Mahou no Star Magical Emi

Sweet magical girl show from the 80s. No evil to fight but nice stories from the magical daily life of Mai.

Clumsy elementary school girl aspiring to become a magician obtains a magical item which allows her to transform into a beautiful young woman and performing incredible magic. From there on she manages to live a double life. Not having the necessary skills to perform with her magic group as her true self she uses her magic powers to perform “magic” tricks on stage getting the whole group famous overnight. Together with an ambitious manager and his pushover assistant her alternate identity becomes pretty ... fast an idol.

The show is very episodic most of the time. Most of the episodes consist of Mai trying to manage to get on time to the magic shows or some minor problems she solves with magic. This can become very repetitive and reduced my enjoyment of the show.

Good thing that the characters are very lovely and funny. There is the shared crush between both personalities, her family, friends from school and the magic group which is like another family. Just a little strange that professional magicians don’t realize that she is using real magic on stage or even ask for a way to join her other than letting Mai get her when needed… And no one seems to have the need to let the idol sign a contract…
Mai probably has the most useless magical pet a show of this genre could have. Aside from explaining a few things at the beginning it was pretty much useless…

Knowing this show is from the 80s it looks pretty good even today. Nice backgrounds and sweet looking characters. Proper and not too much reused animation.

At this moment there are only about 15 episodes available with English subtitles. I watched it with a French dub. The voice acting is all right. The only thing really bothersome is that the whole show they reused the same song at every occasion… If you want to watch it in French you can easily find the disks for less than 20€ on the French Amazon.

It’s a nice calm episodic show where nothing bad happens. All right show to relax.