Review of Someday’s Dreamers (2003)
Modern Japan, with a single difference: Some people are able to use magic. It is highly intuitive, versatile, and powerful. The worst that magic may require of the mage is slight fatigue, but even that is rare.
Examples of activities that are easy for amateur mages: Bending Tokyo Tower with no regard for tensile properties, spawning a huge bag of money (persistent and apparently undetectable as false), travelling to the moon for a picnic, extracting exact “memories” from mirrors, and bringing back the spirits of the dead.
Someday’s Dreamers is on the superficially realistic end of shōjo kitsch. It is an absolute horror show of fallaciously implemented supernatural axioms in the service of wishful thinking.
In this fictional world there are UN resolutions and bureaucracies to control mages, so it isn’t fabulism. Said measures don’t appear to be effective, but nobody ever tries anything really bad. The general public can petition mages for assistance in various petty sentimental tasks, and one project that really ought to antagonize or obsolesce the glass industry but which does neither. Mages are apparently not allowed or not inclined to help out with important stuff. How about space travel or the environment? Nope, it never comes up.
The writers’ disregard for consequences is normally reserved for the worst kids’ shows, though it is fundamentally similar to Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989) and older whimsical classics. It’s worsened by selectively bizarre character design (played with in episode 10), annoyingly repetitive strings and flute music, flailing attempts at emotional depth, an absurd bishōnen boss—named Ginpun no less—and so much other crap that it’s funny, especially considering the general professionalism of the series and the absence of many stereotypes. It’s kitsch.
The original title, Mahou Tsukai ni Taisetsu na Koto, literally means “Stuff Important to Mages”.
References here: Texhnolyze (2003).