2 out of 5

Directed by: Akiyuki Shinbo

I have no experience with Magical Girl anime, but given Sailor Moon as a reference and told that it generally involves young girls given bitchin’ costumes and powers to fight creatures and such, then, sure, got it. And reading the wiki page, which posits this genre as the female-geared version of tokusatsu, then that matches my Americanized assumption of the same, which is that this is the ultra-girled counterpart to ultra-maled action hero stuff, in a world where we’re defining ‘girl’ and ‘boy’ by their pink and blue stereotypes.

And with anime’s expansion in the early 00s, it seems that there was an attempt to broaden horizons some, with Magical Girl stuff marketed toward males as well. Continue flashing forward to 2011, and there’s (perhaps) an inevitable ‘revamp’ that’s akin to a ‘gritty’ take on the scene with Puella Magi Madoka Magica, theoretically subverting tropes and giving us post-Sailor Moon adults our trump card to wave around and prove that there’s genius in them thar hills.

(You may sense some sarcasm here.)

Proceed to present day (currently some time in 2019), when slack-jawed, dumble-dorf me reads about Madoka Magica’s promise of complex themes, and decides to take the 12-episode plunge. You’ve correctly guessed: I did not think much of the show.  Which doesn’t have to be the same as it being bad, and for about half of its total runtime, I was in a frame of mind of considering it as promising, though not for me. But after its initial “complex” plot development, it doesn’t dig deep enough, and then completely bastardizes it by an unnecessary followup twist that renders the entirety of the series ridiculous.  It’s besides the point; it’s just something to create a double-take, and prevents the series from having any need or reason to dig in to the stickier emotional wicket it had been somewhat competently building.

We start off with mystical animal thang Kyubey offering middle schoolers Madoka and Sayaka the opportunity to get powers and fight witches, with the caveat that witch battles ain’t no joke – something they’re witness to when their magical girl guide, Mami, takes them along for some fights. While the two girls daydream about what to make of the wish they’d be granted if they took the gig, they’re also cautious of the dangers, and the show does a good job of keeping a creeping undercurrent of offness butted up against the cuteness, especially through Kyubey’s oblique non-answers to their questions and magical girl Homura’s vague warnings to stay away. The first explanation behind these non-answers and warnings is powerful; but, as mentioned, it takes a somewhat obvious route in its immediate followup, and then buries it under excessive lore and a subsequent ‘what’s it all about’ reveal. Character decisions after this point are rendered moot, and the appreciated ominous tone can be chalked up to the ol’ trick of withholding information just for the sake of shock.

The mixed media animation at least remains a high point throughout, creating some hallucinatory battle sequences, and though our lead, Madoka, is permanently of the cutesy-voiced ‘I love my friends and I wish I were better!’ variety, making her the most one-dimensional and uninteresting character of her friends and associates, her acting (and others) is committed and the animation from Shaft is well suited to the cast’s various personality tics.

I do think Madoka Magica successfully subverted the expectations of its genre, but it ultimately doesn’t have much going for it beyond those subversions and a unique look.