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https://cdn.animenewsnetwork.com/thumbnails/max300x600/cms/episode-review/131315/saki.png.jpg
Magical Girl Ore - Episode 6 [Review]
Just how long can an episode stretch a single joke? This episode of Magical Girl Ore would like the answer to be twenty minutes, but I can't say it's successful there. In “Hot Springs Business,” the cast goes to a hot springs resort, but between karaoke, demons, and concealing their identities, Saki and Sakuyo don't get a moment to relax. There's a lot of potential to explore by putting two gender-shifters in an environment that centers around sex-separated bathing, but the episode tosses most of that out the window to pit Saki's Ore form against the silent Mohiro in a sauna endurance competition that goes on for way too long.
If Magical Girl Ore were a short, with episodes anywhere from 3 to 12 minutes, I think I'd be enjoying it a lot more than I am now. It has fun art and a lot of cute visual storytelling details, like when Sakuyo and Mohiro wear welding helmets to avoid staring directly into the lightning flash that is Saki and Hyoe's rivalry. The problem is that it drags jokes on for long after they cease to be funny. As Saki continued to keep up her “love power” by staring a hole through Mohiro's dick, it occurred to me that the same result could have been achieved if they'd shown her doing this just once, instead of dozens of times. The most unforgivable part of this episode's plot is that Mohiro is essentially mute, so we watched Saki as Ore mostly wrestle with internal dialogue while Mohiro says nothing at all, which really means watching Saki make the same joke while Mohiro sits there not reacting.
Speaking of tired jokes, I'm getting really sick of Saki seeing Sakuyo, who has been nothing but sweet, as the biggest threat in the show. Saki even imagines herself weeping while Sakuyo, in her Ore form, smokes a post-coital cigarette. However, this episode might be the turning point in that romantic plot—it seems that even the show is tired of Saki's fears. Though we've seen her act more predatory in the past, this time Sakuyo is the model of consent, telling Saki she doesn't want to do anything Saki doesn't want, and it's Sakuyo who bursts into the men's bath in the nick of time to be Saki's knight in shining armor. (She does this after taking out a demon party, and this battle is treated as an afterthought instead of being allowed to add any real interest to the story.) Saki may still be deeply in love with wet blanket Mohiro, but her blushing response to Sakuyo after the rescue gives me hope that she'll see that her real dreamboat isn't Mohiro, but his sister.
This episode also showed us exactly how Saki and Sakuyo's Love Power works. They can jump into a cold bath (perhaps a nod to Ranma ½) to kill their libidos or otherwise dampen their lovey-dovey feelings for the object of their affection. It makes sense that Saki's infatuation with Mohiro fades in the bath since she's busy panicking about being discovered, with Ashita no Joe-esque art coming out to emphasize just how far she is past her limit. But just as the minutes in the sauna dragged on for Saki, they were also dragging on for the audience. There was too little tension in this episode, and even the arbitrary countdown clock couldn't make me excited to see just how long Saki was going to be stuck in the bath.
Magical Girl Ore - Episode 5 [Review]
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Magical Girl Ore - Episode 5 [Review]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkcBASkgmck
There's definitely some context I'm missing from this latest episode of Magical Girl Ore. The entire episode interrupts the story thus far to violently skewer every aspect of anime production at Studio Pierrot. (Magical Girl Ore comes from Pierrot Plus, but as the episode handily points out, most animation is heavily outsourced between studios these days.) The jokes are all pretty inside baseball, but even if I did understand them, I don't think I'd like this episode any better. While it's a lot easier to parody somebody else's work than to create something new, this episode proves that the result isn't guaranteed to be entertaining.
“Magical Girl - On Vacation” is a more literal title than I'd expected—Saki and Sakuyo effectively take a week off from being on the show. Instead we focus on Cyborg Fujimoto and his five brothers, who turn out to be professionals in the anime industry. They're on schedule to submit their latest episode when an executive rejects it outright—apparently the designs for Cyborg Fujimoto and his brothers are too similar to the sextuplets from Mr. Osomatsu. That doesn't prevent the episode from showing Fujimoto and his brothers mimicking the Osomatsu brothers' colors and age order, as well as their mannerisms and vocal tics. After this odd start, the episode devolves into a criticism of working conditions in the anime industry on the whole. From unreasonable producers to difficult animators to impossible deadlines and excessive reliance on outsourcing, it's an anime episode about how difficult and thankless it is to create anime. It's an understandable critique of an industry that absolutely has its problems, but I wouldn't say it's funny to watch. It's important to be aware of problems in the industry in order to fix them, but this didn't feel like the place for it.
The Fujimotos' hastily concocted storyline suffers from lack of logic, and having characters angrily shout, “Who came up with that premise!?” to prove that they're in on the joke doesn't make it any more forgivable. Pointing out the problems with a story for laughs can be a calculated risk, but this week it just reads like everyone saw the issues with this episode's parody take before it even aired. In the end, Saki and Sakuyo arrive to save the day in their magical girl forms, dispelling any need for the convoluted scheming of the previous 20 minutes. “What the hell kind of ending is this?” Fujimoto asks, taking the words right out of my mouth.
I'm all for parodying the anime industry, but I prefer the show commit to it the way Anime-Gataris did. This reads like an abrupt tantrum in the middle of a formerly cohesive story. I felt like Magical Girl Ore could frequently deliver pitch-perfect parody of the magical girl genre without losing itself in snide sideroads, so I'm not sure what happened this week. It definitely feels like I'm missing some context here, like perhaps the situation that happened with the Fujimoto siblings actually happened to the Magical Girl Ore animators, so maybe they had to scramble to create a filler episode like this? (It seems pretty unlikely, but you never know.) Even when I did have the cultural context to understand this episode's jokes (like when Chiba fell to his doom while playing Pokémon Go), none of them were funny enough to justify a complete departure from the magical girl story that was being told until this point. Just because characters kept proclaiming that this episode was a disaster didn't make it any less of one.
Magical Girl Ore - Episode 4 [Review]
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Magical Girl Ore - Episode 4 [Review]
Before there were magical girls, there was Kamen Rider. Long before be-ribboned defenders of justice appeared on the scene, heroes worked alone without cute mascots, and they wore masks instead of petticoats. After its thorough caricature of every magical girl trope, it's no surprise that Magical Girl Ore would quickly dig into this divide. This is the most entertaining bit of parody the show has delivered yet, but it's a gem within a bigger show that still has a lot of unresolved structural issues.
Find Kamen Rider down on his luck, and you get Cyborg Fujimoto, a masked hero held together with a plastic supermarket bag and some duct tape. Voice actress Megumi Ogata, who you might know as Sailor Uranus or Shinji Ikari, is the perfect fit for this throwback role. “Heroes are supposed to be lonely and hard-boiled!” Fujimoto complains, echoing realistic complaints about the magical girl genre as a whole. “You freakin' weak ass magical girls are ruining that!” In a world where magical girls have the spotlight, Fujimoto is living a low-budget lifestyle, wearing a school gym tracksuit and living in a crappy apartment. His transformation is just for show, and his power move is a kick to the groin. While he despairs the fall of masked heroes and the rise of magical girls, he also kind of proves why audience tastes have changed. Ogata does a bang-up job as a small and angry cyborg, demonstrating how much has changed between masked rider and magical girl tropes—and how much has stayed the same.
Outside of this highlight, this episode is a mixed bag. Sakuyo continues to be touchy and temperamental in a way that suggests that her lesbian feelings are a physical threat to Saki. It's funny how the ultra-violent demon-crushing scene gives way to a School Days “nice boat” gag, but this is still the second time the show has resorted to the exact same joke. We've already seen mob characters alarmed by Saki and Sakuyo's bathroom stall transformations. Mohiro's hero-worship of Ore happens twice this episode with little difference between the two scenes. And while it feels slow and repetitive to me, this installment of the Magical Girl Ore anime has already added aspects that the manga did not have—so there's no reason for it to feel so protracted.
This episode is also full of odds and ends that are nowhere near being resolved and just add some interesting background noise. Mohiro's bandmate Hyoe is definitely up to something, seemingly revealing himself as the bad guy Saki always suspected him to be. A duo of girls with gold and silver hair lurk in the background to provide commentary, but we don't get to know them in this episode. In short, there are a bunch of elements that I'm not ready to analyze yet because they haven't been established enough. While it does feel like the show is stretching its content thin, there's still a lot to poke fun at when it comes to the magical girl genre, and Cyborg Fujimoto is only the latest example of how successful this flavor of humor can be. Don't miss the post-credits scene that gives me hope that we haven't seen the last of Fujimoto yet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NqT9qyZgSA