Welcome back to 1986, when Studio Pierrot's fourth magical girl series was on the air. Magical Idol Pastel Yumi is very much of its time period, from the sort of ruffled dress that shows up in a thousand school pictures to the Rainbow Brite color scheme. And even if you weren't a little kid in the 80s, it's the kind of show that can make you nostalgic for the sort of world that, if we're honest, never really existed. It's also an interesting departure from what we think of as magical girl shows – if we're being technical, Yumi is more of a magic-using girl than an outright magical girl. By this I mean that she's more in the vein of Card Captor Sakura than Sailor Moon; while Yumi can use magical tools (a wand-and-locket combo), she never actually transforms, and only uses her magical powers on her own appearance once, in episode twenty-five. She also doesn't fight villains, perform as an idol or stage magician, or steal things for the greater good. In fact, for all intents and purposes, Yumi's just a regular ten-year-old girl with a few special skills, making this more a show for those interested in older children's anime than specifically magical girl afficionados. That's not to say that it won't appeal to the latter, but taken as a whole and compared to other similar heroines, Yumi's really not much of a magical girl, idol or otherwise.

What she is, however, is a cheery kid who experiences a normal range of emotions, has a crush on her friend Kenta's older brother, and just generally has a good time. There's a lot of “magic of childhood” elements to this series, with Yumi and Kenta running wild around town having good-natured adventures. Yumi mostly goes between her family's flower shop (which they live above) and her grandfather's treehouse, where he lives with his pet camel Imai. Grandpa was a famous adventurer in his youth; we can see that Yumi got a lot of her personality from him (although she thankfully didn't inherit his predilection for upsetting short-shorts), and his stories help to give her ideas of ways to use her magic. That's a good thing, because the powers she receives from the two cat-like elves from the Flower World aren't quite all-powerful – they rely on her being able to imagine and draw it, and then, once the spell has been cast, she only has a set amount of time before it disintegrates. That means that every problem she solves requires her to really think about it, because if her solution is solely based on magic, she won't really have solved the problem at all.

This, as you might guess, is a fairly hit-or-miss proposition for her. Some cases, like needing a hang glider to participate in a hang glider race that is somehow a thing in her town, require much more careful planning than others (like a short-term solution to her father's ruined parade float). Keshimaru and Kakimaru, the elves, can also help her out when needed, such as when they transform the horse she drew into a Pegasus or when she flies while holding onto their tails in episode ten. But what's most striking about Yumi's use of her powers is that she's almost always using them to help someone else, and virtually never to change her own appearance, even in situations when it might have helped, like in episode thirteen. This again would seem like a deliberate decision to mark her as a magic-using girl rather than a magical girl, although she does have a stock phrase and baton-twirling routine to bring her drawings to life that is roughly comparable to a transformation sequence.

What grounds the show more than Yumi's relatively mundane use of magic (and lack of need to fight monsters or perform) is her family situation. Unlike many other comparable family shows of the time, Yumi's parents often fight, and frequently to the point where her mother storms out of the house. While a flashback to the 1950s does shed some light on the motivations of all of the adults in the series, what we really see in the show is the impact of her parents' fights on Yumi. She does lose her temper and get hurt by them, and in cases like the episode where they switch “jobs,” with Yumi's dad being the housekeeper and Mom running the flower shop, we see it have a more direct effect on her. This specific episode also ties in with the sexism that pervades the series; people call Yumi's mother a “bad mom” if her husband is cooking, but both of them make statements throughout about Yumi's appearance and intelligence that we can see affecting her. In episode seven, her father makes a passing comment about weight that we see Yumi internalizing as needing to be thin to be loved, and later he remarks that her grades don't matter because she's a girl. Yumi's parents frequently upset her in one way or another, but the people around her rarely understand that, ascribing her emotional distress to something else rather than seeing that her parents' treatment of each other and her is the problem. This gives the series a slightly darker feel than, for example, Magical Angel Creamy Mami, or even the later Studio Pierrot magical girl Fancy Lala, because even with her magic, Yumi can't escape her problems at home.

And what a home it is! The designs for this show are impressive, particularly when it comes to the often-overlooked backgrounds. Homes are especially well-designed, with Yumi's attic bedroom being the sort I would have killed for as a little girl (she's got a swing in there!), but all of the layouts of the various buildings show that care was put into them. While the colors and clothes are very much of the time period, along with unintentionally humorous elements like the evil hang glider gang (“They're like a flying biker gang!” Yumi thinks), the show is very easy on the eyes in general. The animation is also pretty good, and if there are only about four designs for the flower elves, well, at least that's more than one each for the boys and girls. There are, unfortunately, two-and-a-half clip show episodes (one from Imai the camel's point of view), but this is still a very complete show. It manages to be fun while still touching on some real-world issues (episode seventeen is a stranger danger story where the predator actually doesn't turn out to be a stranger), and if you're a fan of anime history, I'd definitely suggest putting this on your watchlist. But even if you aren't, grab a bowl of your favorite sugary cereal and settle in – Magical Idol Pastel Yumi isn't the greatest of the early magical girl shows, but it is still enjoyable to watch.