English Dub Review: Magical Sempai “Creative Sempai; Chinese Sempai”

 

 

Overview (Spoilers Below)

Sempai and Saki are in conjoining baking classes. Saki, who sucks at baking, notices Sempai has quite a knack for it. Since she wants to impress her brother with a perfect batch of cookies—in an incestuous way—she asks Sempai for help. The lady magician helps her, but unfortunately, the new batch gets mixed up with a batch Sempai made for Assistant and Masa winds up eating magic-laced cookies.

At the park, the gang tries their hand at fundraising after the school saddles them with an unsatisfying budget. Sempai finds moderate success posing as a human statue, but most of her spectators want to either lift up her skirt or pay her for fetishist delights.

Then, at the pool, Sempai wants to do an amazing escapologist trick. Assistant, however, doesn’t want her bound underwater because he’s afraid she’s going to die. Instead, he has the genius idea of tying just her arms with yarn—instead of her entire body with chains. Good thing, too, because Sempai almost doesn’t survive under those simplified perils.

Once again, Assistant tries to cure Sempai of her stage fright. This time, he tries hiding around the room while pretending not to be there. The whole experiment is closer to a horror show than a type of therapy and is weird for their relationship.

In the next episode, Sempai wants to try Chinese magic. While Assistant images it’ll involve her wearing Chun-Li cosplay, it’s really all about mask-play. First, somebody wears a creepy mask, and then they change the mask in a split second. Of course, she doesn’t know how the trick works, so the club is forced to brainstorm. Nobody’s idea works, but the experiment ends with Saki accidentally getting topless instead of Sempai. That’s progress… I guess.

Next, we get some private time with just Sempai and Assistant where she tries both mentalism and magic involving those tiny little oranges you give your kids as lunchtime snacks. Both methods seem to really piss Assistant off, but at least in the latter, he got to eat a bunch of miniature oranges.

Later, Sempai shows the club the website she created in a single night. Her haste is apparent because the site is awful and looks like it was created back in the 90s by a stupid person. Saki offers to help by adding a portfolio of sexy Sempai photos—and a few cosplay shots which have the potential of being sexy in the eye of the beholder.

The website leads to a gig at a nursery school. The kids like Masa and Saki’s street performance art, but they love Sempai’s magic even though it’s not very good. She’s showing them semi-dirty pictures, breaking props, and failing at simple disappearing acts, but the kids are still entertained because she’s dressed as a magician. I guess kids are just wired that way.

 

Our Take

Now that the club is a hearty four members strong—plus one annoying adviser—it’s good to see everyone getting along. In the last episode, Sempai and Saki were at each other’s throats, vying for dominance. Had such animosity lasted for the remainder of the series, it would’ve gotten really old, really quickly. Good for them for realizing that!

Assistant’s feelings for his boss are a little inconsistent. I think that’s by design, which is quite irritating. I can understand getting irked by her behavior—she’s a little much—but the kid only has two modes: protective and indifferent. I’m sure Assistant has a mental condition and I’m being insensitive, but that shouldn’t affect basic storytelling structure. Every character is on a journey, and therefore should advance and grow as they tackle their individual arcs. I see a little of that from Sempai even though she’s using a very slow trial-and-error method, but Assistant might as well be a blank canvas she constantly paints on even though the paint never sticks.

Sensei randomly showed up at the nursery school and for once she wasn’t a complete maniac. It was as if she momentarily became a legitimate club adviser and actually had a vested interest in how well the club performed. I’m sure it won’t last because she doesn’t seem to be an arc-worthy character either—and that goes double for Masa and Saki. Chemistry girl might have a chance, but we haven’t seen enough from her yet. We don’t even know if she and Assistant have any… synthetic scientific appeal with one another.

Another okay episode, but I feel this show works better when the mini-episodes have a stronger sense of continuity. In both these episodes—aside from a weak link between the final two scenes—every story stood on its own. An audience should be far too invested at this point to have a go-nowhere scene involving oranges unless it somehow advances the relationship between Sempai and Assistant. This one did not.