While mainstream animation has been all over the place lately, the indie scene has had a bit of a moment as new projects have emerged and courted online attention. In addition to Glitch’s Knights of Guinevere, one of the big animation scene stealers in 2025 was Pretty Please, I Don’t Want to Be a Magical Girl, whose second episode premiered over the weekend.
Created by artist Kiana Khansmith, the series centers on 15-year-old Aika, who’s given up on the superhero life to try being a regular teenage girl. She’s barely started figuring out what that looks like when her old life comes calling: her star-shaped guardian Hoshi wants her to come back home, and to make matters worse, her nemesis Eclipse is back, looking to continue their old dynamic.
Instead of just running away or shrugging this off, Aika finds herself pulled back into the life by her geeky friend Zira, who can’t help but fall for all this. By extension, Aika’s part of it too—even as it puts her in danger.
Just off that description, you can easily imagine the rest of the show taking shape, which might be the point: despite its title, Pretty Please, I Don’t Want to Be a Magical Girl currently doesn’t seem like it wants to slap its own genre around or do any kind of deconstruction. It’s as sincere about Aika fawning over otherwise mundane teenage experiences like tests and bad cafeteria food as it is when it’s time for her to fight a monster that’s ruining her day.
Whatever the specifics were that made her walk from her old life—it seems less rooted in any one incident than it does in general burnout, given she led a team of magical heroes—her desire to go back to the ordinary world instead of escape it makes for a fun inversion of what usually comes in stories like this.
She gets some help from that via Zira and Hoshi, and the three of them find a fun dynamic almost immediately thanks to the performances of their individual actors. The show’s consistently funny and feels finely tuned for general audiences without tipping into being too adult whenever it gets a swear in. (The pilot gets off a great use of “fuck” that’ll stick in your head for a while.)
Khansmith also works on the Disney series Big City Greens, and it’s easy to see the overlap between these two series; even if you haven’t watched Greens before, she trusts that you’ve seen something similar with young characters, so the jokes in each episode come at a good clip and never feel out of place in the world she’s set up.
Unlike other well-known indie animations, the Pretty Please episodes consist of storyboards, which are commonly used to previsualize later elements like animation and camera positioning. This asks viewers to put in a bit more mental work than usual when watching, and Khansmith has admitted it saves her more time and money than going for full animation, but it doesn’t take away from how well-made the production is. Her boards are clean, the characters’ actions so clearly defined, and the cast’s performances so well-tuned that it works in the show’s favor and gives it a certain charm. And the one instance where full animation in the pilot is deployed is well-timed, very funny, and hints at what the show could be if expanded into a full production.
Online audiences seem to have really taken a shine to Pretty Please, I Don’t Want to Be a Magical Girl, thanks in part to Khansmith’s engagement with her community and consistently releasing doodles of the characters hanging out or fleshing out her mythology. She’s met her people where they’re at, and they’ve been sure to sing their praises for the show far and wide, helping to explain why Mercury Filmworks—whose credits include Centaurworld and The Ghost & Molly McGee—has stepped in to fully animate the pilot.
Whether that’s a soft launch for a full series or just a nice little one-and-done, Pretty Please clearly has the potential to be as big as Khansmith wants it to be and deserves whatever spotlight it gets.
Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
Read the full article here
