To these wholly virgin eyes, it's a perfect editing job. The narrative flow of Beginnings is perfectly smooth, with its episodic structure disguised through a steady character arc. And while it ends on a cliffhanger, it's otherwise completely self-contained, telling one story and building up to one crescendo that kicks us over to the next movie on a terrific dramatic bottleneck that gathers all of the film's threads into a pair of deeply unsettling climaxes. It's a splendid opening to a trilogy that's also a snappy piece of world-building in its own right
Puella Magi Madoka Etcetera is, in all forms, is a subversion of and philosophical inquiry into the "magic girl" school of Japanese animation, and we should go no further into it before I confess that I don't entirely know what that means; it's a genre I haven't been exposed to in its "pure" form, so I can't entirely appreciate the satire here. But anyway, there are three schoolgirls who are best friends in the town of Mitakihara: Kaname Madoka (Yuki Aoi), Miki Sayaka (Kitamura Eri), and Suzuki Hitomi (Shintani Ryoko), about whom we don't really need to worry too much. Madoka and Sayaka are the truly close ones, and the ones with some unclear potential, that brings them to the attention of a little white rabbit-like animal with pink eyes, Kyubey (Kato Emiri). He - it? - makes an offer to both of the girls: he can grant any wish, no matter how outlandish, to the young women he deems worthy. In exchange, they must form a contract with him to fight the witches that constantly threaten to overtake the human world.
This chance to become a magic girl and have one dream come true would seem to be a slam-dunk - Kyubey is mystified, and increasingly annoyed, at the girls' reluctance to jump at his offer - but there are dark shadings. For one, the new girl at school, Akemi Homura (Saito Chiwa), seems to know all about Kyubey, and she's hellbent on keeping Madoka from taking the creatures offer, going so far as to attempt to kill the little critter. For another, the world of witch-hunting is a terrifying and dangerous one: Madoka and Sayaka are teamed up with chipper magic girl Tomoe Mami (Mizuhashi Kaori), who takes them into the inchoate labyrinths where witches dwell, and what they see there is the stuff of nightmares.
Those nightmare realms are also the stuff of top-level animation. This is a lovely piece of animation in general, but the witch realms, designed by animation team Gekidan INU Curry are as gorgeous and imaginative as animation in the 2010s gets. They're collages, to start with: apparent multi-media universes of scraps taken from dozens of sources, built around rough themes (the animators have identified Czech and Russian animation traditions as their influence - makes perfect sense when you think of where the best witch legends come from). Each of them exists in a different style, from thick swatches of roughly torn paper forming an explosion of textures, to the bright, smudgy poster-paint look of the giant clown-worm that comes along to kick the film's sense of menace and unpredictability into overdrive. The contrast between the backgrounds and the cel-animated characters is a vivid way of showcasing how those characters are terrible visible and out of place; later on, as they character animation starts fade into the backgrounds, it's even more nerve-wracking, since the rules we thought we'd worked out about how the film's aesthetic works have been pulled away from us.
Even in the everyday scenes, PMMM has a lovely, distinctive look, with characters dominated by solitary colors in a way that never feels unnatural, and with textures and shading applied to the characters using pencils over the final coloring, or at least the digital equivalent thereof. Anime, as a rule, owes its style and existence to comics, but this one goes a step farther, by pulling in the specific textural elements of a black-and-white comic book to a digitally-colored 2-D animated film. It probably doesn't actually look like nothing else out there - Japanese animation is a huge world and no one person can see most of it, let alone all of it - but it sure as hell doesn't look conventional, to its immense benefit. The conflict between bright glossiness and rough sketchwork drives the film's mood as much as anything to do with the story or characters.
Nothing against those stories or characters. The film's steadily darkening arc is gripping, as it slowly expands the film's world outwards, making each character seem a little more troubled bit by bit (and letting Kyubey seem more threatening every time his motionless face and staring eyes get a close-up; the only comparable exercise). Each of its main characters finds themselves openly addressing rough questions about how We Are To Behave in a different way: Madoka by questioning how doing good is something that needs a bribe, Sayaka by trying to use sacrifice for another as a way of making people think better of her, Mami by squinting her eyes and refusing to see anything, Homura by attempting to save others from making her own mistakes, and Sakura Kyoko (Nonaka Ai), the last magic girl to enter the picture in the wake of the big mid-film tragedy, by embracing selfish nihilism after trying to do good deeds fails her. It's exactly the opposite of the untroubled wish-fulfillment fantasy promised by its basic scenario, and even without benefit of a completed narrative, it presents a suitably complex moral puzzle to gnaw over alongside Madoka, a most satisfyingly ambivalent protagonist.
8/10
* * * * *
The result is a distinctly less elegant construct qua movies, though there comes a part where you stop paying attention to elegance because things have become too enthralling. That's the other thing - Eternal is the climax to a story, so it has a leg up on being far more sweeping and exciting and consequential. And it's a right freaking good climax, too. If I may now swerve fully into baseless speculation, I find myself wondering if the movie works better in that regard than the series would have - the last "episode" (and it's extremely obvious, in this half of the dyad, where individual episode breaks occur) is virtually all wind-down and spiritual abstraction done up in over-saturated sparkly colors. As the wind-down to a movie, it's paced exactly right; watching it as its own 30-minute chunk of narrative media, I have to wonder if it might feel a bit stretched thin and anticlimactic.
Well, anyway, let's stay away from that rabbit hole. On its own merits, excepting the very distinctively episodic flow of the story, Eternal is a bold sequel and conclusion that takes advantage of the cliffhanger at the end of Beginnings to completely re-direct the intentions and meaning of the plot. You will, please, forgive me for being cagey in describing that plot; it's all but impossible to talk about Eternal's story without delving into the twists and turns that happen in the latter hour of Beginnings, and I'd rather not do that. There are two things in the first hour of Eternal that are very much worthy of consideration for how much they shift the emotional axis of the story. To begin with, we learn (or a least, we are enthusiastically invited to infer) more about the witch-realms than had previously been apparent: as we find in exploring a newly-created one (still depicted in the scrappy collage style that has made all of the witch-realm sequences so interesting to look at), they are assembled from the shards of ill-feeling of the witch who inhabits them - they are the embodiment of her anger and hopelessness. That's enough to make this first sequence rather more tragic than anything, but it also retroactively recasts all the previous witch fights as their own tragic odysseys. In essence, this is the passage through which Puella &c. reworks itself completely as a sorrowful human story instead of a magical girl adventure, not that there was still any real thought of that being the case. But it's here that even the witches themselves are absolved of their villainy.
The other switch happens in the second episode, and involves a most convoluted flashback that turns out to be dozens of flashbacks, or at least one flashback to dozens of time streams. And here's where the series makes its even bolder turn: suddenly, we have a new protagonist, only the way she's revealed as such indicates that she has, in fact, been the protagonist all along, and Madoka's confusion about making her wish has been merely the last small chapter of a very long struggle. It makes perfect sense when you're watching it. It is, at any rate, a remarkably successful change that digs down to make the series an even stronger character drama than it had been; instead of the somewhat schematic way that each of the magic girls (or magic girls in potentia) occupy a different slot on the "how selfless are we to be?" spectrum, the overall story now reveals itself to be about the deep, unconditional love felt by a friend, and the obsessive promise she makes to prove that love.
It's all deeply satisfying, even if I can barely talk about it. So let's switch gears to talk some more about the animation of all this. The design strategy largely remains the same (as it would have to, really), but I didn't talk nearly enough before about how that design translates into practice. At a glance, all the characters, and especially Madoka, are pastel cartoons, with the usual enormous anime eyes and faces coupled with generic and stylistically unlikely uniformity in their hair, eye, and clothing colors. Watching those figures express big, joyful glee is unexceptional; watching throughout Beginnings and into Eternal as those same figures start to feel fear, misgivings, and sadness is much different, and the slowed-down movement and increasingly heavy, downcast expressions of the characters - again, especially Madoka - is reliably jarring, in the best way possible. Directors Miyamoto Yukihiro and Shinbo Akiyuki, and their team of animators, find no limit to the number of ways they're able to make their simplistic cartoon girls feel ground down and desperate, which makes the last-act shift into a sequence so light it literally floats feel wonderfully earned.
I might also put in a word for the lighting: in its final stages, Eternal showcases some highly dramatic mixtures of gloom and piercing beams of light, rather like pre-Raphaelite paintings of storms. Someone with a better knowledge of Japanese graphic art history can tell me if that's as stunningly inept a comparison as I expect it is. But the point being, strong sunlight broken down and filtered becomes greatly important to building the mood of the film as it approaches its final conflict, with an encroaching sense of night that infects even a bouncy pop song montage that glosses over some redundant story bits.
Taken altogether, the two "original" parts of Puella Magi Madoka Magica: The Movie tell a sneakily unsettling psychodrama using unexpectedly lush visuals, continuing to up-end the narrative with unanticipated shifts even after we "get" that's what it's doing. I must again retrench to my ignorance: I don't know what Japanese animated series are like in the 2010s, and perhaps this is all boringly routine stuff. But if that's the case, Japanese animation must be in a tremendously strong place, because even with some lumps and strain - four hours is plenty for this story, let alone even more - this series is damned impressive, visually and emotionally, with an increasingly sprawling narrative universe that always stays grounded in its own rules even as it goes bonkers towards the end.
8/10
* * * * *
It's reflected in the final project, which for all its shortcomings, some of which are extravagant, doesn't feel at all like a cash-in sequel. Ironically, it is just that, at least a little bit: Urobuchi has indicated that he had a different ending in mind, but the money men wanted a sequel hook. And that's exactly what they got, though to my thinking it's a sequel hook that so thoroughly de-centers the entire narrative of the series in such a profoundly unappealing way, it's almost solely responsible for making the idea of a second sequel (which has no apparent intentions of materialising) kind of an undesirable notion.
The whole film is immensely baffling, though, not just the ending. Rebellion is hard to pin down as a sequel: it is, beyond question, a continuation of the narrative of the original series/the two movies, but it doesn't feel at all like they combine to form a single, smooth arc. This is more like a parenthesis, or an asterisk. It's intimately dependent on the original storyline to give it context and explain every aspect of its world and characters, but it strikes me as something that would be much more satisfying to take it as a self-contained standalone narrative, ideally without any knowledge of Puella Magi Madoka Magica at all.
It's audacious, you have to give it that. As a story, Rebellion starts off as a mystery, essentially, with its entire first quarter dedicated exclusively to the question, "what the hell is going on"? The audacious part is that nobody in the movie is asking that question: it's generated entirely in the mind of the viewer. Anyway, what the hell is going on is that our four magic girls from Mitakihara are happily defending the town from nightmares: that being Madoka, of course, along with Sayaka, Mami, and Kyoko, who didn't appear all together at any point in the original, didn't get along very well in most of the combinations where they did get along, and weren't having such blandly innocuous adventures. They are stopping nightmares, I repeat: as in, they are literally the guardians of good dreams. So much for saving the world from all-powerful witches. Eventually, Homura transfers to school and joins them, and helps them complete some kind of nightmare-binding ritual that involves a giant cake. The viewer who has sat through the increasingly grim, anti-heroic series is bound to watch all of this with the sense that eventually, the other shoe has to drop, and of course it does; but the first time that the movie even acknowledges the concept of a shoe is almost exactly at the half-hour mark (in a 116-minute film), and it's still not until some while later that anybody really tries to do something about it.
There's no real way that the film can reasonably expect us to spend that whole time innocently thinking everything is as bright and squeaky-clean as it seems; even if we didn't watch the series and know exactly what should be going on (and if we didn't watch the series, Rebellion plans to just laugh and laugh at our ignorance), the opening credits and accompanying musical montage have obligingly oriented themselves exclusively around images that show Homura contrasted with the other girls spatially, in color design, in movement (that is, her lack thereof). "This girl has secrets that are mysterious and also threaten to pull out the rug from this playful, garish magic girl adventure" says the credits in unmistakable language to anybody who has the first clue about reading images.
So here's one of the film's two big problems: it has no idea how to start. There's no subterfuge, since any possible viewer is simply waiting for the reveal that this fun genre exercise is a sham; and yet the film waits and draws things out and slowly develops as though we need to have a sense of creeping dread placed upon us, as though we don't have creeping dread from within the first few seconds, or at least the first time we see that bastardly Kyubey, who in this reality is a harmless cat-bunny who cutely says "kyu" every time the camera shifts to him. The first thirty minutes do not find us asking, "what's going on?"; the first five minutes raise that question, and the next 25 are instead dedicated to the most more urgent, "is this movie going to ever actually start?"
And the second big problem is the ending. I won't spoil it. There's a point where the characters have worked out all their problems, and this part, at least, is perfectly in line with the series: it becomes a tragedy about loving too much, too hard, and too selfishly, about trying to make life perfect for the people you want to protect the most, and in so doing rob them of the ability to have agency. From the 40-minute mark, and for almost another hour, Rebellion is exactly the Puella Magi Madoka Magica sequel that PMMM didn't know it wanted; I will not say "needed", since it does take some kind of arbitrary bullshit to get the backstory set up in the first place. Particularly the decision that Homura's perfectly-shaped character resolution from Eternal was no such thing, and about fifteen seconds after we stopped watching her, she unlearned everything that the whole movie taught her. But setting that aside, Rebellion is character-driven and emotionally difficult in utterly splendid ways, and having muscled through the beginning, I was all set to love it.
But the ending is really just dire - needless, unearned cynicism, operating under the principle that love invariably turns to possessiveness and obsession, and that good people can be snookered by bad people 100% of the time. It's tiresome adolescent nihilism and quite beneath the dignity of the characters and the writing that crafted that marvelous three-episode ending arc in the first place. Perhaps a sequel would fix it - probably we'll never find out.
All that being summed up, we have here a movie that is truly wonderful for half of its running time, a little tedious for about its first quarter, and a lot tendentious for its last. That's not a terrific batting average (though many and many a film has a worse one), so here's why, after all that, I was still blown away by Rebellion: it is drop-dead gorgeous. This is quite easily among the best-looking animated films of the 2010, and however much more it cost than its predecessors, it was a bargain. From the first time the magic girls fight a nightmare, it's clear that Rebellion has some heightened visual ideas up its sleeve: Gekidan INU Curry's design for the nightmare realm is based on cloth patches and soft textures, which is striking at first and then damned ingenious when you realise that they're evoking quilts and bedding - that is, the fabric of the nightmare space suggests where nightmares are found, just as the ripped paper of the witch labyrinths evoke scrapbooks, since as we eventually learn, they're constructed out of memories.
That's just the launching point for a film that does all of its storytelling through the design of its physical spaces and the way its characters move through them, as much as through the words they say. Cataloguing every last ingenious visual idea in Rebellion would be unwieldy, tedious, and much too long, but I'll run through some highlights. One is the way the film borrows abstract geometric spaces to silently imply the deterioration on the far edges of what turns out to be an imagined landscape, long before the characters figure out that it's so. There is also the increasing tendency of the townspeople to shift into flat paper-like figures with simplified sketches for faces, which not only repeats the notion that this unreal space can only produce so much detail, but also foreshadows what's going on for viewers who can recall what paper animation connoted earlier in the series. At one point, the aggressive simplicity of this figures has become so pronounced that one shivering character, animated on twos, is being gripped by an enemy that switches from a blank smiling face to a snarling, be-fanged grim without any intermediate frames at all, using the mechanical structure of the animation medium itself to provide horror.
Yes, that's the word. "Horror". It's not clear at first, but by the time Homura and Kyoko end up in the non-Euclidean hellscape of the Mitakihara suburbs, Rebellion has clearly committed to that mode. And everything that proceeds from that is great, through the big final battle sequence that's a grab-bag of horror images (one particularly striking moment: a shell of a face, with eyes straggling to keep up with the rest of the head, moves into frame, and is abruptly replaced by a skull), and even into the last scene, a bucolic sequence in which little dreadful things keep moving in on the edges.
I admire the effort, at least. Rebellion strikes me as an essentially unfulfilling concept that has been executed in the most exciting and artistically accomplished way. I don't know what to do with that - if it were just boring or clichéd, I'd be all about this, but it's so actively distasteful near the end. It's captivating, anyway, and it's as thrilling in its aesthetic as any Japanese animation I have myself seen. Which has to count for more than something like a dispiriting, tacked-on ending, right?
8/10
I know it's poor form to let authorial intent colour your response to a work of art, but god almighty did I sour to Madoka Magica after being exposed to Urobuchi's comments on the series, as well as some of his other work as a creator. Essentially, his point of contention with the Magical Girl genre is that he finds it morally repulsive that teenage girls could be allowed wish fulfilment or narrative focus without suffering immensely for it. That was the beginning and end of his inspiration: he wanted a Magical Girl series that focused in all ways on the suffering of its female characters for daring to want the same kind of largely uncomplicated power fantasy that dominates nearly every subgenre of anime, but of course usually focuses on male protagonists. Every other Urobuchi project I've seen has also trafficked in that same sense of snotty nihilism and barely-concealed misogyny, and I can't watch the series without being reminded of it any more. (What really stands out to me in particular is the comically outsized punishment meted out to Sayaka, over and over again, for what are probably the most typically teenage-girl behaviours that any of the characters exhibit.)
ReplyDeleteThere is criticism to be made of the Magical Girl genre, particularly that its core message tends to consist of telling young girls that they won't get anything they want out of life unless they embrace a very traditional and limiting form of femininity, but Urobuchi Gen was not the person to make it. Ikuhara Kunihiko got a lot closer when he made Revolutionary Girl Utena, a far more complex and even-handed and visually sophisticated take on the same genre, although made on a fraction of the budget and thus far less lush in its animation.
All that ranting out of the way, though, my feelings about the series aren't actually that dissimilar to your own - Rebellion basically retroactively sets fire to the series' value as any kind of morality play or character piece, but the entire thing is such a crackerjack work of graphic design and animation that it would have to put a whole lot more feet wrong before it started to really counterbalance its aesthetic value. I mean hell, angry as it makes me, I've still seen the whole thing three times through at this point so it must be doing something right.
About that animation: the use of artificial pencilling and hand-made collage-style animation is, as far as I know, something unique to Madoka, but the boldly abstracted and geometric scenery and use of colour are characteristic of the house style of the animation studio SHAFT, who have made something of a name for themselves in stylistically brash and ripely misogynist animation in the last few years. More extreme than Madoka in both senses is their flagship Monogatari Series , which combines some of the most breathtakingly beautiful and original animation with some of the most revoltingly leering sexism and creepiness I've ever seen in an animated work. There's a prequel movie called Kizumonogatari on its way to theatres this year (in Japan, at least) and while I would never, ever, recommend that any human being go see it, if you end up catching it for any reason I'd be fascinated to hear your thoughts on it.
I seem to be about the only person on the planet who actually really, REALLY likes...well, OK, "likes" is a tough word to use here, it IS a bleak-ass piece of work, and given that the continuation I had hoped for seems unlikely to come about now it feels all the worse, but at the very least, I APPRECIATE the choice "Rebellion" makes for its ending, and I say that as someone who feels one of the original series' biggest strengths is how it manages to earn a genuinely Happy Ending that feels honest to everything that came before it. A big part of that, though, comes from my feeling like it is, in fact, an acknowledgement of something that was ALREADY present in the original series' text, and not even all THAT hidden. That "Rebellion" itself lays the seeds for the final twist of the knife-which again feels all too appropriate from a series that has largely been built on knife twists-in some of its best scenes renders it all the harder for me to dismiss it, personally.
ReplyDeleteIt's DEFINITELY a pleasant surprise to see you touching on the "Madoka" series at all, though. I've only ever seen the three movies, rather than the original series, but I definitely thought it was a fascinating piece of work as a whole. I feel like I OUGHT to dislike it, too, because for all its vaunted status as a "Deconstruction" of the Magical Girl genre, in practice it actually tends to feel more like a Horror Story that sneakily uses the Magical Girl aesthetic to hide its true nature. And yet...ALL the central characters we meet end up feeling so richly drawn and whose dynamic with each other is so incredibly vibrant that the story gets its hooks into you something FIERCE, and so its somewhat-deceptive nature feels actually earnest in its own weird way. And as I said before, and as we both agree with, the original ending is all the more remarkable for how it feels so very honest and appropriate to a story that it didn't seem possible could earn something like that.
ReplyDeleteI sadly did not know about Urobuchi's attitude until now, and I agree with Chris D. that "Utena" is probably the stronger, smarter overall series (at least on a narrative level), but even so, "Madoka Magica" holds a special place in my heart.
oh yes also Sayaka is Best Magical Girl, and Sayka and Kyoko make a wonderful couple (which may go some way toward explaining why I'm more favorable toward "Rebellion" than what seems to be the consensus >w>).
Did the wide-faced character designs, by one Aoki Ume (author of a very cute manga about art students called Hidamari Sketch, which was also turned into an anime by Shinbo's Shaft studio), did they remind you of Mary Blair's artwork? Coupled with the flat look especially in the original TV series (such as the scene where Sayaka shows Madoka her Gem against an eerie backdrop of white windmills), PMMM at times reminds me more of a '50s-'60s American cartoon than most Japanese animation. That's actually a compliment for this lover of Mid-Century Modern design.
ReplyDeleteThe series is often compared to Evangelion, and for good reason IMHO. Some people have wondered if Rebellion and its ending came from a similar impulse as the similarly fanbase-splitting End of Evangelion; that Urobuchi was somewhat annoyed at having to reopen a door that he thought had been sealed pretty tightly shut, and so he responded with something of a middle finger to Shinbo and the overzealous fans. "Be careful what you wish for", indeed.
I know you're rather busy at the moment, but you forgot to mention the show's connection to Faust (possible spoiler alert here to readers who haven't seen this series). Some of this is secreted away in extraneous material (the witches have names which were given on the show's website; one of them is actually named Gretchen after Penitent Gretchen, and the first witch the girls encounter has some passages from the original German version scrawled on the walls of her labyrinth.
Chris- My word, I'm glad I didn't know about any of that when I was watching the show. That man sounds beastly.
ReplyDeleteSssonic- "Liking" or liking not withstanding, I do think the end of the move makes sense - the narrative logic is all very focused and precise. I just don't like what it does to the characters...
Andrew- Now that you mention it, there is some Mary Blair, isn't there? I was so hot and bothered by how niftily the film drew down from Eastern European animation styles that I didn't think to look at any thing else. I definitely glossed by the in-retrospect obvious Faust parallels, so thanks for pointing that out.
I very nearly did compare it to Evangelion, but I had no idea if that was a real observation or just me being a dipshit as hasn't seen enough anime.
I'd sooner approach Madoka as a horror riff on magical girls than any kind of "deconstruction" or whatnot. Practically every story element in it can be found in some form in Sailor Moon, the archetypal magical girl show. No, really. It's got magical girls who
ReplyDelete*are psychologically devastated by what they do.
*come into blows with each other over different worldviews.
*become corrupted.
*die in painful ways.
*are queer (with considerably less ambiguity).
*ascend to godhood.
Which isn't to say Madoka isn't good, just that it isn't reinventing the wheel.
Also, you do sometimes get tv anime compiled as movies with touched up animation (I believe the Gundam franchise in particular like to do this). During the show's original run in 2011, the last two episodes were postponed for a month after the tsunami and then shown back-to-back, so the finale did work well even on tv.
I can't claim to know what goes on Gen Urobuchi's head, and I'm not sure if I want to, heh. When Akiyuki Shinbo, who had previously directed another "military-grade magical girls" anime called Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, and after having turned around the previously middling studio Shaft starting in the early 2000's (before that they had mainly served as a subcontractor to other studios, and back in the '80s had actually produced some American Saturday morning fare such as the animated versions of Dennis the Menace and, ahem, Hulk Hogan's Rock 'n Wrestling) and wanted to create a darker magical girl series of his own at his new sandbox, I'm not sure if he selected Urobuchi based on the gruesome yet highly acclaimed Lovecraft-inspired visual novel* Saya no Uta ("Song of Saya"), or on his authorship of the novel Fate/Zero, which is part of a previously existing creation called the Nasuverse which can be roughly described as King Arthur meets Battle Royale meets Peabody's Improbable History with a more-than-healthy injection of nihilism. That said, in the end Madoka can certainly be viewed as a successful fusion of both strains. It was in the liner notes for Fate/Zero (which was made into an anime later in 2011) that he wrote, "I have nothing but contempt for the deceitful thing men call 'happiness', and find myself with no choice but to push my characters, whom I pour my heart and soul out to create, into the abyss of tragedy."
ReplyDelete* A visual novel is one of those many things the Japanese love, but still causes Westerners to scratch their heads. They're somewhat like those old choose-your-own-adventure books, but digital and played on video game systems...and often contain much more "adult" content, as does Saya no Uta (to say the absolute least).
The man certainly has developed a reputation as a troll almost as much a violent nihilist; he actually wanted to keep his involvement with Madoka a secret to keep the image that it would be a lighthearted romp, and when his authorship was leaked, he claimed that he'd turned over a new leaf since Fate/Zero and that Madoka would be a "healing story". Supposedly Aoi Yuuki's crying during some of her scenes was quite real, and Emiri Kato, voice of Kyubey, was quite upset when her character's true intentions were made clear. After the series finale, he claimed that PMMM was still a healing story after all...just a different kind of healing.
So I'm not quite sure how much of the misogyny above was genuine (I've heard some feminist defenses of PMMM as well as ones bashing it as really flipping sexist), but one thread in many of Urobuchi's pieces of work (pun proudly intended) that I do think is genuine is a disdain for utilitarianism and, believe it or not, a belief in the importance of idealism in the face of grinding despair and an uncaring universe. Check out this blogger's essay for some points on this. (Spoilers for Madoka as well as Fate/Zero and Gen's succeeding works Psycho-Pass (a cyberpunk mélange of 1984 and Minority Report) and Suisei no Gargantia (sort of Waterworld meets Avatar)).
http://wrongeverytime.com/2013/12/02/wrong-every-time-gen-urobuchi-and-the-human-spirit/
That blogger has another essay on Rebellion; whereas PMMM can only be argued to be a true deconstruction of the magical girl genre, some greater claim can be made that Rebellion is a deconstruction of fanfiction and maybe even fandom itself.
PS: This wasn't the first time Shaft had worked with Gekidan Inu Curry. They did some of their opening and ending videos throughout the previous decade. Check out this opening to the series Sayonara Zetsubou-Sensei (Goodbye, Mr. Despair), which I wonder if it may also have influenced PMMM's themes. This video in particular looks like a dry run to Madoka's witch labyrinths.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxcqoCjRPTE
SZS is also the most pointed and political satire anime and manga I've seen; something of a breath of fresh air considering how apolitical most anime and manga are. I can't recommend it highly enough, is what I'm saying.
Sorry about necroposting, but there is in fact some form of continuation beyond Rebellion in the works.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2015-12-23/madoka-magica-new-concept-movie-gets-different-version-in-osaka/.96858
Whatever your opinion of Urobuchi, hopefully he will still be on the staff for the new project, despite him saying earlier that he was done with the series. The sequel to his subsequent anime, Psycho Pass, was written by another person to hideous results.
Now, how soon the series continuation will be coming out... Shaft Studios has been notorious for missing deadline in the past. The aforementioned Kizumonogatari was delayed for something like five or six years! That said, despite that franchise's lewdness and sexism, I would recommend checking it out, if mainly for its incredible artwork (starting with the 2009 TV anime Bakemonogatari). While diehard feminists probably wouldn't like it, I'd still say the girls here manage to hold their own.