Magilumiere Magical Girls Inc. – Episode 1

What’s it about? The market for magical girl services is booming, and Magilumiere is one tiny little startup in a sea of 500. It might be a company full of oddballs, but it’s the perfect place for recent graduate Sakuragi Kana, who wants nothing more than to be of help.

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A moment of silence for Magilumiere, the show about adult magical girls that people are constantly begging for but will never see because it’s been put into the concrete boots of Amazon’s nonexistent marketing and set out to sea at the bottom of Prime’s basically unusable streaming search. It’s a damn shame, because I love an ensemble working comedy about weird adults and it’s been a little minute since we had one.

Since Kana doesn’t join up with Magilumiere until the end of the episode, a lot of these initial proceedings hinge on the promise of the premise…maybe a bit too much. We do get a high-octane cold open wherein senior magical girl Koshigaya Hitomi faces down a giant Taxxon of a monster, which the creative team is clearly hoping will tied the audience over until the climactic concentration. And the details of the world are fun when we get them, including a lengthy transformation sequence for a magical girl costume that’s basically an office uniform with a few bows attached.

But there’s a lot of downtime in between where we follow Kana on a long day of interviews, wherein she’s not only not considering magical girl jobs but seems completely unaware of the field. It’s not bad character work, but scenes drag on past their point of efficiency in a clear effort to make what must’ve been the ending of a single chapter into the climax of the episode.

Once Hitomi and Kana do finally meet it’s an easy sell to see more—call me a sucker for the “laidback veteran and tryhard newbie” dynamic. The action itself is a little perfunctory, perhaps a symptom of the relative inexperience of the team as a whole, but it pops where it needs to and lands the biggest emotional beats.

The only cause for concern, which I’ve been braced for since I saw the character designs and came back to haunt me in the post-credits closer, is the introduction of Magilumiere’s boss. Shigemoto is introduced with the full “scary man in dress” framing, with extra angular features compared to the rest of the cast, a screen-shaking tread, and reaction shots of terror from Kana. I’m pretty sure this will be tossed away two minutes into episode 2 as a “haha, funny misunderstanding, that’s just how he is!” joke, but that doesn’t make it less transmisogynistic.

Minor spoilers for the manga follow

I also took the liberty of glancing over the wiki to try and suss Shigemoto’s gender situation, then took a moment to quietly die inside. When will I be free from the “crossdressing because of a dead sibling” trope. I thought the answer would be “1997,” but here we are.

That irritating caveat aside, this was a solidly middle-of-the-road swing at a premise I’d really like to see done well. More adult magical girls across the board, please.

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