Magical Play is a unique pastiche of both videogames in general, and the Magical Girls TV anime genre.

Magical Play: The Complete Collection.
2D series (24 episodes) + 3D OAV, 2001. Director: Hiroki Hayashi. 150 minutes. Price & format: DVD bilingual $29.98. Distributor: Bandai Ent.

Anime series based upon videogames are common. Magical Play is a unique pastiche of both videogames in general, and the Magical Girls TV anime genre.

In Magical Girl World, all girls train for the chance, when they are 12 years old, to enter the Magical Invitational Tournament. The winner is sent to Earth to become “an international idol, the center of admiration, the pride of one’s homeland, the star of the show biz world!”, as starry-eyed Padudu imagines it. Padudu becomes her hometown’s contestant and, wearing the sentient fish Uokichi (impossible to describe; you have to see it!), skips along towards the Magical Castle where Queen Purilun holds the tournaments. Unfortunately for Padudu’s naïveté, the tournaments are not the friendly auditions among similarly idealistic contestants that she imagines.

Magical Play, by the A.I.C. studio, comes in two DVD discs. Disc 1 contains the “TV” series: Maho-Yugi: Tobidasu!! Hanamaru Daibouken, 24 five-minute “2D” episodes (120 minutes) originally posted on the Maho-Yugi Website (maho-yugi.lycos.co.jp/) beginning October 19, 2001. Disc 2 contains the “3D videogame” half-hour featurette. The 3D featurette was released directly to video on Dec. 29, 2001. The 24 short episodes were collected into four half-hour DVDs of six episodes each and released monthly from February through May 2002, then broadcast during July on the Kids Station (TV).

The five-minute episodes look like cel animation with frequent 3D scenes in the jerky cheap CGI animation typical of videogames. For animation industry insiders, Magical Play is worth getting for the single episode “Battle in the Third Dimension,” in which a 2D girl and a 3D girl face off in magical battle. The 2D girl is so flat she is invisible in profile, while the 3D girl is prone to pixel breakup and similar 3D handicaps. The 24 mostly-comedic episodes also present a slightly more coherent storyline and character depth. The Maho Yugi 3D short is fully digital animation and recasts the main characters in a typical videogame deathly-grim confrontation.

The five-minute episodes carry two parallel stories forward. Padudu picks up two juvenile companions as fantastically costumed as she is, though with living-bunny and kitty themes; the hot-headed Pipin Lacippe, and the superficially demure but back-stabbing Myumyu Pisterica. The three travel together from one contest to another, each crazier than the last such as the challenge of the four great disasters: Earthquake, Thunder, Fire, and the last and worst of all, “STEREOTYPICAL MIDDLE-AGED JAPANESE MEN FROM THE `70S!” (you have to see it!). The short episodes range from flowery, sugary fluff a la My Little Pony to gory action full of raunchy gay jokes that look like a collision between Happy Tree Friends and The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

The second storyline follows Nonononn, the Witch of Destruction, a former Magical Girl contestant now in her early 20s who is wanted for mass murder and is pursued by comically inept Policewomen Mustard and Ketchup. The action is humorous but the situation is tragic; Nonononn has actually been framed by Good Queen Purilun who was her best friend and fellow contestant, and who wants to get rid of her as a potential rival. Nonononn bitterly warns Padudu to withdraw from the contest before she is betrayed by one of her friend or is forced to kill a friend in self-defense; but Padudu will not believe it.

None of the storylines are concluded. The value of Magical Play is in its individual slapstick fantasy situations, and its parodies of videogames and the quality of 3D/CGI animation endemic in them. Do not be misled by the typical Magical Little Girl TV-series early episodes into letting young children watch this, since later episodes wander into South Park territory.