a recent college grad who's been struggling on the job hunt because she's memorized interview guides and company information to the point that it's off-putting to her interviewers. She's far less dynamic than Hitomi, but she's also voiced by Fairouz Ai, so I'm willing to give her a fair shake nonetheless.

Do they have to be magical girls? I'm not objecting to the job, mind you – I love the genre and most of its permutations. But I think we can all agree that the people in question in this show aren't girls but women: fully grown adults. Unlike in Precure Full Bloom or Arina Tanemura's manga Idol Dreams, both of which feature grown-up transforming ladies, they don't age down when they transform, and their transformations are for their full-time jobs. I know this is silly to get hung up on, but what can I say? I can be pedantic.

That quibble aside, I was pleasantly surprised by this episode and am now fully convinced that I was in a bad mood when I read the manga. This adaptation seems to balance being faithful to the source material with understanding the needs of a motion-based format. Much of the imagery is taken directly from the first volume, particularly the cityscape with all the magical girl company signs and the opening fight on the motorcycles. Other elements are beautifully extended, like Koshigaya's transformation, which needed animation and sparkle. Amusingly enough, it feels more exhaustive than any of the transformations in the currently airing Wonderful Precure!, which is a classic magical girl show aimed at a young audience. Still, it also isn't overtly sexualized, which is always a concern. Koshigaya's shit-eating grin during the entire thing is a lot of fun; this is a woman who loves her work, possibly because she gets to beat things up.

I don't love the technological aspect of the way the magical “girls” fight, though. Kaii (the in-world monsters) being sucked into USB drives is inherently funny, but the technology to fight, complete with tablets linked to the magic wands, feels overly complex. Koshigaya has to yell out her commands to the tablet, which sends the attacks to her wand, but she also needs someone to hit the reload button on the tablet, which is how classic overachiever and presumptive soon-to-be magical girl Kana gets involved. It's an attempt to update something like Pretty Cure's group (or just duo) attacks, but it doesn't work for me. I do find their BROOMS, which look a bit like the magic drive shafts from Wish Upon the Pleiades, to be entertaining, though; they make sense in a world where motorized transportation is the norm, and I enjoyed that Koshigaya was putting stickers all over hers.

This fills the same niche as Acro Trip, a different take on an old genre that's trying to reach both genre fans and those who might not be. I don't like it quite as much as the former, probably because I'm not thrilled by office politics and bureaucracy, which is already sneaking in a bit, but it's definitely worth at least the three-episode test.