Hello folks! I am still on an ongoing quest to watch some of the oldest manifestations of the magical girl genre, and today I am bringing you my review of the anime known in Japan as Mahou no Princess Minky Momo and in many other countries as Gigi (or Princess Gigi). This anime has quickly been associated with Creamy Mami and Minky Momo has been featured in a short OVA with Yū/Creamy Mami. However, compared to other productions from the era (notably, Mahou no Star Magical Emi), Creamy Mami and Minky Momo’s series don’t have that much in common beyond transformation sequences and physical appearance.

So, enough with the comparisons, let’s dive into it!

1. General Information

Name: Mahou no Princess Minky Momo (魔法のプリンセス ミンキー モモ)

Number of seasons: 1

Number of episodes: 63

Original airing: 1982-1983

Studio: Ashi Productions

OVAs: 3 (for the original series)

Available?: Unfortunately, the Japanese original seems lost in Internet limbo. Whenever it surfaces, it gets very quickly taken down, even if it’s a subbed version. Someone started an English sub on Vimeo but it was taken down. I recommend trying to watch one of the dubs if you can. Most of the French dub episodes can be found here. Some raw Japanese episodes are floating around the Internet but they are very few. Some rescued episodes from the English dub by Harmony Gold (which is slightly abridged) can be found here.

Just for your general information, this review talks only about the original 1982-1983 series, not the Magical Princess Minky Momo: Hold onto Your Dreams (魔法のプリンセス ミンキーモモ 夢を抱きしめて) remake that aired in 1991-1992.

2. Main Characters

Minky Momo/Gigi

A still taken from an animated cartoon featuring a 10 to 12 year old girl with fluffy pink hair, pastel clothing and hairband, and a key-shaped necklace pendant.

Minky Momo, or Gigi as she is most commonly known outside of Japan, is the 12-year-old princess of the Land of Dreams, Fenarinarsa, which has drifted away from the Earth during its 1000 years of sleep because the people of the Earth stopped holding onto their hopes and dreams (episode 4 explains the backstory). Momo is sent to Earth to help humans regain a sense of hope for happiness. Each time she helps a human regain hope, the royal crown kept in Fenarinarsa lights up. After a few times, a new jewel appears on the crown, thanks to the positive energy that Momo has been able to generate on Earth. When the royal crown is fully restored, the kingdom will get into the Earth’s orbit again and the people of the Earth and of the Land of Dreams will reunite once again.

Sindbook, Mocha and Pipil

Minky Momo has not one, not two, but three companion animals to help her in her quest and serve as her guides to help her do the right thing for the humans around her. All three are rather stereotypical in their personalities (Sindbook, the dog, is old and severe; Pipil, the bird, thinks of herself as the most beautiful in the world and Mocha, the monkey, mostly thinks about having fun). They have arrived with Minky Momo from the land of Fenarinarsa and seem to only be understood by Momo. To help humans, she uses her magic to turn from her 10 to 12-year-old self to a young adult who can do any job (much like Lunlun could).

Papa and Mama

During her stay on Earth, Momo enchants an unnamed childless couple who runs a pet shop and veterinarian office to make them believe she is their biological daughter. Their sole personality trait seem to be that they love each other, but some of their backstory is revealed later in the series and it turns out that the father helped the mother escape an abusive household and the mafia. Both are shown as examples of kind-hearted, generous people who genuinely want the best for those around them and they frequently act as moral guides to Minky Momo. Side-note, I couldn’t find their Japanese names, but they are named Robert and Daisy in the French dub.

The King and the Queen of Fenarinarsa

The King and Queen of Fenarinarsa, Momo’s “real” parents, are pretty much complete opposites to Momo’s model parents on Earth. They are constantly fighting, mostly because the Queen is constantly looking down on the King’s exhuberant and childish behaviours. It is explicitly revealed at some point in the series that the Queen never meant to marry the King, that it happened by accident because of a custom in Fenarinarsa that says that if a sorceress drops her magic pendant, the man who picks it up has to become her husband. The Queen meant for another man to pick it up, but she hadn’t seen the King because he is very small. In spite of all of this, they both seem to care deeply about Momo and the future of humanity.

The series features a few reoccurring characters, but these are the only ones that are seen in almost every episode.

3. Premise of the Series

As explained earlier, Minky Momo is on Earth to bring back hopes and dreams to humanity, so she can reunite the kingdom of Fenarinarsa and Earth once again. If her pendant shines three times, a new jewel appears on the royal crown, and it is only once all of the jewels have been restored that the reunion will happen.

The Land of Fenarinarsa floats inside a giant bubble in space. It is a flat peace of land with soil filling the bottom of the bubble and a futuristic white castle in the center.

The royal crown is a red and golden crown featuring space for 12 jewels: a giant front one in the middle of 10 small ones, and a small one on a golden cross at the top of the crown.

During each episode, Minky Momo meets a person or persons in need and tries to find the best way to help them to the best of her ability, turning herself into an adult with special skills as needed. Her adoptive parents mostly let her go about as she pleases and it is only very rarely alluded to that she sometimes maybe goes to school.

4. Episode Structure

HEAVY SPOILERS AHEAD! PLEASE PROCEED WITH CAUTION!

Magical Princess Minky Momo has a structure in two parts. The first part that spans episodes 1 to 46 broadly follows the structure outlined above and culminates on Momo facing a series of catastrophic failures. First, in episode 45, her magic camper/helicopter hybrid runs out of “cosmic” fuel and vanishes in midair for what seems like no reason at all, since it worked absolutely fine in all the 44 previous episodes.

Obvious merch bait is obvious.

Her parents asked her to run an errand and she took her helicopter instead of using the train tickets that her parents gave her. Now that her helicopter has vanished and she’s stranded in the middle of nowhere, she decides to use the train tickets. Turns out the errand she has to run is to hand out a very important package researched by spies. While she is getting ready to board the train, her necklace holding her magic pendant breaks and the magic pendant gets inside the train. Sindbook, Mocha and Pipil make it into the train, but not Momo, who is stuck outside. All three animals have to jump off the train a bit after the station because the ticket controller chases them. Meanwhile, a kind train station employee helps Momo know where her friends are.

Sindbook, Mocha and Pipil are looking for help but nobody understands them since nobody has hopes or dreams, save for a random man who tries to help them escape from poachers who want to put them in a circus and find back Momo. The man crosses Momo’s path at a phone booth besides the train tracks, but while the man left his home to call to report Momo’s animals as lost, the poachers found them again and captured them. One of the men has a gun when Momo and the kind man come back. Mocha tries to throw Momo her necklace, but the head of the poachers fires his gun and the bullet shatters the magic pendant to pieces. He then fires again to shoot the benevolent man. In an extreme state of crisis, Momo is able to use her powers without her pendant to save her friends and ressuscitate the benevolent man. However, both Momo and the King and Queen of Fenarinarsa know that her magic powers are gone and that she will not be able to finish her mission without being able to act as an adult.

Momo comes to the conclusion that all she has left to do is live the next 6 years on Earth as a human being until she is 18 for real and can help people again, but the crushing realization that 6 years on Earth represent 1000 years for the inhabitants of Fenarinarsa makes her very sad. The episode 46 starts featuring Momo trying to settle into the lifestyle of a Japanese 12-year-old schoolgirl, but she quickly finds out that school is very boring to her and gets herself thrown outside the class because she keeps gazing at the window. Later, she falls asleep in class and dreams about having her powers again. After school, while she is just hanging out on the playgrounds, some kids playing baseball ask her to retreive their ball for them, which she obliges. However, when she follows the ball to the street, a little boy in a toy cart is in the middle of the street while a gigantic truck is speeding towards him. The truck driver turns the wheel abruptly to avoid the little boy, but he hits Momo, who dies in the aftermath. This whole episode features an evident mastery of storywriting and screenplay that really sets it apart from the rest of the series.

Now without a physical body, the only way for Momo to return to Earth is to be reborn as an unborn child, the one Momo’s adoptive mother has dreamt she would get. Momo’s real parents grant her her wish of being reborn as a child to accomplish her mission of bringing back dreaming and happiness to the people of Earth. During their exchange, it becomes obvious that Momo did not quite understand what was originally asked of her. She says that her mission was impossible to accomplish because she could not bring people what they already possessed within them (aka the ability for dreams and hopes). The King and Queen specify that her role is to make people realize the existence of the hopes and dreams within them and Momo agrees to give it another try only if she can live as a normal human child and know what all children live through on Earth.

Momo’s adoptive mother learns that she is pregnant and the seasons pass until the baby is born. The baby is a girl and the parents can’t seem to find her a name other than “Momo”.

The pink-haired baby is sleeping peacefully in front of an open window and dreams. Her parents in Fenarinarsa talk about the fact that when she reaches the age of 12, they will give her a magic wand and she will have back all of her powers. The baby wakes up, and we hear Momo’s voice as an inner monologue telling how one day the Land of Dreams will be reunited with Earth once again. The scene that follows is a dreams in which we see the kingdom of Fenarinarsa finally descend upon Earth and open its doors again to humans who want to journey to it, inhabitants of Fenarinarsa coming to Earth and meddling with humans, etc. In my humble opinion, this is where the main series should have stopped.

Instead, they made episodes 47 to 63, which are admittedly something of a mess. The writing of this second part is very bad and rather cliché. For some reason, the King of Fenarinarsa finds jewels in a river of the kingdom, and when put into the crown, these jewels give Momo’s parents a snippet of her existence on Earth. They show her as she seems to struggle against an all-powerful dark shadow that keeps putting her into trouble and messing with her attempts to give the Evil Queen from Snow White a good life, since she has made ammends and expressed regrets for the harm she has done to Snow White.

In the last two episodes, the dark shadow takes control of Momo’s parents, forcing her to flee Earth into an interdimensional space of sorts, where Momo’s friends try to help her fight against the dark shadow but get turned into stone. The dark shadow tells Momo she has to leave Earth and go back to Fenarinarsa, or he will turn everyone she likes to stone. Momo reluctantly accepts to leave everyone, including Sindbook, Mocha, Pipil, and a small dragon called Gojira. In the last episode, she finds herself alone and angry at how things turn out. Momo’s real parents witness the baby Momo crying in her sleep and understand that the stones they’ve used to see her adventures thus far are magical tears that contain her destiny as a 13-year-old magician. Since Momo wants to change her mind about returning to Fenarinarsa, the dark shadow takes her to show her how each and every one of her attempts to help people thus far was either useless or counterproductive. He takes her to a special place where every person who has lost hopes and dreams ends up.

The dark shadow explains that every person to whom Momo has shown the existence of Fenarinarsa ended up rejected and alone for holding onto foolish beliefs and he explains to her that she has tried to show people that the essential thing in life was to keep hoping and dreaming, but that in real life these things are not useful. Momo’s bitter tears allow Gojira to join her and start speaking to her. Gojira explains that the dark shadow is lying and that he is the one responsible for making hopes and dreams useless and crushing those who try to hold onto them. Sindbook, Mocha and Pipil also are able to join Momo and all five of them start an epic fight against the dark shadow. They are the winners of the fight, which immediately crushes the hold the dark shadow had put on people’s hearts and makes them free to dream and hope again.

At the end of the series, we are explained that 13-year-old Momo’s actions allowed the merging of the world of dreams and reality that will allow her to live her whole life as a human being and makes her presence on Earth as a magician useless, since people will be able to dream again without her help. On top of that, her destiny as a normal child is the fulfillment of her adoptive parents’ wish to have a normal daughter.

5. General Appreciation

From this broad summary, I hope you can gather that Mahou no Princess Minky Momo has quite a bit more depth and philosophical thought than the two other series I have reviewed so far. The writing may have been sloppy at times, especially in episodes 47 to 61, but the overreaching structure and direction of the plot made it quite an interesting series to watch. It is quite sad to see how little appreciation it got in the western world despite being dubbed in several languages.

Personally, I find that the art direction and music soundtracks were a bit tame, but I commend the special efforts made by the team on episodes 45, 46, 62 and 63, which are imo the best and most worth watching of the series. Some other memorable episodes are imo episodes 24, 25, 29, 35 and 38.

I really quite enjoyed the series in its entirety, though I take some issue with the obvious sexualization of adult Momo, in her transformation sequence where she appears nude, and by other characters, especially in the early episodes (1-10 in particular are pretty bad).

I hope you enjoyed this review! I will end this with a nice YouTube video by Kenny Lauderdale, which talks about the famous “curse” that is tied to the airing of the final episode of the series in Japan. A fun snippet of urban legend haha. (This video also contains major spoilers.) This video also contains additional information on why MPMM is incredibly difficult to access.

Let me know what you think in the comments!

Bye bye!