Posted in: Anime, TV | Tagged: Madoka Magica, Magilumiere Magical Girls Inc.

Was Magilumiere Magical Girls Inc. The Most Underrated Anime of 2024?

Magilumiere Magical Girls Inc. is an unexpected anime take on the Magical Girl genre that's an allegory for office culture and tech startups.

Magilumiere Magical Girls Inc. might be the most underrated anime series of 2024, partly because it's on Prime Video, which doesn't do a good job of promoting the anime series they pick up exclusively. It's a new take on Magical Girls that's unexpected and surprising, taking the genre to new places, and it's a Japanese approach to making superheroes feel relevant. When you think about it,  Sailor Moon and magical girls were really meant to be "Green Lantern for girls," and this series does that with a commentary on tech startup culture, office relations, and work-life balance.

Magilumiere Magical Girls Inc. takes place in Japan, where Magical Girls is a privatized industry of superheroines for hire employed by agencies that are like tech companies. The menaces are demonic eruptions that are analogues to computer viruses, and industrial and natural disasters. The Magical Girls here aren't teenage girls but adult career women with high-profile and dangerous jobs that are a cross between first responders and Ghostbusters. Kana Sakuragi is a college grad who joins Magilumiere Magical Girls Inc., a startup company, to become their latest Magical Girl, and has to navigate being a rookie employee and superheroine as well as the public face of the company.

Her co-worker and supervisor of the more seasoned Hitomi Koshigaya, a snarky tomboy with an irrepressible gung-ho attitude to superheroing, and they're backed up by their nerdy tech support Kazuo Nikoyama who writes the code for their magical spells, affable office manager Kaede Midorikawa and mysterious CEO and genius engineer, the cross-dressing Koji Shigemoto. This wacky crew makes the series an allegory for working for an underdog tech startup with a visionary CEO who helped found the whole industry but opted out of being rich to pursue his ideals of creating a thriving industry. Shigemoto seems to know more than anyone the real dangers of the demons they have to fight and has his eye on the future. Remove the Magical Girl part of the story, and this sounds strangely close to the real-life myth of the startup economy, doesn't it?

Magilumiere Magical Girls Inc. is surprisingly adult and political in its commentary about the tech industry and office culture while staying all-ages. The later chapters of the manga (not covered yet in season one of the anime) get more political about the dangers of deregulation on top of a lesson in employee relations and industry practices, all wrapped in a bright anime Magical Girl bow. It's the most interesting use of the superhero genre to talk about current topics, and it passes the Bechdel Test with no subplots involving a heroine mooning over a handsome man. None of the women in the series show the least bit of interest in romance and are more concerned with being great at their jobs and, well, saving the world while looking good. It's really about the tech industry and the geeks who make it tick and how young women manage workplace relationships.

Sailor Moon kicked off the Magical Girl genre as superhero romances for giris. The early 2000s' Madoka Magica was a subversion of the genre where becoming a Magical Girl is something dark and horrible in an Alan Moore-style deconstruction. Magilumiere Magical Girls Inc. doesn't deconstruct the genre but takes it in a more adult and socially conscious direction with its allegory for entering the job market and surviving under Capitalism.

Magilumiere Magical Girls Inc. is streaming on Prime Video with both Japanese and English dubs available. A second season has already been announced.

Magilumiere Magical Girls Inc.

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Review by Adi Tantimedh

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8/10

A new take on the Magical Girl where the superheroines are career women in a world of privatised Magical Girls that's a wacky allegory for workplace relationships and tech startup office culture that's surreal, funny and makes superheroes feel relevant again.

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