In episode six of the 2016 J.C. Staff show, Flying Witch, an age-old mystery is solved: how a witch, in fact, rides a broom. Not as it turns out by riding a flying broom but by also, as the title suggests, flying herself. This was, as Fandom Post reviewer Kate O’Neil put it, “a burning question,” and one that an earlier generation of magic user would have been happy to have seen answered. Because every time Magic Users Club‘s Sae Sawanoguchi tried to ride her broom, her butt hurt.
Also, her club uniform was too tight, too revealing, too hard to put on in emergencies. She had to use a wand that was easy to break. She was late to school a lot. And even if her butt didn’t hurt flying her broom she was just no good at magic in the first place, she believed. And there were aliens after her.
One thing at a time, Sae.
Sae Sawanoguchi had all sorts of problems, as magical girls often have and continue to do: a true scatterbrain and klutz, naive, exposed often to embarrassment, humiliation, and punishing self-doubt. Trying to fly a broom and learning other sorts of magic from her upperclassman, Takeo Takakura, didn’t seem like the extra challenge she required. (Nor Takeo’s messianic mission to defeat the giant benevolent alien space ship floating above the Pacific Ocean that defines the plot of this story.) But she was also positive and honest, trusting and loyal, dedicated and full of hope, all to an unfailing and relentless degree. She had her best friend, Nanaka, reluctant and suspicious of magic and the club, to drag along into this mess. She had an underclassman, Akane, aloof and almost indifferent to magic but gifted at it, to be a role model for. (Akane didn’t care.) She had Takeo’s friend Aburatsubo…to belittle her, more or less. (However his presence kept Nanaka around, though the “most popular boy in school” only had eyes for Takeo.) And she had Jeffy, her little stuffed bear and talisman, as well as her picture diary to record her magical highs and her mundane lows.
In 1996 it was something a little different, after almost three decades of “magical girl” anime shows, that this 6-part OVA from Triangle Staff featured magical girls—and boys—who did not change into their costumes with magical flurries of animation, but just like any normal clothing, piece by piece, in the uncomfortable and confined space of their high school club room. Magic was not, in this world, some innate mystery visited upon a chosen few, but an accidental find that required work and determination to learn and master. “Club,” in the title, is no affectation—this is a club anime story like any other one about sports or otaku or nothingness, with bureaucratic rivals, romance, and aimless outings. This was also a magical girl show aimed less at the child-aged audiences of its genre’s predecessors (and, at least through 1998′s Cardcaptor Sakura, and the ongoing Pretty Cure franchise, a handful of its successors) than the older and then entrenched male fans who fueled then as they do now the collectible anime industry in Japan.
Like several of its contemporaries in the mid-90s from other genres, this was a production for and by people who had grown up in the 70s and 80s on those earlier youth-orientated shows about magic girls, and were keen to see the traditional themes explored, but just as often exploited. Its chief creators, Junichi Sato and Ikuko Itoh, who worked closely together on the genre-defining Sailor Moon, were more than well versed in the shoujo modes of the genre. (Their less slapstick and more character-driven TV sequel, three years later, adopts more of an episodic shoujo stance. They would prove the pedigree best, in 2002, with the magical girl fable, Princess Tutu.) Even without the panty jokes and Takeo’s virginal fantasies and curious camera angles in Magic Users Club, the charm of the young, cheerful heroine, full of pluck and determination—and most of all, the fun and absurd and imaginative magic—could carry it through.
But it feels different enough to seem like a harbinger. Magic Users Club is near the beginning of a period that is marked by the international success of Sailor Moon, which ran from 1992 to 1997, and has included in the two decades since a thorough re-imagining and reorientation of the genre. At least for this sort of mahou shoujo. The genre plays to two basic historical forms, and the more traditional “witch” kind, tracing back to the beginning of the concept, continues with the whimsical pastoral world of today’s Flying Witch. But while it’s amusing to contrast the two, Magic Users Club is in that post-Sailor Moon, henshin-themed, magical-girl-warrior mold, where the image one assumes as a girl possessed with magic is as important as what you do with your new power. The true witches of anime seem to know who they are; the girls who come by magic as part of a mission to fight evil or save the world struggle with their identity and purpose in far starker terms, and it’s this side that has produced the ever more psychological, and ever more male-targeted ideas like Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha and its clones.
In 1996 that mode of dissection was yet years off, happily. (Not that that TV sequel for Magic Users Club, from 1999, penned largely by Chiaki Konaka, doesn’t begin to beg the question.) A bigger curiosity is how it holds to another now old tradition, more familiar then for viewers grown up on media from the 1980s. (And more familiar now in retro-inspired high school comedies like the biker-girl romp, Bakuon!) For it was a mild “ecchi” comedy—a coming of age teen sex comedy with plenty of jokes and visual cues about the sexual naivete and yearnings of its characters, straight, gay, taboo, and above all unrequited. (“Magic” is central, and it does save the day, but its use and the learning of it is that simplest and oldest form of deconstruction: an allegory for growing up and gaining control of new emotions and physical processes. Like most things in anime, and especially for mahou shoujo, it’s about puberty.)
Even while targeting a similar demographic, the darker, late night mahou shoujo that has followed, in bids to appear sophisticated (and to mythologize its characters as “pure” objects to be coveted), can be as oddly chaste as their few remaining daytime, child-targeted competitors. Magic Users Club, above all, and as Sae is always reminding her friends and her viewers, is concerned most about having fun.
