The animation is smooth but more importantly supremely stylish. They make use of various incompatible art styles to represent the unsettling hallucinations brought about by the main antagonists, and it's done very well.
I'm sure in most magical girls shows, the MC gets her powers immediately, likely in the first episode. It has to hook viewers, obviously. Madoka keeps dropping the hook down in front of the viewer's faces and then pulling it away at the last moment in unexpected ways. In some sense, you never actually get that cathartic moment where Madoka gains her magical girl powers and slays the bad guy. That moment is instead replaced by something unexpected but similarly spectacular.
I don't think these characters translate to a non-shoujo audience. These girls aren't terribly complex, but they are unbearably saccharine. Not quite to an annoying extent because of the subject matter of the show, but it's definitely a weaker part of the series. Even the edgy girl Kyouko ends up being a teddy bear within an episode or two of her introduction.
The big twist comes in the last quarter of the show and it totally sabotages the story's momentum. The ultimate message is one of nihilism and hopelessness, and this message goes unchallenged by any of the remaining characters. The main antagonist's speech to Madoka, saying that their behavior toward humans is the same as humans toward cattle felt preachy and 8th-grade-deep, which I would expect from the same writer of Psycho-Pass.
Fortunately, after the momentum screeches to a halt and we're given a convoluted mess of exposition for a few episodes, we are rewarded with an amazing and unexpected finale.
An interesting and unique show with excellent production values, hindered by weak writing and boring characters. Will undoubtedly influence future anime, so again I would say this one is worth a watch.
7/10
