Review for Wish Upon The Pleiades Complete Season 1 Collection

Introduction

This feels like a welcome release in the UK anime scene. If there’s one anime genre that we’ve been underserved by, it’s the magical girl genre. Apart from an abortive attempt to release Sailor Moon fifteen or so years ago, we haven’t seen too many such shows. Puella Magi Madoka Magica went and subverted the genre in the way that Evangelion did for giant robots, but last year’s Fate/Kaleid Liner Prisma Illya looked to be a more faithful example. But it turns out that it plays to adult male audiences first and foremost, in a way that has seen subsequent seasons not licensed for UK release for fear of falling afoul of the BBFC. Magical girl anime in their traditional form are meant for young girls to watch, without any post modern irony and certainly without otaku baiting sexiness. That’s where Wish Upon the Pleiades comes in, a collaboration between Studio Gainax and Subaru... The car manufacturer Subaru... While you try and figure that one out (don’t ask me), I’ll continue with the review.


A young girl named Subaru loves the stars, although she’s the only member of her school’s Astronomy Society. She’s looking forward to viewing the meteor shower that night, but isn’t prepared for the strangeness that ensues. First when she tries going into the observatory, she magically appears in some sort of arboretum instead, where the sole occupant is a mysterious boy named Minato. When she does make it to the observatory, it’s raining; no meteors to view, but on the way back down she encounters as strange bouncy creature, and stumbles in on four magical girls.


Subaru even knows one of them, her childhood friend Aoi. The bouncy creature is an alien, a Pleiadian, known as the president, and he’s recruited the four, Aoi, Nanako, Hikaru and Itsuki to help him find the engine parts for his spaceship, which have been falling to Earth as meteors. He’s gifted the girls magical abilities, and together on their ‘drive shafts’ they track down, contain, and convert the falling stars back to their original forms. But the four girls haven’t had a lot of luck as yet. It could be that they need a fifth to balance their magic, and that fifth is going to be Subaru. But there’s someone else after the engine parts, and all this magic is having a strange effect on reality. And on top of that, just who is Minato, and why does his arboretum keep popping up where Subaru least expects it?


12 episodes of Wish Upon the Pleiades are presented on these two Blu-rays from Animatsu.

Disc 1
1. Meteor Shower Forecast: Rain with Occasional Shooting Stars
2. The Star Travel Song
3. The 5 Cinderellas
4. The Dream of Sol
5. A Hat, Ice and a Princess
6. The Flower of Awakening
7. Two Treasures, or the Smell of Strawberries
8. Nanako 13
9. Planetarium Rendezvous

Disc 2
10. Shining Night
11. The Final Light and His Name
12. At the Water’s Edge

Picture

You get a 1.78:1 widescreen 1080p transfer, and as usual now, it feels just the way that anime should be watched, clear and crisp, with strong consistent colours, and no visible compression or digital artefacts, other than just the merest hint of digital banding, and then only if you really look for it. Wish Upon the Pleiades is a very agreeable anime, with the suitably infantilised and cutesy characters that you would expect from a show of this genre, the world design is strong, and the animation fluid and energetic, especially when things get a little out of this world, and magical effects start being thrown around the screen. There are plenty of magical transformation/costume change sequences, and none of them will trouble the morality police.

Sound

The sole audio track on this release is a DTS-HD MA 2.0 Stereo Japanese track with locked English subtitles. The audio is fine, the dialogue clear, the action suitably represented with the stereo and even rendered a little immersive thanks to Prologic. The music suits the show well, and the actors are suitably cast for their roles, once again keeping the characters cute and appealing. The subtitles are accurately timed and are free of typos. The witches, I mean magical girls’ brooms, I mean drive shafts have a whole lot of car engine noise applied to them, and I guess an automotive aficionado will be able to identify each power plant by the engine note.

Extras

The discs present their content with static menus, and each episode is followed by a translated credit reel.

The extras on disc 2 amount to the textless credits and trailers for RIN-NE, When Supernatural Battles Become Commonplace, Bodacious Space Pirates: Abyss of Hyperspace, and Medaka Box.

Conclusion

Wish Upon the Pleiades turned out to be unexpectedly good. The thing about the magical girl genre, or at least the magical girl genre before it was endlessly parodied and subverted, was that its target audience were little girls, offering them appealing, optimistic, and proactive role-models, stories replete with relationship issues to be resolved, and no little adventure and excitement to be had. Sex certainly wasn’t an issue, and things never got dark and depressing. Having said that, I’m not a little girl, and Wish Upon the Pleiades is definitely a magical girl show of the old school, wholesome, progressive and heart-warming, albeit not aimed at my target demographic.


The first few episodes certainly conformed to the standard, with Subaru the main protagonist, who accidentally discovers the other magical girls, and winds up joining them to help find and recover the cute mascot alien’s spaceship engine parts. There is a villain of course, Horn Cape who pops up every episode, just when the girls are about to recover an engine part, to try and steal it out from under them. And from the beginning, Subaru’s discovered a magical arboretum that appears at random around the school, and contains a solitary inhabitant, a boy named Minato who in no way whatsoever resembles Horn Cape. Subaru and Minato hit it off, and she often goes to him for advice about whatever interpersonal issues are affecting the girls that episode.


For there are the personal issues that need resolving, beginning with Subaru and Aoi’s friendship, abruptly broken off when they went to different schools, and suffering from friction now that they are back together. As the show progresses, it turns out that Nanako, Hikaru, and Itsuki also have problems in their lives that need resolving. It’s all wholesome and formulaic stuff, which is perfectly aimed at young girls, of below the BBFC age rating given to this show. Seriously, 12? But for the first half of the series, I was tuning out.


But Wish Upon the Pleiades has a trick up its sleeve that will appeal to adult males like me as well as its primary audience, and it’s not sneaky fan service if that’s what you’re thinking. Wish Upon the Pleiades is serious sci-fi stuff, despite its magical girl genre. For one thing the engine parts that the girls are looking for are spread far and wide, and they wind up going on a grand tour of the solar system and beyond to find them. There is some scientific rigour to the show, and you can get a glimpse of the structure of Saturn’s rings, descriptions of the Oort cloud, concepts like dark matter and dark energy thrown in, internal structures of gas giants, and the show even lifts a plot point from Arthur C. Clarke’s 2010. When you start getting descriptions of singularities, black holes, event horizons, you get the feeling that they applied more scientific rigour to this one 12-episode series than the entirety of Star Trek.


That applies to the ‘magic’ in this show as well, which for one thing obeys Clarke’s Corollary “sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”, and it turns out that it also obeys a whole lot of quantum, when characters’ back-stories and flashbacks differ from each other’s, even when describing the same events from two different points of view. The quantum mechanical approach to the narrative plays a bigger and bigger part as the series unfolds, and is a key part to its climax. You don’t need a physics textbook to enjoy the show. Indeed Clarke’s Corollary is just as valid here, and Wish Upon the Pleiades can be enjoyed as a pure magical girl anime. But for any sci-fi geek who’s watched and read enough hard science fiction, and attended a few physics lectures, then Wish Upon the Pleiades is pure catnip.