Nov 23, 2017 1:14 AM
"Why Madoka was a success"? or perhaps the surprising reasons why I prefer Uta~Kata
Anime Relations:
Koukyoushihen Eureka Seven, Uta∽Kata, Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS, Mahou Shoujo Madoka★Magica
Oh hey, someone who wasn't me actually bothered to compare Madoka Magica to Uta~Kata:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yks2NGlqo4s
Sorry this is another blogpost about MadoMagi but it's also about Uta~Kata and that show deserves more attention and I almost thought I was the only person who still talked about that show.
It seems that TL;DR Madoka Magica was high-concept (I think I'm using that word right?) while Uta~Kata wasn't.
* very distinctive art style
* jumping into the darker plot premise rather than doing slow buildup
* distinctive music
* Uta~Kata's transformations were too varied and less iconic
* [not related to the show's own content, but rather its context] Uta~Kata had bad timing compared to MadoMagi.
Curiously, upon thinking about them, some of these may actually be major reasons why I didn't connect to MadoMagi.
The art style, for example -- I've definitely noticed that I have a preference for art styles that one might consider "generic", while being noticeably less interested in art styles that are particularly distinctive. This video reminded me of a MAL thread about Gonzo and someone's comment about Trigger and how I started to notice that Gonzo's style, when it came to character designs, is relatively generic in terms of not being as heavily stylized while Trigger's style is more often conspicuously visually stylized, yet I had a track record of preferring Gonzo shows. And meanwhile, I knew also tend to not much like face faults.
Why would I prefer more "generic" art? When it comes to character art, perhaps it comes from subconsciously trying to see the anime characters like real people, or perhaps it's just less distracting from me trying to understand them that way.
Or maybe they just make things feel more "familiar". I'm not sure how valid this reasoning is for character art because I obviously do like at least a little bit of visual idealization. But this reasoning can definitely be applied to architecture and other surroundings -- for example, the bizarre-looking witches' labyrinths of MadoMagi didn't make me feel unnerved, but instead were so bizarre they just felt fourth-wall-breaking and made me feel like I was watching something "constructed" and "artificial", which almost certainly contributed to my feeling that the show seemed contrived.
Perhaps someone who focuses more on visual style, as well as someone who's seen more anime and thus had more time to "get sick of" a more typical/generic art style, would find something so visually striking to be refreshing and appealing. In contrast, I've known for a while now that I specifically want to be able to connect to the characters and feel a sense of familiarity.
Incidentally that might be why I suspected the dub of being the problem, despite being unable to pinpoint anything specifically wrong with the dub. A (North American) English dub, to me, is something that I appreciate because it brings the characters to life more readily since I can understand/connect to/feel them more easily. But it seems part of the design intention of MadoMagi was for it to feel distant and strange. That said, the characters also felt stiff and underdeveloped due to a lack of time for it...which brings me to the second item.
Uta~Kata was criticized in that video for its long buildup and having "bland slice-of-life" during that time. I've noticed that I seem to have a taste for stories that do exactly that -- I've praised Eureka Seven's seemingly-boring first half because it creates a sense of boring normalcy that makes the feeling of loss and separation far more poignant when they actually happen. I've also praised how Nanoha StrikerS spends a lot of time on character development and allowing the audience to get comfortable knowing the characters before the action really kicks in big-time. This preference is consistent with the preference of wanting to feel "familiar" with the setting and characters, as I mentioned above.
This is not to say that I like every "slow burn". Yukikaze and .hack//SIGN are examples of slow shows I didn't much like. Though in both of those cases that's because I never felt that it had a "payoff" -- it never climaxed into something that made me look back at the experiences I had neglected prior to that point.
But this is also consistent with my apparent dispreference for some shows with really "high-concept" (would this be a correct usage?) starts, such as Humanity Has Declined, Assassination Classroom, and No Game No Life, which rather blatantly throw the terms of the premise and/or main cast at the viewer. At least, that's how I felt about them.
Again, it's not a stiff dispreference -- I did enjoy Problem Children, after all. Though it may be relevant that I appreciated Problem Children as a comedy rather than a drama.
The music may be a similar situation. Uta~Kata's soundtrack sounds relatively "ordinary" as far as music goes. It's often pleasantly melodic, and it even uses lots of C major, which is the most "common" or "basic" key in a way. The OP has a slight touch of bittersweetness in an otherwise bright song, while the has a sense of poetic resignation, but both feel very lyrical and convincing, forming memorable melodies. I really like Uta~Kata's soundtrack, because I feel it has a place for the emotions I felt in the course of the story. MadoMagi's soundtrack, on the other hand, is pretty strongly rooted in the bizarre and dark, with very iconic but restrictive character themes (specifically only showing one side of them, and often from an external perspective -- Sayaka certainly didn't see herself as a lamentable tragic hero, but that's what her character theme suggests) among the soundtrack, suggesting that any "bonding" with the setting/characters is restricted to the relatively few moments that seem "normal", while bizarre things happen quickly and often, which I'd say prevented them from having a proper emotional context and carrying an appropriate weight to them. MadoMagi's OP and ED1 are intentionally generic (I can't even remember what ED1 sounds like other than its mood), though ED2 is certainly impactful...but feels a little too "constructed" in light of its context. (Also for some reason I always felt the singing didn't quite sound right in Magia. Dunno why. Or maybe it's just that it's not well-supported in the middle registers by instrumentals.)
When I'm in a worse mood, I tend to call this overall taste that I disagree with, a desire for "novelty" in anime. Basically, stuff being seen as better just because it's distinctively different from stuff that came before. People frequently praise "uniqueness" and criticize things for being "generic". I'm not sure whether it's because I haven't seen as much anime, or whether I have a rather specific "artistic vision" for what I want to see, or whether I'm just inexplicably more patient than the average person, I don't know. I do know I care a lot about heartwarmingness and "feeling for the characters", though. But in any case, is it better to prefer distinctiveness? This I disagree with.
The fifth reason stated in the video for why Uta~Kata didn't succeed is timing. Uta~Kata never got a sequel, competed during the same time period with several more notable magical girl series, and was only very belatedly licensed for distribution in the west (inauspiciously for it, right before MadoMagi came out). Incidentally, this also doesn't apply to me, because I never have followed anime seasonally, and I don't pick shows based on their release date (art style preferences notwithstanding), which means that I end up considering each show in a more "isolated" way. I also watched Uta~Kata first (I didn't "rediscover" it after MadoMagi), since I knew its character artist from his work on Kiddy Grade.
As for the "magical girl" style costumes and the transformations -- I actually kinda agree that they're not hugely special, though I think they're still decently pretty. But costume design seems to be something people who watch magical girl shows seems to generally care more about than I do (and I'm someone who doesn't have strong tastes in fashion), so perhaps the "not hugely special" was more jarring to them than to me.
Furthermore, the fact that there was one every episode and the fact that I could see through this structurally, resulted in me a curious sense of inevitability -- and what starts off as a familiar sense of inevitability (magical girl powers being invoked every episode, as usual) later on becomes a source of anxiety and dread. This lined up my experience as a viewer with Ichika's experience as the main character, which is something I can't say about any of MadoMagi's characters, aside from Homura in a specific and odd way that was less about sadness/sympathy and more about anger and resentment on her behalf.
In summary, it really surprised me to come to the insight that the elements that this video alleges made MadoMagi successful and Uta~Kata unsuccessful were practically the same elements that may explain why I feel that Uta~Kata is a better show than MadoMagi. Uta~Kata is visually and musically less "striking", and doesn't jump into its sense of darkness early on, which means that there's more opportunity for me to gain a feeling of familiarity before things begin shifting in the setting, which in turn increases the impact of those later shifts. (This is consistent with my complaints about MadoMagi's timing.) The timing can be deemed an unfortunate coincidence, but aside from that, everything is directly about tastes in anime, which may bear similar insight regarding other times when my opinion differs strongly from the consensus.
----
Curious follow-up thought: (from https://www.reddit.com/r/MadokaMagica/comments/49m8no/why_madoka_was_a_success_madoka_vs_uta_kata/ )
This quote gets to something I've occasionally said about MadoMagi, which is that it seems to require people come in with preconceptions about how things should work, in order for certain tropes to be played with in ways that they'll get and appreciate. This quote suggests that MadoMagi makes use of the common genre cliches of the magical girl genre as setting elements themselves, in what I'd argue is the absence of crafting and justifying them in an arrangement specific to the series, before playing with them. And the "playing with these tropes" part can't be counted as crafting and justifying because it seems to be done with the specific intention of doing something relative to an existing trope.
If your mindset coming in isn't jumping to those tropes, this will fall flat, and I think that's part of what happened to me. Kyubey as a malicious Faustian-bargain dealmaker is a lot less interesting than Kyubey as a malicious Faustian-bargain dealmaker who poses as a cute mentor mascot that's supposed to be trustworthy. If you're not thinking of the latter, the first part just seems to be "just there" and more like a setpiece.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yks2NGlqo4s
Sorry this is another blogpost about MadoMagi but it's also about Uta~Kata and that show deserves more attention and I almost thought I was the only person who still talked about that show.
It seems that TL;DR Madoka Magica was high-concept (I think I'm using that word right?) while Uta~Kata wasn't.
* very distinctive art style
* jumping into the darker plot premise rather than doing slow buildup
* distinctive music
* Uta~Kata's transformations were too varied and less iconic
* [not related to the show's own content, but rather its context] Uta~Kata had bad timing compared to MadoMagi.
Curiously, upon thinking about them, some of these may actually be major reasons why I didn't connect to MadoMagi.
The art style, for example -- I've definitely noticed that I have a preference for art styles that one might consider "generic", while being noticeably less interested in art styles that are particularly distinctive. This video reminded me of a MAL thread about Gonzo and someone's comment about Trigger and how I started to notice that Gonzo's style, when it came to character designs, is relatively generic in terms of not being as heavily stylized while Trigger's style is more often conspicuously visually stylized, yet I had a track record of preferring Gonzo shows. And meanwhile, I knew also tend to not much like face faults.
Why would I prefer more "generic" art? When it comes to character art, perhaps it comes from subconsciously trying to see the anime characters like real people, or perhaps it's just less distracting from me trying to understand them that way.
Or maybe they just make things feel more "familiar". I'm not sure how valid this reasoning is for character art because I obviously do like at least a little bit of visual idealization. But this reasoning can definitely be applied to architecture and other surroundings -- for example, the bizarre-looking witches' labyrinths of MadoMagi didn't make me feel unnerved, but instead were so bizarre they just felt fourth-wall-breaking and made me feel like I was watching something "constructed" and "artificial", which almost certainly contributed to my feeling that the show seemed contrived.
Perhaps someone who focuses more on visual style, as well as someone who's seen more anime and thus had more time to "get sick of" a more typical/generic art style, would find something so visually striking to be refreshing and appealing. In contrast, I've known for a while now that I specifically want to be able to connect to the characters and feel a sense of familiarity.
Incidentally that might be why I suspected the dub of being the problem, despite being unable to pinpoint anything specifically wrong with the dub. A (North American) English dub, to me, is something that I appreciate because it brings the characters to life more readily since I can understand/connect to/feel them more easily. But it seems part of the design intention of MadoMagi was for it to feel distant and strange. That said, the characters also felt stiff and underdeveloped due to a lack of time for it...which brings me to the second item.
Uta~Kata was criticized in that video for its long buildup and having "bland slice-of-life" during that time. I've noticed that I seem to have a taste for stories that do exactly that -- I've praised Eureka Seven's seemingly-boring first half because it creates a sense of boring normalcy that makes the feeling of loss and separation far more poignant when they actually happen. I've also praised how Nanoha StrikerS spends a lot of time on character development and allowing the audience to get comfortable knowing the characters before the action really kicks in big-time. This preference is consistent with the preference of wanting to feel "familiar" with the setting and characters, as I mentioned above.
This is not to say that I like every "slow burn". Yukikaze and .hack//SIGN are examples of slow shows I didn't much like. Though in both of those cases that's because I never felt that it had a "payoff" -- it never climaxed into something that made me look back at the experiences I had neglected prior to that point.
But this is also consistent with my apparent dispreference for some shows with really "high-concept" (would this be a correct usage?) starts, such as Humanity Has Declined, Assassination Classroom, and No Game No Life, which rather blatantly throw the terms of the premise and/or main cast at the viewer. At least, that's how I felt about them.
Again, it's not a stiff dispreference -- I did enjoy Problem Children, after all. Though it may be relevant that I appreciated Problem Children as a comedy rather than a drama.
The music may be a similar situation. Uta~Kata's soundtrack sounds relatively "ordinary" as far as music goes. It's often pleasantly melodic, and it even uses lots of C major, which is the most "common" or "basic" key in a way. The OP has a slight touch of bittersweetness in an otherwise bright song, while the has a sense of poetic resignation, but both feel very lyrical and convincing, forming memorable melodies. I really like Uta~Kata's soundtrack, because I feel it has a place for the emotions I felt in the course of the story. MadoMagi's soundtrack, on the other hand, is pretty strongly rooted in the bizarre and dark, with very iconic but restrictive character themes (specifically only showing one side of them, and often from an external perspective -- Sayaka certainly didn't see herself as a lamentable tragic hero, but that's what her character theme suggests) among the soundtrack, suggesting that any "bonding" with the setting/characters is restricted to the relatively few moments that seem "normal", while bizarre things happen quickly and often, which I'd say prevented them from having a proper emotional context and carrying an appropriate weight to them. MadoMagi's OP and ED1 are intentionally generic (I can't even remember what ED1 sounds like other than its mood), though ED2 is certainly impactful...but feels a little too "constructed" in light of its context. (Also for some reason I always felt the singing didn't quite sound right in Magia. Dunno why. Or maybe it's just that it's not well-supported in the middle registers by instrumentals.)
When I'm in a worse mood, I tend to call this overall taste that I disagree with, a desire for "novelty" in anime. Basically, stuff being seen as better just because it's distinctively different from stuff that came before. People frequently praise "uniqueness" and criticize things for being "generic". I'm not sure whether it's because I haven't seen as much anime, or whether I have a rather specific "artistic vision" for what I want to see, or whether I'm just inexplicably more patient than the average person, I don't know. I do know I care a lot about heartwarmingness and "feeling for the characters", though. But in any case, is it better to prefer distinctiveness? This I disagree with.
The fifth reason stated in the video for why Uta~Kata didn't succeed is timing. Uta~Kata never got a sequel, competed during the same time period with several more notable magical girl series, and was only very belatedly licensed for distribution in the west (inauspiciously for it, right before MadoMagi came out). Incidentally, this also doesn't apply to me, because I never have followed anime seasonally, and I don't pick shows based on their release date (art style preferences notwithstanding), which means that I end up considering each show in a more "isolated" way. I also watched Uta~Kata first (I didn't "rediscover" it after MadoMagi), since I knew its character artist from his work on Kiddy Grade.
As for the "magical girl" style costumes and the transformations -- I actually kinda agree that they're not hugely special, though I think they're still decently pretty. But costume design seems to be something people who watch magical girl shows seems to generally care more about than I do (and I'm someone who doesn't have strong tastes in fashion), so perhaps the "not hugely special" was more jarring to them than to me.
Furthermore, the fact that there was one every episode and the fact that I could see through this structurally, resulted in me a curious sense of inevitability -- and what starts off as a familiar sense of inevitability (magical girl powers being invoked every episode, as usual) later on becomes a source of anxiety and dread. This lined up my experience as a viewer with Ichika's experience as the main character, which is something I can't say about any of MadoMagi's characters, aside from Homura in a specific and odd way that was less about sadness/sympathy and more about anger and resentment on her behalf.
In summary, it really surprised me to come to the insight that the elements that this video alleges made MadoMagi successful and Uta~Kata unsuccessful were practically the same elements that may explain why I feel that Uta~Kata is a better show than MadoMagi. Uta~Kata is visually and musically less "striking", and doesn't jump into its sense of darkness early on, which means that there's more opportunity for me to gain a feeling of familiarity before things begin shifting in the setting, which in turn increases the impact of those later shifts. (This is consistent with my complaints about MadoMagi's timing.) The timing can be deemed an unfortunate coincidence, but aside from that, everything is directly about tastes in anime, which may bear similar insight regarding other times when my opinion differs strongly from the consensus.
----
Curious follow-up thought: (from https://www.reddit.com/r/MadokaMagica/comments/49m8no/why_madoka_was_a_success_madoka_vs_uta_kata/ )
blond-max said:
Although Madoka has all those, there is little emphasis and they just feel like part of what makes this world what it is. It's simply part of the suspension of disbelief. I'd argue it feels that way because the magical girl theme is not use to define the series, but rather is used as an conflicting factor that strenghtens the dispair in this world.
Although Madoka has all those, there is little emphasis and they just feel like part of what makes this world what it is. It's simply part of the suspension of disbelief. I'd argue it feels that way because the magical girl theme is not use to define the series, but rather is used as an conflicting factor that strenghtens the dispair in this world.
This quote gets to something I've occasionally said about MadoMagi, which is that it seems to require people come in with preconceptions about how things should work, in order for certain tropes to be played with in ways that they'll get and appreciate. This quote suggests that MadoMagi makes use of the common genre cliches of the magical girl genre as setting elements themselves, in what I'd argue is the absence of crafting and justifying them in an arrangement specific to the series, before playing with them. And the "playing with these tropes" part can't be counted as crafting and justifying because it seems to be done with the specific intention of doing something relative to an existing trope.
If your mindset coming in isn't jumping to those tropes, this will fall flat, and I think that's part of what happened to me. Kyubey as a malicious Faustian-bargain dealmaker is a lot less interesting than Kyubey as a malicious Faustian-bargain dealmaker who poses as a cute mentor mascot that's supposed to be trustworthy. If you're not thinking of the latter, the first part just seems to be "just there" and more like a setpiece.
Posted by
GlennMagusHarvey
| Nov 23, 2017 1:14 AM |
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GlennMagusHarvey | Mar 8, 2018 8:39 AM
Since I can post them here...here's a copypaste of a forum post I made in a thread called "Unpopular opinion you have?", again about MadoMagi and also about Uta~Kata.--- Puella Magi Madoka Magica is a poorly-written show that fails to properly humanize the characters or properly justify various story and setting elements. It has serious pacing problems, feels infodumpy, has an ending that comes out of nowhere (that can be criticized similarly as Charlotte's ending can, and arguably even more so because at least Charlotte didn't involve rewriting the laws of the universe), has characters who are more like plot devices rather than properly humanized, and generally fails to appeal to emotion aside from shock. MadoMagi relies too much on playing off the stereotypical tropes of the magical girl genre, and does not stand well on its own two feet as the story is not satisfying by itself. Part of the reason it's infodumpy is that it's trying too hard to set up the scenario for the characters to fail in -- with the result that it feels "forced" and artificial. It's as if the setting is adding wrinkles on the fly in the form of new rules in order to ensure that the characters are doomed, just because the premise gave them powers that were too powerful. Walpurgisnacht itself is an example of this -- it's not actually an entity with a set power level, but rather, it's essentially like one of those "unwinnable boss battles" in videogames, unwinnable by design, always set (intentionally) to be more powerful than anything Homura can muster. And at other points, various other characters (especially Sayaka and Kyouko) do things that seem silly, stupid, or counterinuitive, as if having a metatextual reason to force the failure reel to keep playing despite lacking a proper reason in-universe. In general, the characters feel more like icons or plot devices than actual characters, with the possible exceptions of Homura and Madoka, and Madoka barely does anything (though Madoka barely doing anything isn't a complaint because at least it's justified by the course of the story). The best "humanizing moment" is Kyouko explaining her backstory, and that's not much. The rest of the series is tuned to use a combination of trippy visuals, striking visual effects that communicate mystique without establishing a sense of awe, and a soundtrack that, surprisingly, doesn't help smooth things over (compare Yuki Kajiura's work for Noir, Mai-HiME, or .hack//SIGN, all of which involve more melodic writing). Meanwhile the rules of the setting don't even fully make sense. What exactly are the constraints on what people can wish for? There don't seem to be any, aside from Kyubey implying that there are, late in the series, but we've already seen wishes for stuff as downright "gamebreaking" as reversing time itself to do things over. Oh, and then for some reason we tack on the extra condition that that wish itself has extra constraints, not because it makes relevant sense but for unspecified magical reasons...or rather, only because it's needed for the plot to move forward. Hell, the plot and especially the ending would have made more sense and been more poetically meaningful if Homura just ended up sacrificing herself to save Madoka. Even the thing that it's known for -- being a darker take on the magical girl genre, and introducing themes of despair and getting into character psychology -- Uta~Kata did it earlier, and did it better, with better pacing and less reliance on shock value. Uta~Kata is a story about a girl who gains magical powers, and how using them more and more changes her, except it doesn't rely on the element of surprise and a bunch of setting infodumps. It relies on showing the course the character takes through the circumstances that she encounters, one by one, and how they test her character and influence her, intellectually and emotionally. At the same time, she is humanized by her interactions with a much richer cast of characters, and by a more lyrical/poetic soundtrack (written by Megumi Oohashi) that helps bring this tender but increasingly troubled story tone to life. Instead of throwing tone in the deep end and expecting it to work (like MadoMagi does), Uta~Kata properly takes the time to set up the changes in tone and story direction. Some people criticize Uta~Kata for being slow. Sure, MadoMagi drops the first of its big reveals in episode 3, rather than episodes 6 to 8. But Uta~Kata uses that extra time to set up the characterization. MadoMagi has like four or five different story arcs in just a one-cour series; Uta~Kata keeps a stronger narrative focus on the big picture with just one or two arcs (depending on how you count them) in that same one-cour timeframe. Uta~Kata doesn't need to reveal new rules to the setting just to keep the despair going -- it just needs one core mechanic. It's much neater. And it doesn't need to create an ending out of thin air either. |