©岩田雪花・青木裕／集英社・株式会社マジルミエ製作委員会
It was a good move for Magilumiere Magical Girls Inc. to establish early on that the titular company was a good, fair member of the magical girl business to work for. The cynical pitfalls of such a fanciful role becoming a job-ass job can still be explored through other companies, but the adventures of Kana keep the core aspirational aspect to it. It creates a magical girl experience that’s just as much of a fulfilling fantasy for adults as it’s inspirations are for little girls: what if your job really was satisfying, and the pizza party purchased by the management wasn’t simply a hollow plea for you not to go on strike?
Magilumiere takes place within the Japanese business world, and so the role of the pizza party is played by an after-work karaoke session. Some might decry such an extracurricular excursion as “filler” in a show where they’d rather see magical girls in uniform coordinating to blast monsters and build up business intrigue as much as possible, but look, these ladies have been on the clock, they need time to unwind. What I love about this whole segment is how well it serves the characterization purposes of so many other series sidebars, as well as the real-life purposes of such outings: getting to know these people better.
Even before the festivities formally kick off, audiences are cottoning to details about these characters due to their reactions. Nikoyama is extremely work-focused even at the very end of the day, worried he won’t be able to finish everything in time to go out with everyone. President Shigemoto, meanwhile, is sure to take everyone’s potentially pre-planned schedules into account with his invitations, while also revealing that he got the rest of Niko’s workload done in the meantime so he’d have the chance to come along. Kaede shows off how constantly prepared he is, as a natural-born member of the sales team, with coupons ready to go. They fit their roles and activity in the company as Kana continues to observe and figure out how she fits into all this.
POV characters are a tried-and-true storytelling device because, when used well, they can effectively pull double duty in characterizing a story’s lead and naturally communicating information to the audience. “Natural” is the keyword there, as all the other members of Magilumiere are simply acting as their natural selves on the karaoke outing, and Kana is observing that behavior in its natural habitat. Despite the fact that they are literally performing songs, there’s not sense of performativity when Niko antisocially withdraws his singing into himself when an attendant pokes their head in the room, or when Kaede takes it upon himself not to sing, but to manage everyone else’s activities over the course of the evening. Also it’s just amusing to see Kana have the tables turned on her with someone attentively observing details about her for once.
This is the way of this segment, and even absent any magical girl action apart from Shigemoto’s extremely dedicated cosplay karaoke performance, it’s easily the most earnest fun Magilumiere has had with itself. Askew character details that aren’t necessarily immediately plot-relevant are neat, such as Koshigaya’s ability to project while singing. And don’t think I didn’t notice her multiple exclamations of how cute Kana was. It’s enough that I could continue just recapping every bit of it, but I won’t. The karaoke session isn’t the whole episode, even if it is the heart of it.
That heart is President Shigemoto’s point about one reason they even do this—something else for Kana to learn about the company as she comes along. It can be kind of easy to forget in the midst of things that even with the whole “magical girls as nine-to-five jobs” bit, they are still working to protect people. That came up last week with Magilumiere’s defense of the shopping district, and it’s reflected on in a quieter way here in how these employees need to experience the everyday joyous moments that people partake in so they understand what they’re safeguarding. That lines up with how Shigemoto seriously sees magical girls as “heroes” still, and contributes to the stated unusualness of Magilumiere as a business in the industry.
This all aligns with the satisfaction the employees at Magilumiere have in working for their boss-man, alongside some idle speculation on his cross-dressing habits and the past potentially tied into that. The writing certainly wants audiences to start speculating on this as much as the characters (there’s the value of an effectively written character POV again) as more of Shigemoto’s past connections are coming back, getting Kana collaborating with cosmetics company Miyakodo and, most importantly, meeting more professional magical girls. New character Lily Aoi pointedly uses the term “magical lady” that I know some viewers would have preferred for all the heroines in this series since they’re, you know, adults. But it’s a neat aside anyway along with the detail that Aoi transferred into magical-girl-ing from another department like you would so many other jobs. (God, I love the world building in this series.) This week’s episode of Magilumiere gives a lot of its time to simply setting the tone of itself and its future stories, and that confidence pays off in a delightful time with just enough to get me excited about where it’s going with this next storyline.
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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 reskeeting art of anime girls (magical and otherwise) on his BlueSky.