Kabushikigaisha Magi-Lumière

In recent years, creatures known as Kaii have frequently attacked cities and wrought destruction. Exterminating these monsters quickly became a popular and well-respected profession, carried out by magical girls. More than five hundred magical girl companies, ranging from small ventures to large corporations, offer their aid to those who need it.

Kana Sakuragi is a studious college graduate struggling to land a job despite attending numerous interviews. But when a Kaii attacks during her latest interview, she finds herself assisting the magical girl responding to the crisis. Although she lacks battle experience, Kana relies on her exceptional memory and knowledge to help subdue the monster.

Hitomi Koshigaya, the headstrong magical girl who faced the Kaii, recognizes Kana's potential and invites her to join Magilumiere Magical Girls Inc.—the startup where Hitomi works. Wishing to make a difference, Kana accepts the offer to become a magical girl herself. While Kana may not be suited for the corporate world, it soon becomes clear that her true calling is to rise as one of the most talented magical girls in existence.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Sakuragi, Kana Main

Fairouz Ai Japanese

Koshigaya, Hitomi Main

Hanamori, Yumiri Japanese

Shigemoto, Kouji Main

Koyama, Rikiya Japanese

Nikoyama, Kazuo Main

Yamashita, Daiki Japanese

Midorikawa, Kaede Main

Oosaka, Ryouta Japanese

Aoi, Lily Supporting

Ishihara, Kaori Japanese

Asou, Miyako Supporting

Inoue, Kikuko Japanese

Tsuchiba, Mei Supporting

Anzai, Chika Japanese

Hasegawa Supporting

Koshimizu, Ami Japanese

Kashinomi Supporting

KENN Japanese

Fujishiro, Atsushi Producer

Onoue, Taiki Producer

Kikuchi, Ruriko Producer

Hiraoka, Masahiro Director

Reviews

Feb 7, 2025

drainingdays

Recommended

Seeing the trailer, I initially thought this anime would be terrible solely because of the animation like the 3d low-quality animations for the monsters they’re fighting. I’m thrilled that they improved the animation to be not as bad as the trailer, the animation of Magilumiere has become decent! I loved the manga because it was a fresh new take on magical girls, an innovative concept! The story and development were meaningful yet unexpected which makes it exciting. It touches on realistic themes due to its concept of magical girls as more of a corporate and technological industry driven by software and programming instead of solely ... on magic. It's a more mature and systematic concept, especially with themes of idealism vs efficiency of corporations and issues on corporate slave. I hope the manga will get more love and moreover a bigger budget for upcoming seasons because the latter part of the manga is especially exhilarating.

HOWEVER what makes this anime good regardless of the decent budgeted quality of animation and the yeah okay directing was the OST and sound engineering! I normally appreciate OST to an extent and never really noticed sound engineering as much. The OST and sound directing were what pushed me to keep going and finish the anime, whoever was responsible for this I just want to say the team was a godsend. Whoever composed the OST was so good, it had a similar hopeful heroic vibe as encouraging and heartening as My Hero Academia OST or How to Train Your Dragons. The OST has truly left me inspired. I came from reading the manga and I simply liked Magilumiere because of the story, but watching the anime, the ost really made me see Kana Sakuragi in a new light, her story seemed much more inspiring because of the OST. I now understand her personal struggles more and how she grows as a character to become more heroic. The OST moved me to tears, it reminds me of how inspiring Deku was in My Hero Academia as he grew from his struggles and became the hero he has now become. Furthermore, whoever directed the sound engineering was great, they understood great timing.

Reviewer’s Rating: 8

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Dec 22, 2024

patkarunungan

Recommended

Magilumiere Magical Girls Inc. seems to be a new twist to the magical girl genre. Somebody said that Magilumiere isn't the first to introduce technology in the genre, but for people like me who had a first taste of that through this anime, this feels so unique.


§ Overview

In a world threatened by magical creatures known as Kaii sprang several magical girl companies. In this world, a magical girl is just like any other profession.

Enter our protagonist, Sakuragi Kana. She is a new graduate who is looking for a job. One fateful day, during a job interview, one of these Kaii attacked, and she met one ... such magical girl, Koshigaya Hitomi. Koshigaya asked Sakuragi for help, and together they defeated the monster. Koshigaya impressed Sakuragi so well that she withdrew her job application and asked to be a Magilumiere magical girl.


§ Notes


1. The animation here is mostly average. This is especially true in the OP where there are some frames where Sakuragi appears to be lifeless when she should be alive.

But the animation in the final episode is above average, and anyone watching can look forward to that.


2. The concept is unusual, even if it's true that Magilumiere Magical Girls Inc. isn't the first to try this concept. Being a magical girl is seen as another profession like a lawyer or a plumber. So anyone can become a magical girl.

The problem with this is that it takes away the uniqueness of being a magical girl. The transformation sequences are forgettable. In short, this feels soulless.

The attack spells feel more like lines of code. Imagine how refreshing it was when one of the magical girls being featured had a traditional transformation sequence as well as attack spells that seemed to be magic.

Speaking of attack spells.


3. In the Magilumiere company, a custom-made spell is made for every Kaii to ensure maximum effectiveness. It's a product of computer programming, which is nice. Computer programmers might appreciate this aspect.


4. In season 1, we didn't learn why Kaii started attacking humans. There doesn't seem to be an evil force with some ultimate goal in mind. The Kaii are just given.

I hope we are given an answer in season 2, but as it stands, I can't see how this story holds up as a good one. It's just that it's entertaining as it is.


5. To appreciate this anime, it is necessary to remove the lens of traditional magical girl stories like Sailor Moon. I suggest two points of view:

A. As competing technology

Since capitalism is involved in the magical girl business, we see that each magical girl is competing for services. The better the Kaii removal technology, the more a company will gain clients.

B. As the ever presence of problems being solved by software developers

I mentioned above that, to deal with Kaii, Magilumiere creates custom spells through coding. It doesn't seem to be different to real-life coding where code can be used for either creative expression as well as solving problems.


§ Conclusion

I don't think this anime can be better than a traditional magical girl show like Sailor Moon. I can give it props though for being so entertaining.

Reviewer’s Rating: 5

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Jan 8, 2025

PixelB

Mixed Feelings

What is the main issue of this show? I really can't suspend my disbelief at the setting sometimes. Generally speaking, I wouldn't say I am very picky when it comes to worldbuilding. After all, complaining about how physics just doesn't work with 3DM gear in Attack on Titan is just an "erm actually" moment and doesn't actually affect anything. However, Kabushikigaisha Magi-Lumière fails to even pass my low expectations.

It's magic in modern world! The problem is quite apparent once you look at even just the first few episodes. The show is a profession-type show, with the main focus being the logistics of how magical ... girls fight Kaii (monsters) with their magical powers. The way the magic is generated, the pipeline towards subduing kaii, and overall the general worldbuilding surrounding magical girls is the focal point of the story. They even use code to generate magical spells in this world. That's all and good, but that also means that if you're going to be so focused on the development of magical girls as an industry and profession, it's got to be a bit more than just Sailor Moon logic. After all, with Sailor Moon, the plot is that "our heroes --magical girls-- have magic powers and can transform." That's perfectly fine for what Sailor Moon was trying to achieve and I am satisfied with that explanation. This show obviously tries to go more in depth on how the magic actually works, so on and so forth. Thus, if you focus on it, you need to flesh it out more.

So begs the question: there's a LOT of blatant plot holes or worldbuilding the anime just decides to never explain or show to you. For example, how does the magical girl industry actually operate? We can go back to even just the adventurer's guild in a classic medieval fantasy as an example. Adventurers take on quests based on their rank, and these quests are issued out in conjunction with the adventurer's guild. The adventurer's guild is a third party entity similar to a contracting company where they accept requests from all sorts of individuals. Even the government will commission adventurer's guild to serve as mercenaries or to clean up monsters in the area.

Here's the thing though: even this simple explanation of how adventurers work is not extended to this show with magical girls. After all, what does the government have to say about this? I have to say that some novels and anime make governments omnipotent. For example, the government being able to predict when monsters appear and issue people to address the issue immediately. In this show, the government doesn't even exist. The show kind of just assumes that a capitalistic privatized magical girl industry would actually be a good solution for a public safety concern that governments would probably have large regulations or control over. At the very least, it would be a mix of privatized and public magical girls depending on the pay and location. Anyways, you might say this is a huge nitpick, but it ties into the main issues I have.

For how in depth the show goes onto looking into how magical girls perform magic and how they exterminate monsters, I really dislike how the show never bothers to explain how the industry came to be in the first place. To begin with, magic can clearly be used with harm as well. How are magical girls controlled and how are magic girl criminals handled? It'd be kind of fun to just see how let's say, see how magic brooms and wands are programmed with failsafes to not target humans under any circumstances, and how the history of that came to be. That's kind of the charm of these types of shows in my opinion; being able to focus on how things came to be in a fun but sort of realistic manner. For a show that has episodes showcasing magic conventions on how to deal with monster mutation and how the pipeline of creating spells from code to the actual field is emphasized, there are still very large holes in logic like this is commonly shown in this anime, which doesn't really make sense for what the theme of the show seems to be. I'm only focusing so much on these sorts of things because the anime clearly wants to be realistic about some things. Such as the fact that in a privatized industry, there's proprietary spells, software, and equipment that they use. And that such proprietary software and information is licensed out to magical girl companies. When you have dedicated research labs towards in-house magic development in companies and have a large amount of exposition and worldbuilding surrounding it, sorry if I also expect to have some semblance of how the industry actually works when it comes to government intervention and public safety.

All other aspects of the show are fine. The show was fine to watch. It's just large leaps in some logic and storytelling makes the show a lot worse. For example, in one episode, Kana has a perfectly functional broom while her partner, Koshigaya broke hers and is running out of power. Since Kana is a beginner while her partner is trying to do the heavy lifting in this episode, is it not normal for Kana to swap brooms so Koshigaya can do her job? Instead there's a crisis with a clear solution but Kana never wants to pursue that line of thought. You might argue that Koshigaya wouldn't be able to reach in time but it's clear that in the next few frames that Koshigaya is able to push off the building and land right next to Kana to do the exchange, showing that it was possible. Instead, Kana inexplicably just does a risky move that she's never done before and crisis averted. Strange.

Other ways the show is just straight up awful is how Kana is portrayed in the first episode. "huh, I really need a way to hammer into the viewer that Kana has good memory. How do I do that?" In an inconsequential scene, Kana is able to memorize all of the previous customers' orders in a coffee shop because the barista forgot their orders. This scene is so shoehorned in just to show how Kana has good memory it's ridiculous. The scene was only crafted to showcase that Kana is smart. It's not the fact that Kana has good memory that makes the scene bad, it's just that the scene was only created to show to the audience the in such a straightforward and forced manner that makes it bad. Could it not have been done more subtly or elegantly?

Anyways, I have been bashing the show but characters aren't so bad outside of Kana's first episode and how her character is introduced. The episodes themselves are frankly average but enough to retain interest. There doesn't seem to be much of an overarching plot so it just makes the episodes focused around magical girl monster extermination and how magic can be applied in different ways. I did think the special effects and CGI were a cut above normal to be honest, and the animation quality isn't the greatest but good enough. I enjoy how the anime blends the CGI and 2D animation. Only in far shots is CGI used for the main characters, and most if not all closeups are hand animated still which is good. The show clearly understands that CGI can be used as a way to save money, but when shots matter, they won't use it.

Reviewer’s Rating: 6

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