Mahou Shoujo Madoka★Magica Movie 3: Hangyaku no Monogatari

The young girls of Mitakihara happily live their lives, occasionally fighting off evil, but otherwise going about their peaceful, everyday routines. However, Homura Akemi feels that something is wrong with this unusually pleasant atmosphere—though the others remain oblivious, she can't help but suspect that there is more to what is going on than meets the eye: someone who should not exist is currently present to join in on their activities.

Mahou Shoujo Madoka★Magica Movie 3: Hangyaku no Monogatari follows Homura in her struggle to uncover the painful truth behind the mysterious circumstances, as she selfishly and desperately fights for the sake of her undying love in this despair-ridden conclusion to the story of five magical girls.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Akemi, Homura Main

Saitou, Chiwa Japanese

Kaname, Madoka Main

Yuuki, Aoi Japanese

Sakura, Kyouko Main

Nonaka, Ai Japanese

Miki, Sayaka Main

Kitamura, Eri Japanese

Tomoe, Mami Main

Mizuhashi, Kaori Japanese

Kyuubey Main

Katou, Emiri Japanese

Momoe, Nagisa Main

Asumi, Kana Japanese

Charlotte Supporting

Kaname, Junko Supporting

Gotou, Yuuko Japanese

Shizuki, Hitomi Supporting

Shintani, Ryouko Japanese

Iwakami, Atsuhiro Producer

Kubota, Mitsutoshi Producer

Mori, Yasunori Producer

Kamiji, Tomoyo Assistant Producer

Reviews

Nov 15, 2013

MotherOfUltra

Recommended

There're anime where the ending will leave you satisfied.
There're cliffhanger anime for people to die for a sequel.
There're even anime that just leaves cliffhangers and never come back.
There're those garbage anime that you just don't feel anything at all.

And there's Madoka, an anime with an amazing story, art, sound, character, but a soulless and downright devilish ending.

There will be absolutely no plot at all, because I want people to understand and be ready for anything.

And, I tell you, you'll need to be. ...
[P.S. There are absolutely no plot summaries in here, but the vocabularies and terms I use may indirectly suggest a minor point of the story.]

Story: 10
This story is meant to leave an unsatisfactory ending. The motif is pretty clear: the Bible and the genesis of God and Lucifer.
Come on, our world hasn't come to an end, has it? A story based on our world, a never-ending cycle of unsatisfactory endings cannot be satisfactory by itself, unless by deception and/or imagination.
Urobuchi, author of Fate/Zero and Madoka among many others, is famous for a seamless plotline. I cannot state that this movie has brought down his fame, because all his stories had dark motifs. Indeed, this movie has left an unsatisfactory ending, but this is a masterpiece, creating an amazing transition between theogenesis and diablogenesis.
How could I dare say that unsatisfying ending crushes this masterpiece?

Art: 10
Imagine Madoka being reanimated with Monogatari: Second Season's animation technology.
Now add malice to that.
Now add another plot twist to that.
That does not even begin how great the movie was.
The seemingly childish animation was still there, but the malice was all the more heightened, getting into the fine line between creepiness and evilness.
A wise mangaka once stated that drawing a malicious face (not angry face) was not an easy job. He stated that the background, the eye, the position of the panel, the position of the character, darkness, facial expression and etc were all necessary to make one malicious face.
Then how much harder would it be to draw nearly an hour-long malice?
Shaft studio, producers of monogatari series and of course madoka among many others, is known for their ability to, despite using quite "cheating" methods, send chills down the viewers' spine. Using scenes where the character simply stands, or where the name of the font used or color of the scene or sometimes seemingly scanning the clothings or skirts of an unknown origin, Shaft studio actually makes a great success of delivering an heightened message to the viewers.
And, truth be told, I could not catch a single misgivings about the animation of the movie. When malice was needed, Shaft did their job. When they needed a happy tea time, Shaft did their job. When they needed a battle scene, Shaft did their job. No more colors or fonts. They did their job.

Sound: 10
If there's one criterion I always cut down and attack, it's the sound. Being a very keen person in sound, I always wanted the producers to use the "perfect" BGMs (of course nothing is perfect but still I can dream?!) at the "perfect" moment. But I have to say it--rebellion nailed it.
The song was as creepy as it could get. The background musics at the moment of realization was so good that I got a chill down my spine and nearly pissed myself (true story). On the opening, ClaRis did their usual mislead. The general "ah, this is a magical girls' story! There're absolutely no genre-twisting stories or one of those Urobuchi things in here!" and comforted the slaughter lambs. Then, came the usual malice.
Scary it was.
And somehow, even at the ending, although the song was in major pitch and no double voice or alterations have been added, it was still creepy and malicious. It created a sense of Judas' kiss, meaning that while the act itself was a beautiful act, the inner sense was dark enough to creep our intestines. If there is one thing that music should do, it is to do that. Even through the electronic amplifiers, music should always deliver the feelings.
Rebellion was an amazing exemplification of this job of music. It did its job when it needed to, creeping our guts out after cleansing our soul with "cute" music, then presenting the "Judas' kiss".
Sound--a job well done.

Character: 10
No one expected this.
No one could have expected this.
No one could have seen this coming.
Yet this was inevitable.
Urobuchi always does this. He reveals a down-to-Earth fact that has been in front of our face the whole time yet at the same time a fact that no one has realized.
The development of our main character, Akemi Homura, is wonderfully presented with this motif.
Her "transfiguration" was something no one have realized, yet something so obvious and inevitable that everybody should have known.
I will not go onto further details.
As for minor characters, such as Mami, Sayaka, Kyouko and our all-time hated con artist, MOTHER****ING KYUBEY, they have done their job spectacularly. Every bit of stories they shared and every bit of clues they presented showed and developed the story rapidly. In a way, they "created" the main character. It is always difficult to involve all of the characters and giving all of them important roles. Failure to do so may not be the doom of the anime, but a horrible trial of doing so means the end of the anime and doom of its production. However, Rebellion Story, while providing every character a role, also succeeded in not awkwardly fitting in their roles into the original plot.
It is indeed a job well done.

Enjoyment: 5
...........
...........
...........
Now, before you say anything or go away, let me explain myself.
Indeed, this was an amazing movie, and I don't think any other movie can create a seamless storyline as this one.
However, I didn't enjoy this at all.
In fact, I don't think I can ever see the movie again.
It was too soul-breaking that it felt like my soul was breaking apart.
Indeed its story was good, indeed the art was amazing, indeed the sound did its job, indeed the character development was godly.
But I just couldn't like it.
Still, this was only my opinion. Some people might like it.
In fact, exactly because I liked it, I want people to watch this.
It both critiques the conventional "now everybody's happy" anime endings and the well-known "good guy always is the good guy" logic and crashes it down to Earth.
Because of this, I have to take off the Enjoyment spectrum out of the overall rate.
It indeed is an important aspect of anime, but not in this one. This movie DOESN'T want you to enjoy the show. And that is exactly why this is great.

Overall: 10
Great story, art, sound and character.
It is the work of our lifetime.
Don't miss it.
If you are in a region where you can go watch the movie, you are blissed.
GO WATCH IT.
IT'S WORTH EVERY PENNY.
Then, happy anime-ing.

Reviewer’s Rating: 10

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Apr 4, 2014

sjack

Mixed Feelings

This movie was disappointing. While visually and artistically stunning, I found it to be extremely lacking in the story and character department. The first two thirds of the film to me were nothing more but Shaft just masturbating in front of me for an hour with their colossal budget and overly-indulgent animation. Magical girl transformation sequence that lasted too long, overly long fight sequences with the Nightmares, with the only thing they accomplished was to vomit a barrage of non-stop god-like animation, while relatively little progression in the character development and story department occurred.

I don't want to go into any spoilers, but suffice to say, ... the first hour of this just feels like a massive pandering and giant piece of fan service for fans of the original show. You get to see the fight between Hamura and Mami that we never got the chance to in the original show. Familiar characters such Kyosuke and Hitomi turn up for the sake of cramming more of the original cast into the story and reminding us why we hate them so much. The only new character that's introduced is Bebe, and besides explaining a bit of the plot to one character, she has about as much relevance to the overall story to what Nami from the Rebuild films does. Both of them are equal amounts of fan service and overall uselessness. There was relatively little of interest for me going on during this time and I found the only thing engaging me was the unbelievable production value of the show. After the first hour of the movie finished, I felt like this would've been better off as 30 minute OVA dedicated as a side story to Homura's character rather than a movie.

And then the final act happened. From here on the review will be straying into spoiler territory, so if you haven't watched the movie before doing so, I highly advise that you do before reading on. To say that Homura's 180 degree turn as a character was a massive ass pull would be an understatement. One of the film's most glaring problems is that it breaks the most cardinal rule of visual story telling mediums-show, don't tell. When it occasionally decides to visually stop jerking off in front of my face for about five minutes and remembers that it has a story and characters, the characters basically announce how they feel and describe why they're doing what they're doing. This is especially egregious during the conversation between Homura and Madoka when they're on the flower field. Homura breaks down in front of Madoka and blurts out her feelings to her as if she was reading her own character page from a wiki. This moment had little to no build up or foreshadowing to really have an effect for me emotionally, mostly because Madoka has been pretty much a non character within the story at that point, and the plot had been focusing more on Homura's confrontations with the other characters.

And it's because Madoka and Homura's relationship felt so ineffective to me was the reason why I had nothing but indifference to convey to Homura suddenly turning into magical satan because she was completely overcome with her lesbo juices when Godoka showed up. If her motivations had alway been selfish and she yearned to be with Madoka regardless of the consequences, then why didn't she just stay in the labyrinth once she found out that the Madoka with her at the time wasn't an illusion but the real deal once Kyubey told her? Her sudden plunge into the dark side felt extremely half-assed and forced, and felt like it was there to introduce a superficial shock factor that was needed to justify for what up to that point was an extremely point-less movie.

Many have said that you need to watch this film multiple times to grasp the "deep" themes and meaning of the film to truly appreciate it, but I can confidently say that you'll pretty much get the entire gist of the thing on your first viewing, since 75% of it is a superficial, two-dimensional barrage of fan service and Shaft reminding us how loaded they are, and the final 25% of it is just the writers undoing the ending of the original show so that the film can appear "edgy" and "controversial", with Biblical allusions to Madoka as God and Homura as Satan, but it's really all a pretentious disguise and mechanisation for them to dish out more sequels and milk this dead cow of a franchise even further, because no way was the ending I just watched a satisfying conclusion that ties any untied threads the movie had introduced to the universe at this point. While I do recommend watching the movie just to see how it completely falls the fuck apart towards the end, the only reason I can see myself coming back to this is for the stunning animation, and even that struggled to keep me engaged during my first viewing of the film, considering how bloated and dragged out a lot of the sequences in the beginning were.

Reviewer’s Rating: 5

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Dec 11, 2013

Olwen

Not Recommended

Spoiler warning! I can't make this review without spoilers. Please don't read the review and blame me for spoilers. You've been warned.

I was pretty excited about seeing this movie at first. I figured that since the series was pretty good, I could trust the makers of the movie to not screw up. But what I did not expect was to see an incredibly boring movie that served only to ruin the great Madoka series.

Art: I think they really improved on this aspect compared to the movie series. I still have some issues with the art style--I think the characters have football heads--but other than that ... the style is pretty great. I thought the creepy witch art was needlessly excessive, though. Still, I'll give this an 8, with two points subtracted for the aforementioned reasons.

Sound: I'm not sure how to rate this because I don't really pay attention to background music while watching a movie. But the music was very nice, so I'm going to give this an 8 as well.

Character: This is where everything starts to go downhill. Characters like Kyouko, Sayaka and Bebe didn't even need to be around--especially Bebe. What on earth did she even do in the movie? Absolutely nothing. They could have thought of some other reason to make Mami and Homura fight very easily instead of wasting money on a pointless voice actor. I don't think anyone can deny the fact that she's out of place and useless.

Madoka and Mami were okay, but by far the most important character in this movie is Homura, and they completely destroyed her. She acted way out of character. Why would you become the embodiment of evil and become the foe of the person you love just so you can be together with them? If she really were in love, I think she wouldn't want to fight the person she loves. Also, it's quite selfish and inconsiderate of Madoka's feelings. I really liked her before seeing this movie but now she's easily one of my least favorites. 5 points off for Homura, 3 for Bebe and 1 for Kyouko and Sakura not being around much.

Story: I think the story was interesting up until the part Homura became evil, and I think I explained why Homura becoming evil is out of character and not necessary for the story. But there are a couple other issues with the story that stand out. For example, Homura's quest to find out who is creating a witch's labyrinth is honestly a little boring, and it takes most of the movie. Not much happens. Why didn't they just go with the movie trailer they showed at the end of the TV series? They decided to do something completely different instead.

Also, there are a few unanswered questions. Why did Homura consent, if at all, to Kyubey's experiment? If she didn't consent, then how did they get her? What happened to Kyouko and Mami during this time? What happened after the end of Madoka? What exactly is the Madoka in the witch's labyrinth? And so on. The creators just totally skipped over these questions and we aren't going to get an answer in the future. I'll give this a 2, with 1 point given for the witch's labyrinth thingy being slightly interesting.

Enjoyment: I liked to look at the cute art, but that's pretty much all I enjoyed. As mentioned before, they totally destroyed Homura and the future direction of the Madoka series. I can't possibly enjoy that. I'll give this the same point as the story for the same reason.

Overall: This movie is incredibly overhyped by, in my opinion, rabid fanboys who are just excited to have another Madoka thing to watch. The hype will die down and people will eventually start seeing this movie for what it is. 2/10

Reviewer’s Rating: 2

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