Hello folks!

I’m a person who tends to be drawn to very old and very obscure stuff, hence why I decided to start watching old anime shows of my favourite kind: mahou shoujo. I am starting here with a review of probably my favourite underrated mahou shoujo, Magical Angel Creamy Mami.

Before I start with this first review, let me just define what exactly is a mahou shoujo! The term stands for “magical girl” and it’s a genre of anime and manga that features one or more main girl* protagonists who have magical powers in a world where most people don’t and use them to do good things**. There are subcategories of the genre which I will discuss as I come across them in my reviews.

*Some shows also features boys and gender ambiguous characters who also have magical powers, but they’re not that common or not that well-known.

**These are very generic traits but they’re really the core of the genre.

1. General information

Name: Mahou no Tenshi Creamy Mami (魔法の天使クリィミーマミ)

Number of seasons: 1

Number of episodes: 52

Original airing: 1983-1984

Studio: Pierrot

OVAs: 5 (including short crossover with Mahou no Princess Minky Momo)

Available?: Yes, subbed by Live-Evil and available for download here.

2. Main characters

Morisawa Yū / Creamy Mami

Yū is the series main protagonist. She is a regular 10-year-old schoolgirl. As a thanks for helping an alien named Pino Pino find his way back to the Feather Star, she is gifted a magical compact which allows her to turn into a 16-year-old lavender-haired girl which she decides to name Creamy Mami (after her parents’ crepe shop name). Creamy Mami can use all sorts of magic to help people. Her powers are granted to her for 1 year under the condition that she keeps them a secret. She has a secret crush on her childhood friend Toshio. As Creamy Mami, she becomes an idol by filling the spot of Ayase when she does not show up on time to her TV gig, at Tachibana’s request. She uses her magic to be able to sing, but she also uses it to help people around her.

Nega & Posi

Nega & Posi are two aliens from the Feather Star whose mission is to watch over Yū. They have the appearance of two really small cats and generally travel with Yū wherever she goes. They teach Yū how to turn into Creamy Mami and try to give her advice on how to use her powers to do good, not for personal self gain. Nega & Posi are short for “negative” and “positive”, and as such the two aliens frequently fight against each other.

Ōtomo Toshio

Toshio is a childhood friend of Yū. He is slightly older than her. He falls in love with Creamy Mami at her first TV appearance and start showing up to events and concerts to support her, unaware that she is the same person as Yū.

Kisaragi Midori

Midori is Toshio’s best friend and has a crush on Yū. He follows Toshio around pretty much all the time and tries to be helpful, but he is very clumsy and nervous around Yū, and not very intelligent. He can be violent at times and generally acts as a comic relief.

Tachibana Shingo & Kidokoro Hayato

Tachibana is the president of the production company Parthenon Production, which hires Ayase and Mami. Kidokoro is Mami’s manager and Ayase’s former manager. Kidokoro is the scapegoat for every problem Mami causes, including being chronically late to all concerts and events she participates in.

See additional characters on Wikipedia.

3. Premise of the Series

In this part I will pretty much address the context of the first two episodes, which is how Yū gains her powers, so feel free to skip if you don’t want to be spoiled.

The first episode begins with Yū witnessing a shiny UFO flying above her parents’ house. She decides to go after it despite her parents wanting her to help out at the crepe shop and Toshio and Midori arriving to talk to her. Toshio goes after her and after a long pursuit somehow involving the police (yeah, I know) they end up in a baseball field above which Yū sees the ship from upclose.

And this is where the what the fuck only keeps getting… weirder and weirder. After some weird power making Yū float off the ground, nightfall has arrived and she is left in the baseball field while Toshio is looking for her. She sees two small cats (Nega and Posi) who asks her if she sees the ship, and she replies affirmatively. Then, the cats zap her to the ship and it only gets weirder from then on…

She floats through a succession of surreal places and sees magical creatures that she fights. And yes, somehow naked fairies with their boobs hanging out like it’s nobody’s business. She is also repeatedly flashing her underwear to the camera, which I didn’t include in the slideshow below.

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After her trip, she is told that all of this was memories of the Feather Star. She keeps asking questions to Nega and Posi throughout her trip but they never give her real answers. After being stopped by a shiny yellow light (last image of the slideshow), she wakes up in a dark blue room and takes a tunnel until she arrives into another room, where she meets Pino Pino.

Pino Pino thanks Yū for showing him the way back to the Feather Star. He explains that Yū has some form of memory about the Feather Star from before she was born because the aliens touched her (yeah, I’m not really sure I understand how it works either). Then, because she’s so happy about helping him, she squeezes him until he pops (what the fuck).

As a thanks to her, Pino Pino gives her a magic compact that allows her to use magic for 1 year, as long as she keeps her powers secret.

And this is how Creamy Mami came into existence. That just about summarize the first episode. At the end of this episode, Yū figures out how to use magic with the help of Nega and Posi.

To turn into Creamy Mami’s form, Yū needs to take the mini-wand from her compact and extend it by calling it “keno”. Using the wand, she can then turn into Creamy Mami by using the words “pampuru, pimpuru, pam pom pum, pimpuru, pampuru, pam pom pum” and drawing a G-clef in the air with it. Flashes of light will then hide her figure and she will grow into Creamy Mami’s form and materialize as fully clothed (with the notable exception of the first time she transforms, where she stays in her child form pajamas). She may then use other types of magic simply by brandishing her wand and forming the will to use magic, but generally whatever magic she wants to use will come into effect at the same time as she transforms. Turning back into Yū will give her back the clothes she wore when she turned into Mami.

On the next day, she goes for a walk under the form of Creamy Mami and crosses the path of Toshio. She tells him she finds him cute, and from then on Toshio develops a huge crush on Creamy Mami. After seeing Toshio, she goes into the city and stands in front of a building, waiting for something which is not disclosed. Tachibana urges out of the TV station van parked nearby, angry about his top star, Ayase Megumi, being stuck in a traffic jam, which means she is going to be late to a really important TV spot he had planned for her. Tachibana asks Creamy Mami to sing on TV, seeing her presence as a god-sent chance. She hesitantly accepts and starts to sing a song in front of a crowd after some stalling. Everyone is absolutely ecstatic after her performance and she has to stop time to be able to escape the crowd. Everyone thinks she simply disappeared.

The following week, Tachibana is starting to get impatient because his men can’t find back Creamy Mami. Tachibana learns through Toshio the area where Mami lives and Yū panics when she sees him at her parents’ crepe shop. Yū tries to meet up with Toshio under Mami’s traits to confess her feelings to Toshio, but Tachibana uses this opportunity to snatch Mami against her will. He brings her to a restaurant where he tries to convince her to become an official talent for Parthenon Production. Mami refuses, but Tachibana doesn’t want to take no for an answer so he forces her to come participate in a TV show again. Seeing how desperate Tachibana is, she reluctantly agrees. Ayase convinces her to actually make her debut by acting as a mentor during her interview and from then on she agrees to become Parthenon Production’s top star.

This is how the show gets set up!

4. Episode Structure

So, for the record, Magical Angel Creamy Mami broadly belongs to the problem-solving sub-genre of mahou shoujo. During each episode, either while Yū is doing her regular Yū thing or while she’s performing duties as Creamy Mami, an issue will come up that requires -or not- magic to be solved. Unlike other more classic problem-solving animes, the problem usually isn’t brought on by an exterior agent in need of help, though this can happen as well. The problem is usually caused to either Yū herself or her friends and parents by exterior agents, some of them supernatural. For example, in the 4th episode, Yū inadvertantly drops the magic compact that contains her wand in front of Midori at the park but needs it to turn into Mami to attend a TV broadcast. So she both creates and is the victim of the problem in need of solving.

Reoccurring themes in the events are meeting with aliens or ghosts, people almost discovering Yū’s secret, and obstacles when Yū tries to combine her normal life with her activities as Creamy Mami. While Mami cultivates a rivalry with Ayase Megumi and there are supernatural agents intervening, she does not have a formal opponent in the series and usually only struggles with life’s misfortunes in general.

Pretty much every episode has a happy ending for everyone involved.

5. General Appreciation

If there is one thing I adore about Magical Angel Creamy Mami, it’s that Yū’s growth as a character is a product of her maturing and gaining a sense of responsibility, trust, and justice through exercising her duties as Creamy Mami, but also through the combination of her lives as a normal schoolgirl and as an idol. She becomes more confident in herself and learns the value of things through her experiences, and also learns selflessness and becomes a lot more dependable.

Aesthetically speaking, the show is very well-made. The visual signature is cohesive and the colour schemes are well-chosen and well-managed. The soundtrack in general is a bit redundant because Creamy Mami only learns 7 songs thoughout the whole series and they are generally also used as openings and endings of the show. However, it is an interesting thing that Yū and Mami’s voice actress (it’s the same for both) is also the one that sings those songs (see her performing the opening for TV here). The rest of the soundtrack is usual anime stuff with stock songs for specific moment types (funny, tense, etc.) so it is not very imaginative, but very much within the conventions of the time.

Like some other shows where little girls turn into teens or adults, there are some inappropriate moments between Creamy Mami and men, but most of it is mild and is not endorsed at all by the show (that is to say, those who go beyond boundaries are usually punished for it).

If you’re interested in learning more about what mahou shoujos were like “back in the days”, Magical Angel Creamy Mami is a sensible choice as it represents pretty much everything there is to know about what mahou shoujos were like up until Sakura Cardcaptor and Sailor Moon.

I hope you decide to watch it! Its lack of diffusion outside of Japan means it is very underrated, at least in my opinion.

Bye bye!