A Certain Magical Index the Movie: The Miracle of Endymion
劇場版 とある魔術の禁書目録 エンデュミオンの奇蹟 (Toaru Majutsu no Index Movie: Endymion no Kiseki)
- Action
- Fantasy
- Sci-Fi
- Super Power
- Urban Fantasy
- Episodes
- 1
- Duration
- 1 hr 30 min
- Aired
- Feb 23, 2013
- Status
- Finished Airing
Synopsis
In the technologically driven Academy City, anticipation builds around the near-completion of “Endymion,” the world’s first space elevator—a project hailed as nothing short of a miracle. Amid the city’s usual bustle, high schooler Touma Kamijou and his companion Index cross paths with Arisa Meigo, a bright, determined aspiring singer, and soon find themselves drawn into her orbit.
As unsettling incidents begin to ripple across Academy City, Touma and Index uncover a complicated scheme tied to both Arisa and Endymion. The situation escalates with the arrival of Stiyl Magnus, hinting that the forces of magic have become entangled with the city’s cutting-edge science once again.
Otaku Consensus
Endymion lands as a solid but nonessential Toaru side entry: Hiroshi Nishikiori and J.C.Staff keep the science/magic collision brisk enough for a theatrical outing, and its self-contained structure makes it easier to sample than the franchise’s longer arcs. The recurring complaint from critics and fans is compression; several reviews frame it as a two-episode story with missing connective tissue, leaving Arisa and Shutaura less developed than the setting machinery around them.
Why You Should Watch
Watch Endymion if you want the Toaru franchise’s science-versus-magic collisions in a compact theatrical hit rather than another multi-cour commitment. It scratches the same itch as A Certain Scientific Railgun when Academy City hardware turns into a battlefield, but keeps the Index-side occult vocabulary and church-operatives flavor closer to the main series. The movie’s specific hook is its unusual mix of idol performance energy, urban-fantasy rule lawyering, and space-age mechanical spectacle, a combination reflected in AniList’s high Magic and Super Power tags plus its less common Idol and Space tags. Viewers who like franchise cross-pressure, named specializations, and J.C.Staff’s familiar Academy City action staging will get more out of it than anyone expecting a deep character reset or franchise-changing canon event.
Key Characters
- IIndex Librorum Prohibitorum(VA: Yuka Iguchi)
Index remains the franchise’s walking occult archive and comic spark, giving the film its clearest link to the magical-side vocabulary that separates Index from a standard esper action story.
- TTouma Kamijou(VA: Atsushi Abe)
Touma is still the battered moral anchor fans recognize, interesting less for power escalation than for how his anti-specialness drags miracle-level conflicts back into blunt human terms.
- AArisa Meigo(VA: Sachika Misawa)
Arisa is the movie’s idol-coded newcomer, remembered as the emotional entry point whose presence gives Endymion a different texture from the franchise’s usual church-and-laboratory confrontations.
- SShutaura Sequenzia(VA: Youko Hikasa)
Shutaura brings a cool, militarized counterweight to Arisa’s performance energy, fitting the film’s harder-edged action side and its Guns and Kuudere tag associations.
What Makes It Stand Out
- 1
It is a single theatrical installment from J.C.Staff released on February 23, 2013, not a recap film or a TV-season substitute; its structure is built around one concentrated franchise incident.
- 2
Kazuma Kamachi is credited for series composition as well as original creation, which makes the movie more directly tied to the source creator’s franchise logic than many anime-original tie-in films.
- 3
The production credits split design labor with unusual specificity: Kiyotaka Haimura on original character design, Yuuichi Tanaka on anime character design, Mika Akitaka on mechanical design, and Kenichi Takase plus Shinobu Tsuneki on prop design.
- 4
Its AniList tag profile is a genuine franchise oddity: Magic and Super Power both sit at 96%, while Idol reaches 76% and Space 60%, signaling a blend of Toaru staples with performance-anime and orbital sci-fi textures.
- 5
Critical discussion repeatedly identifies the film as more effective as a standalone feature than as a consequential franchise chapter, with the main drawback being that its setup and character turns feel too compressed for the ideas it raises.
Fun Facts & Trivia
- Fun fact 1
- The film’s reception is almost perfectly aligned across major anime databases: MAL lists it at 7.4/10 from 72,435 votes, while AniList records a 72/100 score with 312 favourites.
- Fun fact 2
- Hiroshi Nishikiori directed the film, with Tomonori Kuroda as art director and Ounoou Fujii as assistant art director, keeping the visual production organized around Academy City’s dense urban-fantasy environment.
- Fun fact 3
- The movie is catalogued as one finished episode, which is why many franchise watch orders place it as a compact checkpoint rather than a separate season-length commitment.
- Fun fact 4
- A recurring fan-review pattern is long-gap rewatching: one documented review frames a second viewing more than ten years after the 2013 release as preparation before later Index and Railgun continuation material.
- Fun fact 5
- Among the listed main cast, Sachika Misawa and Youko Hikasa voice the film-original focal characters Arisa Meigo and Shutaura Sequenzia, while Yuka Iguchi and Atsushi Abe carry over the core Index/Touma dynamic.
Studios
- J.C.Staff
