For the most part I enjoyed myself. I found Madoka Magica to be a fairly easy watch, and its experiments with digital animation and the natural curiosity about the depths with which its macabre story would go kept my attention pretty easily. Basically, Madoka is a young girl who comes across other middle schoolers who can transform into Magical Girls and fight Witches, monstrous entities that cause disasters for humans. At first Madoka is excited at the possibility of using this power to help others, but the price she must pay for becoming a Magical Girl is an extremely heavy one. They seem to take the hero’s obligation to a logical extreme here, where the girls who become Magical Girls are forced to sacrifice their real lives out of a duty to fight Witches and an urgency because they have to do it to live. Many “normal person to hero” works thrust responsibility on the hero, but it can be portrayed as anything from a small price to pay for the power or something that can still be reasonably juggled with real life, as is a common plot conflict with many comic book heroes. In Madoka Magica, the need for the girls to purify their Soul Gems means they have no choice but to throw their life away.
The Witches are also portrayed as an actual threat that can do true harm to the girls early on, and naturally many of these Magical Girl or hero shows are aimed at children and feature incompetent villains or minor punishments for failures on the part of the heroes. This subversion isn’t a new one, but it’s not as common to see such things happening to children which can make it more uncomfortable. An early problem I had with Madoka Magica though was how desperately it tried to sell its tragedies. After a while, the whole thing becomes beholden to Murphy’s Law. Characters have these ridiculous backstories where everyone ever dies, people make sacrifices that amount to literally nothing, and the show’s devoid of victory or optimism. Having consequences and dramatic gravitas is very important and what defines this show when paired with the childishly feminine aesthetic, but when you go overboard as much as they could do here, the despair starts to not feel like despair to the viewer because it’s predicted as the only likely outcome. You need to have your hopes up for the tragedy to mean anything, and after a while the show is just punishments piling up without the emotional impact.
Part of that missing emotional impact amidst all the misfortune was that I didn’t particularly connect to any of the characters. Isolating the characters from the context of the series’ unique premise and subversions of their basic image I don’t think any of them are very interesting. Madoka is intentionally a very typical young girl heroine, but a young girl heroine nonetheless. She wants to help everyone, she’s shy and hard on herself, she cries a lot about how everything’s wrong and everyone needs to stop fighting to futility. She’s drawn entirely into this because of her friend’s reckless decision to become a Magical Girl. Sayaka is obsessed with a crippled violin player she just knows from somewhere and is simply in love with, but you get the bare minimum of expression as to the fact she likes him without getting to feel much in the way of why. They don’t have good chemistry when he’s an emotionless husk lying in a hospital bed, and beyond that you get a background scene of her sitting in the audience watching him at a concert. So Sayaka has a motivation you understand but don’t really get to feel, which hinders the heaviness of her sacrifice as well as part of its believability. Akemi is the mysterious outcast type who foreshadows the dangers of becoming a Magical Girl, but mostly hops in and out to bail the other girls out of situations while speaking in cryptic messages that don’t mean anything until the second-to-last episode of the series. Until this point she’s just a stoic girl who has no meaning behind anything she does even though we can obviously infer immediately she knows more than what she’s letting on and is on the right side.
A lot of the emotional tragedy of the show seems to be sold to the viewer due to the fact that these are brutally violent and dark fates meeting innocent cute colorful young girls. Madoka Magica feels like kind of a forced concept in that way, take the Magical Girl genre and pair it with something antithetical to shock by contrast. But I’ve seen so many macabre shows that have so much more significant drama and tragedy because they set up more interesting or complex characters or balance a dynamic tone of yearning and disappointment whereas Madoka Magica is kind of a straight line of the same kind of attempts at gut punching the viewer without setting up enough meaning for it. It’s easy to recognize why all of these things happening are bad, but making the audience feel the suffering is a much taller order. Madoka Magica jumps into its dark side very early on, and the subversion itself is weakened as such because the typical Magical Girl show and light tone is barely set up for it to deviate from and the characters haven’t yet been developed enough to really care about.
And that’s kind of what the whole show is. There’s not really much to call a plot besides what’s revealed in the last few episodes, and so the progression is mostly a train wreck of contrived bad things happening to bland characters and their subsequent existential crisis of reactions to them so the show doesn’t really feel like it evolves until the very end. Part of even the basic empathizing with these girls’ misfortune due to them being only children is offset by the fact that, for some reason, they all speak as eloquently as adults in some hammy soap opera. It’s hard to believe in their naiveté and innocence when it’s offset by dramatic philosophizing and on-the-spot existential monologues from 12 year-olds. The melodrama of the show is often a bit too much to handle and the emotional reactions of the characters can be absolutely ridiculous as to what instigated them. I can forgive a lot of this because it’s made a point of how they’re hormonal adolescents that aren’t totally rational, which is fair to an extent, but I draw the line on that level of reason at things like (SPOILERS contained in following image because there's no spoiler tags yet) http://i.imgur.com/eAXnpNP.png
The art direction and animation of Madoka Magica ended up being my favorite thing about it. Instantly the show sets up an eye-grabbing design. The colors are bright and varied which is expectedly pleasant, but there’s nice cross-hatch pencil sketch effect on the characters’ eyes that give their expressions a bit more of an emotional glare as opposed to a more sterile digital look of flat colors, because your eyes are immediately directed to the characters’ when they stand out so much from the rest of their appearance. The architecture of the world also quickly got my attention, since Madoka Magica is placed in the “real world” but the general city looks different from a real life city in many subtle ways. There’s a distinct sense of decorating style that fits a lot of geometric shapes together in close quarters seemingly arbitrarily. Madoka’s school has classrooms located on a single square floor but all of the classrooms are separated only by see-through glass so the room is blatantly divisible into separate shapes at a glance. One of the rooms in Madoka’s house where she brushes her teeth has an extremely high ceiling and the wall is plastered with various squares of differing sizes with nothing on them to give them an actual application. Madoka’s own room has a ton of vastly different looking chairs covering the floor asymmetrically. There’s even a bar late in the series that has Michelangelo’s painting, “The Creation of Adam”, hung above the bar (which I would consider for symbolism if not for the fact no focus was drawn to it). The city often has hologram projections just out in the street, and touch screen technology is common around the actual houses. At a first glance, it’s just kind of a surreal flavoring, but I thought the choice to even bother doing this was very interesting. Technology or the idea of future mankind development doesn’t play into the plot or backgrounds of any characters even remotely. The series already takes place in the real world, and designing the city to look like any contemporary one would’ve been the obvious choice and far easier because the concept art practically draws itself because you can use pre-existing templates of actual buildings. Instead, Madoka Magica used changing decorating trends and acceptably widespread current technology to imply that the story is taking place in the future, but not something too far off or unimaginable which required the restraint of a light touch. This background art design may just be a unique texture, but it’s admirable to experiment with nonetheless and I was charmed how little attention was drawn to this endeavor by the writing itself.
Seeming to further play with the idea of sharp shapes is what I saw as a general tendency to use many different perspective shots. There’s a lot of refraction played with here, with reflections and shadows being particularly common ways to express emotion. Reflections show multiple angles of a character’s face of course, and there are dozens upon dozens of shots where everyone’s face is obscured and you can only gauge their body language from seeing what dramatic pose their giant shadow is striking. This diagonal rhythm and large, projected body language keeps the reactions and responses of the characters very lively, and although I have issues with the writing selling the story’s drama, I have little to no qualms about the direction’s attempt to do so.
To finally speak of the animation quality, I was nothing short of extremely impressed. To start with the only negative thing I can think of, sometimes when the camera perspective was too far back character models had a tendency to look very lanky and nondescript in the face with blotchy features – an unfortunately common digital problem. That aside, the frame-by-frame is extremely fluid which makes the unbelievably elaborate and well-choreographed fight sequences nothing short of a marvel. This is a good point to mention the design of the Witches and their secluded worlds. The animation group Gekidan Inu Curry use stop-motion to create mechanical monstrosities of multiple moving parts that look like shuffling paper craft when combined with the fairy tale storybook appearance. Gekidan Inu Curry take influence from dark fantasy works as well as Czech and Russian animation to give the Witches their distinct mix of modern gothic and Lewis Carroll-based absurd fantasy. The textured paint job on the Witches and their backgrounds makes the solid colors of the characters really pop, and the contrast between these scenes and the rest of the world (or even anime in general) make them a joy to watch, packed to the brim with small details and objects that fly by in a second. It can very nearly be sensory overload when trying to follow the fast action as characters summon dozens of flashing weapons to combat the hordes of paper grotesqueries. But the choreography keeps the constant movement to follow, and knows well enough to frequently place the camera back enough with so many things on screen so that the action doesn’t become too cluttered. The scenes with the most amount of objects feature a lot of flying movement so knowing a character’s exact position in all the chaos isn’t important and you can get into the spectacle. The distorted, inverted art design of Witches and their worlds (as well as how they visually symbolize the characters they manifest around) would be enough on its own for me to not regret watching 12 episodes of a series. Madoka Magica is generally an incredibly well-animated show that goes that rare extra mile in also doing unique things to make sure that talent and effort truly pays off. It makes ideal use of digital techniques, not to cut corners but define its aesthetic in a way that only the pristine synthetic nature of digital could allow.
The music and sound design didn’t particularly impress me. Most of the background score doesn’t stand out too much, but I do quite like some of the vocal battle themes as well as the second ending song. The dark electronic trance music reminds me of some of the work made by composer Shoji Meguro, which I only bring up because the design of the Witches’ worlds also makes me wonder if the anime’s art design was inspired somewhat by Persona 3. Anyway, the sound effects that play during transformations and battles are what you’d expect, and sound is rarely used to set mood. It’s almost always the backing score’s duty, but the soft string pieces sounded generic to me if suitable enough.
That probably does it for now. Madoka Magica was a show I found to be pretty fun but not at all very emotionally impactful despite serious attempts in the show’s tone and direction to stress it. The melodramatic story and characters fell flat to me because I never ended up getting enough to care about either, but the premise kept me going without much restlessness. I’d give it an easy recommendation if someone hasn’t seen it before because it’s such an easy watch story-wise with its length and dark concept, and even if you’re like me and that wouldn’t make it on its own, there’s still the idiosyncratic art direction and animation techniques.
