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Series name: Someday's Dreamers

Review date: 20050404

Genre: magical girl

Length: 12 episodes on 3 DVDs

Fan service: none

Rewatch: medium

Summary: Yume spends a summer month in Tokyo as an apprentice mage.

Main Characters:

		Kikuchi Yume – is the 17-year-old daughter of Kikuchi Etsuko, a very distinguished and powerful -- and retired -- mage. From a small town in northern Japan, she sometimes speaks with a thick Tohoku accent when she gets excited or flustered (or when talking to her family on the phone).
		Oyamada Masami – A well regarded mage who seems a bit withdrawn. There are shadows inside him; he often smiles, but he isn't really happy. In addition to his work as a mage and teacher of mages, he owns and operates a small salsa bar (i.e. one where Brazilian music is played).
		Kera – is his nickname because he is so cheerful. (Kera kera is the Japanese onomatopoeia for laughter.) He works in Masami's bar. He becomes Yume's onii-san and teaches her to dance.
		Angela Brooks – Angela is somber, dour, morose. She is English and is another candidate with world-class potential. She has travelled to Japan to study under Chief Ginpun. When he's busy, she sometimes joins Yume and Masami for training.
		Melinda – Works part time at Masami's bar, as a DJ and bartender. She has a day job in a grocery store.
		Runa-chan – hangs around at Masami's bar when it isn't open, and is friends with Kera, Melinda, and Masami. She loves classic Japanese comedy and has deliberately adopted an Edokko accent, which is the one that such comedians affect.
		Chief Ginpun – is one of the most powerful mages alive. He is blind, but perhaps he can see better than anyone else.

Comments: This series is gentle, slow, unhurried. Yume is a country girl who spends a month in the big city, but that's not really what it's about. This is a coming-of-age story, because the core of it is Yume's worry about her magical power. Does it help or harm others? Is it really a good thing? Can she bear the responsibility implicit in such power? Does she have the wisdom to use it well?

Magic in this series doesn't involve wands or words chanted in lost languages or any of the other stuff you might see in a Harry Potter story. It's actually more like a psychic power or the ability to do miracles. Mages have an intuitive understanding of their abilities and don't have to study magic as such in order to use it. (Or at least that's the case with mages like Yume and Angela who have been able to use their power all their lives. Some people with magic power only become able to use it when they grow up,and those might well need instruction in control and technique.)

Magicians are rare, but hardly unheard of. It appears to be something which runs in families, but some who have the power don't ever learn to use it, and not all children of mages have the power. Still, there are enough of them, with great enough power, that they could represent a threat to the fabric of society even if they acted with the best of intentions.

Some mages join the police, and some work for the fire department and other kinds of emergency services, where they can use their magic to save people or protect them. Other mages are in private practice.

The most interesting and unique idea in this series is that all use of magic by mages in private practice is controlled by a government bureaucracy. Such mages must be licensed by the Bureau of Mage Labor. Applicants who want to have magic done must file an application at the bureau, and if their application is approved they will be assigned to a specific licensed mage to carry out the authorized spell.

Mages occasionally use magic without authorization, and if it's rare and doesn't cause too much harm, and if they file the appropriate paperwork after the fact, then it will be overlooked. But a mage who uses magic indiscriminately without authorization is committing a serious crime.

Yume's mother is a mage, but she has long since ceased to practice magic professionally. But when she did work, she was among the most powerful and distinguished mages around. Yume turns out to also have particularly powerful magic, which she can utilize quite easily.

Mages like Yume are quite rare, and one of the functions of the bureaucracy is to help nurture such talents to make sure they become assets. So they tend to cut Yume a bit more slack than usual. Powerful people make big mistakes, but without mistakes you can't learn.

All registered mages are issued rings which incorporate a special gemstone which appears to be a product of both high technology and magic. Whenever the mage performs a spell, the ring monitors it and transmits information about the spell to a central monitoring center. The ring also facilitates the magic by creating a holographic crest which is the manifestation of the mage's power. Each mage selects their own crest at the time that they register. Yume is horrified to see that when her mother had filled out her forms that she'd written that Yume's crest should be a kappa, a water imp. (In Japanese mythology, kappa are generally seen as being malevolent,and they're pretty ugly.) Fortunately, the clerk at the bureau asked her first, and she was able to change it to a dolphin.

Apprentice mages are assigned to study with senior mages, and Yume is assigned to Oyamada Masami. Masami is a name like Chris which is given to both boys and girls, and Yume had assumed that Masami was a woman. So she's a bit flustered to discover that he is a man, and in fact a quite attractive one, especially since she had also opted to take advantage of rooming in his home. Yume is a bit of a hick, and not very worldly. Still, Masami is strictly honorable in his dealings with her, so there isn't any problem with her living in his home once she gets used to it.

Initially apprentice mages observe their teachers as they practice magic, and later apprentices begin to practice magic themselves under close supervision of their teachers. What they're studying is proper use of their power. They learn about the laws governing magic use, and they learn discipline, and they gain experience in selecting the appropriate magic power to try to help those whose applications for magic have been approved by the bureaucracy. And like pilots, eventually they have to "solo".

At the end of their apprenticeship young mages are assigned a special task to perform, which serves as a certification examination. Ordinarily the task would be chosen by the teacher, but Masami and Yume are both surprised when Chief Ginpun, the top mage in Japan and among the most powerful mages in the world, personally gives Yume her assignment.

It is, of course, no spoiler to reveal that in the end she passes with flying colors. This is not the kind of series which has a downbeat ending, or at least it better not be. (If it had been, I wouldn't have given it the kind of rating I did.) But the assignment itself, and what she ultimately decides to do with her magic to carry out that assignment, are not at all obvious at the beginning of the series. The groundwork for it is presented slowly, as the series develops, so that when the time finally comes and Yume finds out what it is, it's a shock but not a surprise. By which I mean that it terrifies Yume, but doesn't really totally surprise the audience.

I'm usually allergic to the word "heartwarming", but I have to say that this series is heart-warming. Like any really good magical girl story, part of her magic is magic but part of her magic is that she's loving and caring, and in this series because Yume is both, she does change the lives of many of the people she meets and gets to know, in positive ways, by what she does and by what she is. She makes friends, and they are all richer in the end for having known her, and she for having known them. In the end we know that she will be a great mage, because when she uses her magic she uses it kokoro komite, "with all the precious feelings in her heart". Yume's compassion is the core of her power, and her greatest strength as a mage.

There were so many things I was afraid I'd see in this series which would have ruined it. I was afraid Yume would get a crush on Masami; I was afraid that Angela would end up being a bitch who would decide she was Yume's rival; I was afraid that they'd toss in shoujo tear-jerking complications; I was afraid I'd see idiotic love triangles and a lot of other hackneyed cliche plot complications. But the creators of this series avoided those things. There aren't any villains in the story, though there are people who make mistakes or who are tied up in their own pain. The concentration is on Yume, her magic, her growing realization of the kind of power she wields and the responsibility it engenders, and in the end on how she grows and accepts that responsibility. The writers don't let themselves get distracted by things which don't contribute to telling her story.

This series is serene. Not all the characters are, and Yume doesn't necessarily have an easy ride all the way, but the story itself is serene, untroubled, and ultimately joyful. It is in many ways very comforting. And because of the characters, and the story that's told about them, I find myself watching it again and again.

It is sufficiently low key that some may find it boring. If you want explosions and epic battles, you're going to be dreadfully disappointed by this series. There's not a fireball to be seen. But if you like stories which are character driven, stories which include characters you would like to know, then you'll love this one.

And some of the magic which we see cast is pretty spectacular. In one particular case (in episode 4) I'd go so far as to say that the result is poetic.

Things to watch for: As always, skip the teasers on your first watching in order to avoid spoilers. That said, I think the voiceover for the teaser for episode 4 is hilarious. (I wonder how much of it was ad-libbed.)
I really like the music in this series.

Complaints: Did they really have to start episode 7 with such an obnoxious sound effect? Gad...

Is the ending satisfying? I liked it a lot. It's interesting that they didn't feel the need to pound it into the ground, so there are only vague hints of the long term effect of the spell Yume cast during her certification exam. But I rather liked it that way. It is consistent with the low key approach to the storytelling which runs all through this series. The writers didn't think they needed to paint the final results on the wall for us because they trusted us to figure it out for ourselves.

Recommended? Definitely.