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The Summer 2014 Anime Preview Guide
Magimoji Rurumo


Hope Chapman

Rating: 1

Review: Magimoji Rurumo is a "comedy" split into two short ten minute episodes. I'm going to just spoil the "hilarious climaxes" of both of them. If you don't want the amazing yuks ruined for you, breeze on by this writeup. Frankly, I don't have enough respect for the show not to ruin it.

The first half concludes in our hero Kota "doing the right thing" by jamming panties onto an underwear-less little loli witch. The entire buildup to this heartwarming gag is him spending hours and dozens of methods to get a peek at her unsheathed vagina without her knowledge. What a lovable scamp! Oh wait no, that's voyeurism aimed at a minor. (Yes, I'm sure she's probably 100 years old or whatever, but she acts like a child who just don't know nuffin about the real world, and that's the point.) That's not funny at all! Try again, you creepy, creepy show.

The second half concludes in Kota "doing the right thing" by not using the invisibility powers the witch has given him to massage a girl's breasts and slap a bra on her, which she'd previously lost. The only reason he doesn't is because he finds out that the bra was a treasured going-away present from her sister, and presumably that sappy knowledge kills his stiffy. (Also, hello comedy written by a man who don't know nuffin about women. Yes, I'm sure this lacy bra her sister bought her to remember her by is a treasured and heartfelt heirloom.) Isn't Kota a charming rapscallion? Oh wait no, that's magically-assisted assault. That's not funny either! Two strikes, Magimoji, and personally I don't care to give you a third chance.

There's not a single thing in this anime that hasn't been done better elsewhere. As an ecchi comedy, it's not explicit enough to be arousing, but it's too offensive to be funny. Design-wise, it's pretty ugly, and mostly full of boring or bad decisions. Its emaciated and angular box-people are arguably the only unique visual aspect, but they're highlighted by the most cliche colors and details in the annals of anime comedy. It's just an actively repellent show on every level imaginable to me, and anyone turned off by the gags described above won't find much to laugh at, either.

Man, this is so bad it makes me not want to ever watch Yowapeda. Hopefully that show by the same creator has a better sense of humor, but...blech! Skip this one.

Magimoji Rurumo is available streaming on Crunchyroll.


Carl Kimlinger

Rating: 3.5

Review: Magimoji Rurumo is your basic magical-girlfriend show. Our romantic lead is Kouta, a perverted but essentially good-hearted guy. He finds a magical book and, with the help of his school's Occult Club, uses it to make a wish. Stuff goes wrong, other stuff happens, and eventually he ends up with a cute witch—shy, quiet-spoken Rurumo—as a companion. By all rights this should be about as fun as reading a dictionary.

Somehow, though, Magimoji ends up a silly little treat. How? Well, to begin with it's actually funny—something most series of its ilk are ghastly at. Usually because they try too hard or have the comic creativity of knock-knock jokes. Magimoji is plenty antic, but it also has a healthy comedic imagination. That is true of its pure sight gags (it finds endless new uses for Rurumo's po-faced mannerisms), its situational humor (as payment for wishing up a pair of girls’ panties, Kouta must be eaten by crows), and its pervasive character silliness (Kouta is wholly satisfied when he finds out that his suicidal wish has allowed him to be in the same room as a pantiless girl). The series has a lot of fun with the ways Kouta's perversions sabotage his life, and with tweaking our magical-girlfriend expectations (magical girlfriend as Mephistopheles anyone?).

Interesting visuals also help the show out—the characters have an appealing lankiness and even Rurumo's feline familiar has his own very funny body language—but what really seals the deal are Rurumo and Kouta. Reluctantly kindhearted Kouta and guileless, straight-speaking Rurumo have that rare rom-com commodity: actual chemistry. You can see why they're good for each other and can look forward quite shamelessly to the evolution of their friendship into something more. No one's reinventing the wheel here, but it still promises to be one sweetly enjoyable ride.

Magimoji Rurumo is available streaming on Crunchyroll.


Theron Martin

Rating: 3 (of 5)

Review: Kota Shibaki, a member of his school's unofficial Mysterious Discoveries Club and long-time notorious pervert, is actually a Good-Hearted Pervert, in that his perversions only run wild until he stops to think for even a second about the consequences of his actions, upon which he becomes decent to a fault - even to the point of his life being at stake. That actually happens when an attempt to summon a witch unexpectedly works, resulting in a convoluted scenario where he ends up with the panties of the witch Rurumo but at the cost of his life, but he can get out of that cost if he just lets her be taken for punishment (because witches can't give up their possessions to humans), but he's just too decent a guy to do that. When Rurumo shows up again later, she's being punished for letting Kota off the hook on the contract (she only had him half-pecked to death by birds), so since she's been demoted to a trainee witch Kota is given a booklet of 666 tickets which he can use to call upon her magic. But there's one catch that Kota doesn't know about at first and Rurumo doesn't know about at all: once those tickets run out, Kota is history.

Magimoji Rurumo comes from the same manga-ka who created Yowapeda, so one can expect a slick degree of comic timing and delivery. That is a big part of what sells the first episode, which turns out to be remarkably funny when not stooping to the cheapest of (mostly mild) fan service antics. Somewhat surprisingly for such stereotypical characters, the chemistry between the excitable Kota and the dry, practical, and occasionally bluntly harsh Rurumo (a moeblob cut from Yuki Nagato cloth) also works; the closer visuals, which show Kota teaching a normally-dressed Rurumo to ride a bicycle, are just gosh-darn sweet, but there's more to it than just gimmickry. Their interactions here are fun enough and cute enough that seeing how the series develops them could alone make the series worth watching.

Animation production by J.C. Staff is nothing special, as are most of the character designs, but that super-tall pointy hat of Rurumo's and the high, sharply-pointed ears of her familiar cat will certainly stand out in a crowd. Regardless, the series’ first episode may not succeed at being knock-your-socks-off funny, and does have just enough fan service that it may be a discouragement for some viewers, but it does succeed at its goal of being a slapstick magical comedy.

Magimoji Rorumo is currently streaming on Crunchyroll .


Rebecca Silverman

Rating: 1.5

Review:

Sometimes it feels like a show isn't even trying. That's the case with Magimoji Rurumo, a phoned-in story about a guy who's a total pervert and the loli witch he (sort of) accidentally summons. Shibaki has been known as a pervert since elementary school, when he enjoyed flipping up girls' skirts. Then in middle school he liked to lend people porn. Now in high school he acts nice in order to sneak a peak where he oughtn't, and he's known as the Pervert King. To his chagrin, all of this means that he can't get a girlfriend. So when he and the school's equivalent of the SOS Brigade find a book about summoning a witch, he asks for...panties. He gets them, but because he had his wish granted by the witch Marumo, he has to die.

Is it bad if I wish he had?

Magimoji bumbles along from one crude joke about how perverted Shibaki is to another, with brief pauses when he considers doing something nice. (He actually does something decent a grand total of three times.) His frenetic speech patterns are offset by Marumo's expressionless dialog, and the only visually interesting component is Marumo's familiar Chiro, a strangely long, skinny cat with huge ears. A lot of yellows and oranges are used, which makes the show unattractive and at times overly bright, as if it were trying to distract from its lackluster character designs. Girls' faces are drawn in the most generic anime style possible, the better to focus on their bodies – the breasts and nipples of a girl who has had her bra stolen being the best example, as it has much more detail than her saucer-eyed face.

This does not look like a show that's going to go anywhere unexpected, and its handling of the usual material is inferior to other similar titles. Chiro's kind of neat and the eye-catch is pretty funny, as is Marumo's decision to kill Shibaki via “avian burial,” but for the most part this just comes off as annoying and kind of offensive. Unless you really dig bright orange backgrounds or emotionless witches who look like twelve-year-olds, I wouldn't bother with this one.

Magimoji Rurumo is available streaming on Crunchyroll.



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