Magilumiere Co. Ltd.

 Magilumiere Co. Ltd. (株式会社マジルミエ) is a 12 episode magical girl series based on the manga of the same name by Iwata Sekka.  The first season originally aired during the Fall of 2024.

    Sakuragi Kana is a recent college graduate who has struggled to find employment.  She puts unparalleled effort into researching each company she applies to but ultimately fails to impress them enough to want to hire her.  At one interview the room suddenly becomes infested with a supernatural being known as a kaii.  In recent years kaii have increased in frequency, causing danger and destruction in their wake.  This has lead to a boom in the magical girl industry, where hundreds of companies taught the series of these specialized women in combating the kaii.  The company she's at that is being attacked have been negligent in their kaii prevention measures and decided to hire a small magical girl business for this extermination, feeling they can be less than open on the level of threat involved.

    Sakuragi ends up assisting the magical girl, Koshigaya Hitomi, as she battles the powerful kaii, showing off hr ability to be flexible and objective under preassure.  Koshigaya tells Sakuragi that she should come work for her employer, Magilumiere Co. Ltd.  Overcome with emotion she agrees to join up, grateful for a job, but is uncertain if she is really cute out to be a magical girl.  Not counting Sakuragi, the company only has 4 members.  Its head, a middle aged gentleman who dresses as a magical girl named Shigemoto Kouji has an unconventional approach to how the business operates and what their goal is.  He's not concerned with being the most profitable, instead he's focused on the aesthetics of the magical girl industry and evolving it to a place where the kaii may no longer be a threat.  Sakuragi adapts to the unconventional ways her employer operates and appreciates it for its vision.  As she gains more experience in her roll she becomes more confident in her own abilities, but something dangerous is lurking in the recesses and there may be a preventable tragedy around any corner.

    I don't really watch magical girl series', as its not a genre that appeals to me very much.  I do however respect the genre and am glad that its fans have so many quality titles to choose from.  I've watched a few over the years, most enjoyable being Magical Girl Ore but was intrigued by the initial concept of this series.  I liked the concept of the world in Magilumiere being one of magical girls being rather common place.  The abilities behind them as well seems to stem from advanced technology instead of super natural elements.  The kaii themselves feel like yokai under a different name.  Honestly...this is pretty much the anime version of Ghost Busters when it comes down to it.  At times the action got boring, with the need to continuously call out attacks, largely made of nonsensical words stringed together that had little standardization.  But that's all par of the flavour in the genre so its not with out its precedent.

    This series is a little unconventional for a magical girl story.  Its really the story of a scrappy group of idealists fighting for their own sense of whats right, against standard conventions.  They all have their own past trauma's that have lead them to their fated union and they are stronger as a whole compared to what they can do alone.  Through out the first season bits and pieces of past events in the world leak out, working as foreshadowing for a greater narrative tension to come.  Like a video game, it slowly ramps up the difficulty as the audience and the main character are exposed to the nuances of the world.  At this point I am invested enough to continue watching it when the second season comes out but I'm not sure if I really enjoy this series over all.  All the while I was watching it I rally wanted to shut it off and re watch the original OAV's for Maho Tsukai Tai instead.  Either way, its a fun change of pace for the magical girl genre that adds an amount of maturity, both with the story its trying to tell and the fact that its characters are adults working in an industry, instead of randomly selected (some would say kidnapped) adolescent girls forced to carry the worlds burden on their shoulders.

The series was simulcast on Prime.