Overview

Mahō Shōjo Kira Kira Sunlight is an American web series created by an unknown animator or animators. The show combines magical girl anime tropes with cosmic horror, following high schooler Sally Hoshino (Kira Kira Sunlight) and her friends as they are drawn into a secret interdimensional war between two groups known as the Catalpa and the Empire of Limitless Night. Claims that the show is autobiographical are considered spurious, although some fans point to unsolved disappearances in early 2000s Long Beach—the time and place the show is set.

The first four seasons appeared as a series of Flash animations on Newgrounds from 2003-2006. Despite the lack of a regular upload schedule and the sometimes sketchy quality of the animation, the show gained a dedicated following for its diverse cast, mix of comedy and horror, and the in-universe style used to describe each episode by their uploader, Sparkle_Sal. A short fifth season, uploaded to YouTube in 2018, is considered by some to be an unauthorized sequel.

The show’s recurring themes include the power of hope in the face of darkness, found families, and the idea that we live in an inescapably hostile universe that is beyond our understanding. The show’s use of companion animals is an especially complex meld of its horror and anime roots.

Season One: Lucky

Lucky, a talking Persian kitten, is a mainstay of fanfiction and fanart despite her death early in the show. She first appears in the pilot episode, “Lucky.” After Sally witnesses her best friend and long-time crush Annika vanish during a school basketball game, she searches the building in a state of increasing desperation, finally running into the streets during a torrential downpour before returning to the gymnasium as the sun sets. There she finds Lucky, who—after a series of talking cat jokes and uncomfortable pratfalls—helps her warm up and gives her the athame that transforms her into Kira Kira Sunlight.

Although Lucky’s role as mentor and granter of transformative powers is typical of animal companions in magical girl anime, in many ways the character provides a stark contrast to those tropes. Lucky is difficult, obnoxious, and sarcastic, and sometimes obstructs Sally’s missions against the Limitless Night rather than helping her. She is also violent—one of the show’s running gags is Lucky’s tendency to bite Sally at climactic moments.

Although the show initially plays Sally and Lucky’s antagonistic relationship for laughs, the bond between the two deepens after the first season’s midpoint episode, “Origins.” In this episode, Lucky explains the cosmic stakes of the fight between the Limitless Night and the Catalpa and reveals that Sally’s athame and her powers are gifts from the Catalpa.

Lucky dies in the first season’s final episode while saving Sally’s life during her infiltration of a Limitless Night stronghold. Many fans still mourn Lucky’s death, which becomes especially poignant after the revelations of season four. Fans who believe the show is based on real events frequently maintain small shrines to her.

Seasons Two through Three: Pythagoras, Marigold, and Others

The second season opens with Sally standing on the high school roof, contemplating suicide. She is stopped by a classmate, Leokham, who has also been deputized by the Catalpa to fight the Limitless Night. Leokham becomes Sally’s new love interest as the series progresses, and has as her companion animal a friendly, talkative cockatiel called Pythagoras.

Pythagoras’s main role is to insist that Sally take on another companion animal. Sally, still traumatized by Lucky’s loss, refuses. However, in the second season’s midpoint episode she finally relents, taking on a Dutch Lop named Marigold. Marigold proves essential as Sally and Leokham investigate a string of disappearances similar to Annika’s, and Sally’s realization that the best way to heal is to accept the help of those around her and acknowledge that nothing will bring Lucky back provides one of the show’s most memorable scenes.

It is this change of heart, representative of Sally’s resolve to fight evil wherever she can, which sees the introduction of Kira Kira Sunlight’s iconic “white witch” costume. Following her new transformation, Sally forms a coven with Leokham (“red witch”); Melody Barnes (“purple witch”), a trans woman and artist with a grass snake named Shimmer; Jeff Gonzales (“blue warlock”), a transfer student who slowly opens up to the group and whose companion is a laconic sugar glider named BB; and Tyrone Williams (“starfire warlock”), Jeff’s boyfriend and a cross-country runner with a bookish fox called Yaoyorozu.

Season Four: Lucky

In “Sunlight,” the final episode of the show’s original four seasons, Sally and her coven return to the Limitless Night stronghold where Lucky died. Together, the group breaks through the stronghold’s defenses and defeats the Limitless Night forces, although BB dies during the battle and the other animals and humans are badly injured.

At the end of the episode, Sally—driven by her fury at BB’s death—brutally interrogates a Limitless Night soldier. The soldier tells her that the Limitless Night are escaped former slaves of the Catalpa, who simply want to live their life in peace, while the Catalpa are malicious, sadistic beings bent on conquest and death. Sally dismisses the idea, but as she is about to kill the soldier her athame flares with magic, plunging her (and the show’s viewers) into a flashback seen from Annika’s point of view.

As Annika walks towards a water fountain, a rift opens up in the floor and sucks her in. However, it is not the Limitless Night on the other side, but the Catalpa—shown on-screen for the first time as half-human, half-goat creatures. They force Annika into a massive machine, which extracts her magical essence in order to power Sally’s athame before killing her human form. They then bind her spirit to Lucky and send her back to the gymnasium, where she is magically compelled to do their bidding.

Sally teeters at the edge of a permanent breakdown as her guilt over the cat’s death compounds itself with the truth of Annika’s disappearance. But with Leokham, Melody, Jeff, and Tyrone at her back, she overcomes her grief and transforms into Kira Kira Sunlight, her white witch costume now changed to a flame-lined yellow-and-white robe. The season ends with Sunlight and the coven resolving to side with the Limitless Night in the war against the Catalpa.

Season Five: Sparkle

Season five, uploaded to YouTube in 2018 by a user named RedWitch1989, is infamous for its nihilistic tone—dark even by the standards of the show’s fourth season—its significant time jump, and its abrupt ending after only two episodes. Despite keeping the “Mahō Shōjo Kira Kira Sunlight” title, the season centers on Leokham, now an adult living alone with an elderly tortoiseshell cat called Sparkle.

In the first episode, Leokham reconnects with Melody, Jeff, and Tyrone at a beachside cafe. None are accompanied by their animals. When Melody reveals that her nephew has vanished, Tyrone suggests they resume their fight against the Catalpa. Although Melody and Jeff agree, Leokham excuses herself in a bleak mood.

The second—final—episode, titled “Sally,” lacks an opening sequence. Instead, it shows Leokham’s arrival at her apartment as a montage of illustrations, absent sound and motion: a door half-open; glass shards scattered across the kitchen floor; Leokham’s forearms, scratched and bloody, as she goes down on all fours to pick something up that is obscured from view. The final pictures appear so briefly the show must be paused to see them. First, a broken, battered Sparkle, cradled in Leokham’s arms. Second, the athame that Lucky gave to Sally in season one, embedded in the back of Leokham’s front door.

The rest of the episode is almost entirely a flashback, revealing that the Catalpa kidnapped Sally shortly after the end of season four and returned her to Leokham as an ordinary tortoiseshell cat. It shows the slow dissolution of the coven as first Shimmer, then Yaoyorozu, are killed by the Catalpa. It shows Leokham, sick with grief and crying into Sparkle’s fur, ignoring her friends as they try to contact her and then at last giving up and agreeing to meet. It shows the relentless advance of the years as Leokham tries, with little success, to put her past behind her.

As the flashback ends, Leokham wrests the athame free of the door and transforms—not into her red witch costume, but into the yellow-white robes of Kira Kira Sunlight. She wipes the tears from her eyes with one bloodied wrist and looks directly at the camera, a fury in her eyes that we realize now has been there all along. The screen abruptly goes black, bringing the episode—and the series—to an end.

Despite hundreds of thousands of views on the video and thousands of comments, no further episodes of Mahō Shōjo Kira Kira Sunlight have ever been posted.