Alternative title(s): Magilumiere, Ltd.; Kabushiki Gaisha Magilumiere
Manga adaptation by Moe and J.C. Staff
Streaming on Amazon Prime Video

Premise

In a world where “magical girl” is as common a profession as any, college graduate Kana Sakuragi is struggling to find a job. Yet when a monster disrupts her latest interview and Kana gets a taste of what working as a magical girl actually entails, she finally discovers a career opportunity that allows her to put her unique skills into practice.

Aqua’s verdict: Oh well, it pays the bills, right?

J.C. Staff producing an anime about a middle-of-the-road company struggling to keep the lights on in a highly competitive industry? I can appreciate the irony.

Magilumiere‘s initial sales pitch is an endearing one. The idea of magical girls as a employees of startup companies fighting for their slice of a market that didn’t exist five years ago, dispatched to deal with monsters the way exterminators deal with vermin, is a creative one, and could lead to all sorts of quirky scenarios involving courting investors, arguing about invoices or dealing with insurance for property damage. Traditional tropes associated with the archetype are recontextualized in clever ways, with magical spells becoming lines of code executed via proprietary software and brooms becoming all-caps B.R.O.O.M.S., standard-issue company vehicles being leased as a fringe benefit to employees. Furthermore, with the entire central conflict of this episode hinging on a company neglecting its mandatory safety checks to cut costs — allowing for a monster to mature into a serious threat in a meeting room they “never use anyway” — Magilumiere even adds a slight drop of corporate satire into the mix, which certainly gives it an edge that will make venture capitalists drool.

Strong world-building certainly makes for an effective unique selling point, but unfortunately, that doesn’t mean I’m confident this initial public offering will make Magilumiere‘s stock skyrocket. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but something about this adaptation feels stilted. Shots are composited in uninteresting ways, numbing the sentiments each scene should evoke and turning conversations that should be exciting delves into this fascinating world into dull exchanges of platitudes by talking heads. The whole thing has a kind of “amateur theatre” vibe, with characters stiffly standing around when they’re not actively doing anything, moments that are supposed to be certified crowd-pleasers falling flat and performances that are inconsistent and wishy-washy, especially Yumiri Hanamori as Koshigaya, who alternates between refreshingly laid-back and sounding as if her lines were spliced in from a different production altogether.

This isn’t really Hanamori’s fault, though. In fact, no one seems to be cutting corners here. This production is not the kind of obvious hatchet job sent out to die as a tax write-off the anime industry has seen way too many of in recent years. It clearly has some money behind it, that money simply isn’t being put to good use. If I had to point fingers, I’d say the man in the chair here, debutant Masahiro Hiraoka, simply can’t seem to get a real grasp on what he’s dealing with, opting to rely on the safest possible directorial choices and appearing unwilling or unable to leave his own thumbprints on the work he’s been put in charge of, which is a real shame. Hiraoka’s prior credits mostly seem to have had the letters “CG” in front of them, which makes me wonder if the lack of a third dimension is what makes his style feel stilted here. Using traditional animation techniques in CG animation generally works well — as evidenced by shows like Beastars or Girls Band Cry — but the other way around? Jury’s still out on that one, I’m afraid.

In the end, Magilumiere reminds me of the lacklustre adaptations of the late 2000’s and early 10’s — not offensively bad, but not particularly noticeable either. It fits snugly in the segment of the production quality that exists between “torch the ships and run” and “Twitter user @DomainExpansionGear5 will get 10,000 retweets for posting our work and some variety of the phrases ‘goes hard’, ‘has aura’ and ‘brings the sauce'” — a niche that is nowadays mostly occupied by shows with titles like “The Strongest Gamer gets a Cheat Skill In Another World”. In a way, it’s refreshing to have a show in the three out of five segment that has heard of concepts like “original ideas”, “likeable characters” and “not endorsing blatant violations of the Geneva Convention”, but you gotta know what you’re getting into before taking the plunge.

J.C. Staff producing a perfectly mediocre time-waster of anime that will evaporate into thin air as soon as it’s over? Some traditions just refuse to die.