AKA: N/A

Genre: Psychic shoujo soap opera

Length: Television series, 51 episodes, 24 minutes each

Distributor: Currently unlicensed in North America

Content Rating: 6+ (threats of violence)

Related Series: N/A

Also Recommended: Boys Before Flowers: Hana Yori Dango, Kimagure Orange Road, Sailor Moon

Notes: Based on the manga by Akimoto Nami, which originally ran in Nakayoshi and is now available from TokyoPop. However, it should be noted that some names have been changed in the TokyoPop release of the comic.

Rating:

Miracle Girls

Synopsis

Two twin sisters, Mikage and Tomomi, are opposites in almost every way. Mikage is gentle, feminine, and intelligent, though she has a tendency to have explosive experiments in chem class. Tomomi is tomboyish, good at sports, and not really so good in book-smarts. They do, however, have one *major* thing in common: they're psychics. That's right - they can manipulate small objects with only their minds, communicate with each other telepathically, and they can even teleport if they're in contact with one another. At least their boyfriends (and everyone else) have gotten used to it by now ... what a mess it would be if this ESPer thing was such a big deal!

Review

Now, in the real world, these two teens would be subjected to so many experiments by the Japanese government, they'd look like that kid from Spriggan. However, this *isn't* the real world, which is readily apparent when the supporting characters in this series don't even flinch when these girls start popping out of thin air at random intervals, since apparently, this sort of thing happens all the time.

This sort of ridiculously surreal storytelling is just one of the problems I have with Miracle Girls, which is one of the least memorable shoujo anime I have ever seen. Now, Miracle Girls is based on the manga by Akimoto Nami, which was a charming, if average series about romantic hijinks between the girls and their (prospective) boyfriends, complicated some because they're trying to hide their psychic power.

The animators unwisely decided to remove much of the conflict in this series by saying, "Hey, let's have just about everyone figure out right away that Mikage and Tomomi are psychic!" And worse, they turned prospective boyfriends into "Oh, we're actually going out already," turning a potentially interesting series into something deadly dull, real quick. So what do these people do to reinject some actual interest into this series?

They have these two "ordinary" teenage girls thwart the hijacking of an airplane in the second episode of this show. Yes, you heard me correctly. It's like Kimagure Orange Road meets Die Hard, but with a fluffy, cutesy, shoujo style. And no one is surprised by this.

Now, normally I try to give a series about three to five episodes to either succeed or fall flat on its face, but Miracle Girls takes maybe half that to be relegated to the "don't bother watching any more" pile on my AVI directory. Still, I forged on, hoping that *maybe* it might get better, though admittedly, having the girls use their psychic powers to catch the super sale at Mervyn's loses about all its luster after the Mary Sue fanfic plot of "save the boyfriend from the evil hijacker" - it's hard to inject any sort of realism back into a series once you've already thrown it away with something that utterly unbelievable.

What about rolling that beautiful psychic footage? Well, there isn't any. The animation is subpar even for 1993 - a good many sources (Lord Carnage for example) have pegged this as an 80s title, which it is most certainly not. Compared to contemporaries such as Irresponsible Captain Tylor, Sailor Moon R, Slam Dunk, and Yu Yu Hakusho, this looks awful.

While the music is cute, there isn't a single conceivable reason that this series will remain in your memory for more than five minutes past the credits, unless you're a really big fan of the manga. Even then, you'll be wondering where on Earth the scenarists got the idea to put Mikage and Tomomi in such badly contrived situations, because even the most forgiving shoujo fan is going to see through this thing like it was cellophane. Miracle Girls will only entertain the young girl audience that its writers are so obviously pandering to, and even then, I imagine that a lot of them would be bored by this. Sure, it's not the worst thing you could pick up, but with so many other quality series already available in the market today, I can't recommend buying it unless you're an obsessive Miracle Girls completist.

And that's even rarer than having psychic twins avert the hijack of an airplane.

Totally unmemorable fluff that panders to its preteen audience, leaving adult shoujo fans slapping their foreheads in shame that anyone would buy this. — Carlos/Giancarla Ross

Recommended Audience: Best left for the 6-12 year old female audience of Nakayoshi readers who it was intended for. Teens and adults would have a hard time suspending their disbelief of the events of this series, and younger children might be scared by some of the psychic antics (and probably wouldn't care for the pretty pictures).