Mahoutsukai Tai!

So this was one of those anime I'd often see recommended back when I first got into anime in the late 90s and early 2000s, but for whatever reason, I never got around to watching it at the time. But now that I finally found it on Nozomi Entertainment's YouTube channel, what I found was a product of its time that's aged rather poorly. Or maybe I've just grown too far out of the target demographic.

I'd heard that this was a magical girl series going in, and while that's technically not wrong, it's pretty clear that it expects its audience to identify more ... with the pervy guy who runs the club than any of the girls. At least it never quite hits harem territory, even if it's about a nerdy guy, the hot young women that surround him, and a gay guy whose only character trait for 90% of the series is to "humorously" hit on that nerdy guy (I don't think I've ever seen an anime filled with as many gay panic jokes as this one, and it's exactly as uncomfortable as it sounds). The main girl still has a lot of screentime and a character arc, but it's nothing deep or that interesting. Sae's whole thing is that she's clumsy and doesn't believe in herself, which she feels the need to tell everyone around her over and over again, until she finally learns to believe in herself. It's the same kind of thing you've seen plenty of times, usually done better than this.

That isn't to say that everything about it fails. The alien threat is interesting in that it actually manages to feel alien and isn't like anything I've seen in a magical girl series before. I liked the gag early on where two of the girls treat being part of a group of magic users trying to get into a big fight with aliens as boring and worth blowing off.
The nerdy guy's absurd pervy fantasies managed to make me laugh once, even if they failed more often than not. And there was one small story arc between the gay guy and one of the girls that ended up being kind of sad and sweet. I just wish the rest of the show could have had an emotional core like that.

This probably still makes it sound like I disliked the show more than I did. It's hardly awful, and I don't regret my time watching it. I feel like I would have been really into it if I'd seen it at around age 14, but in my early 30s, I don't feel like there's a whole lot for me here.

Magic User's Club is an anime with a stunning visual style, where it is obvious at every turn that a great deal of passion and dedication went in to every scene. However, beneath this mastercraft veneer, is something so typical and unremarkable that it is shocking. The content within this anime is essentially what you'd get if you asked some random uninterested stranger what they thought anime was like. It's by no means necessarily bad, it's just not really all that special. Without the visual aspect, Magic User's Club would have nothing left to set it apart. Beginning with the ... story, it at least has an intriguing enough concept, with the looming presence of alien machines studying the earth, sizing it up for invasion, and the response of a bunch of high school students to that presence with the use of magic. However, past the very initial premise, there's no real substance here. It follows your typical color-by-numbers tale of a magical girl using the power of believing in herself to save the world. There are love triangles and crushes, and all the tropes and jokes and slapstick and thinly-veiled-fetishes one has come to expect from a lot of anime. And I say this as someone who actually finds a lot of these anime tropes fun, and think they lend a certain character to the medium when used right, but here it's just kind of lazy. You can tell from the first episode how everything is going to end, and that really shouldn't be the case. Beyond this, the funny moments are really hit-or-miss. I did find myself chuckling every now and then, but some things get dry quick when you get to episode 4 of the same joke. I want to reiterate here, it's not bad, it's just not strictly good.

But man, the art makes this mid show look absolutely amazing. Magic User's Club is one of the greatest examples of what 90s anime has to offer visually. Everything from the color to the seamless animation and minute detail come together to paint a picture of immense and timeless beauty. It strikes at the very core of what makes this era of animation so good. Personally, my favorite aspects of the art, and indeed the entire show, are the backgrounds and the character design. The backgrounds are in and of themselves masterpieces of color and technique, balancing mood and composition in ways which bring the world to life. Then, within this living world, the character designs exude a unique vitality, blending realism and style which breathes life into the characters which they portray, and giving them a physicality which invests you in their wellbeing against your better judgement.

The sound meanwhile is pretty good, with a semi-orchestral OST which focuses on dramatism while taking a backseat to the art. The sounds of life are lacking however, lost in the music and unremarkable voice work.

The characters, while they might bear visually compelling designs, fall flat in their substance, just like the story does, and they lean on their tropes almost entirely to function. Not a single person in the main cast manages to rise above this, and as such they remain pretty mid even when compared to smaller projects of the same era, and in fact I found a couple pretty unlikable. When it comes to choosing favorites, there's only one character that really stands out to me, and that's Minowa, the journalist. I think, because he's a secondary character, he manages to avoid the garbage treatment the main characters got, which lead to him being unique and interesting, and to some degree, genuine. This is especially demonstrated in a particular conversation he has with one of the more interesting members of the main cast, Aikawa, near a beach bonfire. On this note, I want to say that overall, this anime had potential. It really did have the makings of something great. With a visual element so impactful that it can turn a 5 like this into a 7, imagine what it could have done to a show which was a 7 at its core. I think, if they just spent a little more time on everything else, this could have been amazing. Unfortunately, that didn't happen, and the later TV adaptation robs this show of its art, which is once again to say, the only thing that makes it good. So, we're stuck with this as it is. Magic User's Club is not a bad anime, and it's certainly one of the better looking shows I've watched, but that's not all there is to greatness. There needs to be something under the hood, and this just doesn't have that something. Watch it for the visuals alone, as I really cannot recommend it on any other metric.