It feels weird praising a show about a business – and a startup at that – in the times we’re in, but such is the case with Magilumiere. It’s one of several shows over the past few years that have used the framework of Japanese corporate storytelling to kinda give a discrete middle finger at more toxic elements of Japanese corporate culture, while depicting a framework that could potentially not suck – in this case also, in a weird way, riffing on what a modern Japanese take on Ghostbusters might look like.

Magilumiere follows the company of the same name, focusing on the perspective of a new hire – Kana Sakuragi. Kana is fresh out of school, and like the Japanese school system has trained people for, she’s incredibly good at absorbing massive amounts of facts – which comes in handy when a group interview at a company goes south due to an infestation of Kaii (monsters that exist in this world), which ends up needing to get dealt with by Hitomi Koshigaya of Magilumiere (currently their only Magical Girl). Kana responds to the interviewing company’s apathy at the whole situation to (professionally) tell them to take the job offer and shove it, and helps out Hitomi, which gets her a job as a Magilumiere.

Oh, and in this setting, Magical Girls are a bit like professional monster exterminators with style. This fits in with the Ghostbusters comparison – both with the entrepreneurization (new word) of a supernatural thing, but also with the protagonists being part of a small company with a passionate interest in the field. Unlike Ghostbusters, though, there are numerous other companies in the field, each with different takes on the business, including Black companies (including one operated by a former colleague of Magilumiere’s founder – Kouji Shigemoto.

What makes this show feel like it works well is a lot of factors – Magilumiere and its staff – specifically unlike the characters in Ghostbusters, take real care in minimizing property damage whenever they can. There’s a sense of the other companies and their executives not having the same priorities. There’s also a sense here of the main company being one that favors regulation of the field – not in terms of regulation in their favor – but regulation being what’s right, even if it does them dirty, so long as it protects people and the environment.

This ties into the character of Kana and what you’d call her “special ability” – not only something like a photographic memory but an ability to quickly assess a situation and use the information she’s absorbed to better tailor a response to the situation. It feels like it’s playing with the same themes that Shin Godzilla was doing. However, while it’s doing it with a company, it also doesn’t feel like it’s doing the libertarian/pro-privatization thing of implying that a private company could do better than the government. The field’s already been privatized, and the big companies aren’t doing that well – and there’s a few implications (in this season) that the companies are making things worse, like the ambient magic radiation at a trade show causing a Kaii used in a demonstration to mutate and become more dangerous.

And, on top of all of that, it’s just fun. All of the staff of Magilumiere are entertaining and charming. The action scenes of each episode are great with lots of great little visual and audio flourishes. For example, Hitomi’s wand has a cute kitty head, and all of her magic has a kitty motif, including a “meow” sound when she casts anything. It also doesn’t have any of the skeevier elements that some magical girl anime not-aimed for young girls has – it’s just a show about a bunch of people in a workplace doing work (with some workplace comedy elements) and it so happens their work is Magical Girl Stuff.

Magilumiere is currently streaming on Amazon – buying anything through that link supports the site.

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