© とよ田みのる／小学館／王島南高校漫研
“Magic House ~ What Would a Manga Protagonist Do Here?”
What They Say:
First-year high school student Ai Yasumi lives on the island of Izu Oshima and loves reading manga. But after a certain turning point, she sets her sights on creating stories of her own! As she dives into the world of manga-making, Ai faces challenges, growth, and the excitement of chasing her creative dreams. Where will her creative journey take her?
Review: (Please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
This summer 2026 anime series is based on the manga Kore Kaite Shine, which comes from Minoru Toyoda and certainly translates well. The manga began in 2021 through Monthly Shonen Sunday, so it doesn’t have a huge amount of material as it clocks in at around nine volumes, which are being released in English by Seven Seas Entertainment. The anime has a solid team behind it that has to capture the whimsy of our lead character, while also playing to a lot of manga properties at times. Hiroaki Akagi is directing and certainly seems up to it, with a good team of writers on it. Shin-Ei Animation is handling the production and it manages to capture that kind of island whimsy to it with its visuals, and the way that our lead re-imagines things at times from what they really are.
The series does some decent work of exploring the foundation of our central character, Ai Yasumi, as she’s always viewed the world in an artistic way. Watching the clouds go by when she should be playing with friends, she sees them as characters living a life. Some of it is due to living on Oshima island and it being a bit small and not exactly modern. When she watches a cat flit about like a ninja, her mind reinterprets it as just that and watches and delights in how it moves. But where her life changed as an elementary student was in discovering a bookstore that did rentals. She consumed a lot of manga, making references to fun things like Doraemon as well as Ushio & Tora, but she has one book that she likes above all others and keeps borrowing a lot. It’s a good foundation for understanding her in that this medium is what drives her to consume things, but it doesn’t extend (yet) to novels and the like. Where the series takes place is seven years later as she’s a month into high school, now out of mandatory education, and one of her teachers is pretty hard in discipline since Ai pretty much daydreams a lot. It’s understandable, but you can see how her love of things like the Robota & Pokota manga is keeping her from actually progressing. The problem is that you get teachers like this who can crush what makes Ai as special as she is.
You can see this easily as an adult saying it’s time to put away childish things, but the teacher, Teshima, is so harsh with it that it’ll leave an expected bad taste in your mouth, even as Ai lays out exactly why it’s special after being told to never borrow that book again. Ai can’t give this stuff up, however, and she makes it pretty clear hwo it’s helped her navigate her life as a child to where she is now. So it’s no surprise she later takes the ferry to Tokyo to the big convention to see things and to meet the author she most respects. It’s a great experience watching her discover all these things, but I absolutely love that when she gets to Hoshino’s table to meet her, it’s the teacher, Teshima. She does her best to play it off as being someone else with the best costume change moment ever. The way it impacts Ai is pretty amazing, since you know it’s going to impact Teshima as well, but it’s such a complex and open range of emotions for Ai as a teenage girl.
© とよ田みのる／小学館／王島南高校漫研
In Summary:
Discovering that a person in your life is secretly not just a mangaka, but also one that you revere, that’s a pretty crazy situation. And one that has you wanting to learn from them as well, making for a really problematic and probably adversarial relationship at times because it’s also still very much an adult and a child/teenager dynamic. But it has a lot of potential because you want to see Ai grow through this and discover her own voice, but you also find yourself wanting to know what’s behind Teshima being the way she is. There’s a lot of potential to play with here and it offers up a lot of interesting paths it can go down, especially by playing out on a small island with its own culture and limitations. The supporting cast is teased a bit here with Ai’s peers, so I’m curious to see more of how that unfolds, but the real draw is Ai with Teshima.
Grade: B+
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
© とよ田みのる／小学館／王島南高校漫研
© とよ田みのる／小学館／王島南高校漫研
© とよ田みのる／小学館／王島南高校漫研
© とよ田みのる／小学館／王島南高校漫研
Chris Beveridge
http://www.fandompost.com
Chris has been writing about anime, manga, movies and comics for well on twenty years now. He began AnimeOnDVD.com back in 1998 and has covered nearly every anime release that’s come out in the US ever since.
He likes to write a lot, as you can see.
