Madoka Magica

Spoiler Warning: Madoka Magica TV series

Netflix is pretty good at forecasting my ratings for films. But when it comes to TV, it gets strangely erratic. Despite having very few 5-star shows and many 5-star films amid my ratings, they never predict a >4.5 for a film, but they'll quote me a 4.8, 4.9 for all kinds of ridiculous TV shows that aren't even any good. Lord only knows why in the flying samhain they predicted 4.7 as my rating for Madoka Magica, until this show I've never watched more than two episodes of any anime on Netflix and I don't even have anything like Evangelion or Dragon Ball Z in my ratings collection to point the results in that direction. Yet this was a rare case where their overenthusiastic TV rating was actually correct.

Madoka Magica was recommended to me (not by Netflix, but by an actual human) on the basis that it is to Magical Girls what Neon Genesis Evangelion is to Giant Robots. I don't generally like to go into any TV show expecting it to be Evangelion, that's almost inevitably a recipe for crushing disappointment. That's like taking a random meal from anywhere in the world and assuming it was made by an Iron Chef! But, hey... the person who recommended Madoka to me was, in fact, the person who showed me Evangelion some 13 or 14 years ago, so I gave them the benefit of the doubt.

So I started watching. And I was highly skeptical but the show turned out to be fucking awesome. The Evangelion comparison becomes apparent pretty quickly. You have your Asuka, Shinji & Rei, you even have a Gendou. But this isn't some two-bit Kinko's photocopy like RahXephon. Madoka Magica approaches its influences more in the vein that Avatar: The Last Airbender did; using the giants which preceded it as a jumping off point to see what *else* they can create, rather than using the previous work as the intended end result in and of itself.

It's not necessarily Game of Thrones in terms of trope-defiance, but this show definitely fits in with the recent emphasis on reevaluating the tenets of fantasy and aligning them more closely with the edicts of real world turmoil. And it does a very clever job of it. I especially like how Madoka is basically a side character in her own series, until the last couple of episodes. This is a welcome subversion of how Sailor Moon was necessary to kill virtually every enemy no matter how many hordes of near-equal magical comrades were attacking it before she showed up to invariably save the day.

The character designs weren't quite to my preference, they look more Chibi Moon than Sailor Moon, and their faces strike me as slightly too big (in close up shots). But I got used to it and ended up liking it by the end. And I suppose choosing this style serves the show, in the sense that it's supposed to be a more gritty/realistic Magical Girl show and these are supposed to be little girls, not the 12 year olds that inexplicably are 6'1", have mini skirt legs and size-D breasts like you see in Sailor Moon, Evangelion, ad infinitum. And the animation itself was superb, utilizing crisp, vibrant digital technology but retaining the warm, human feel of traditional animation.

Ultimately I came to dearly love and care for all of the different characters, which is a very impressive task to accomplish. Most shows have at least one character that fails to really hit it off with me. I think part of the genius was focusing on so few characters to begin with. There are no unnecessary characters what-so-ever. And the sparsity of characters also empowered the strength of the bond between them, and underlined the concept of fate's threads having already locked these people together, as we ultimately discover.

After Kyubey tells Madoka she could become a God, I started to wonder what the ending might be like, and whether they might give us a Third Impact type scenario. But I never thought they'd actually have the courage to do it. To emulate the most confounding and controversial aspect of Evangelion? Magica's finale had conscious shades of both the deific mayhem of The End of Evangelion, and the psychological confrontation of Evangelion's original final episodes, utilized in a way that felt natural to Magica's own intricacies. More importantly, it told a perfect ending to the story of the series, and quite a spectacular one at that.

Overall this was an intriguing concept with excellent characters, 12 episodes was a little thin to really tell this story. They could definitely have benefited from more time to flesh out the character's relationships and lengthen some of those lightning-fast witch fights (could that be my latent masculine side talking?). But ultimately it's really hard to argue with a succinct series with exemplary pacing and a very satisfying conclusion in which all pertinent threads are conclusively and reasonably resolved. Too few episodes is preferable to too many, where the strength of a core story weakens exponentially as extraneous content muddles its impact. And I certainly struggle to think of anything else that would have been strictly necessary for them to explore.

I can't say this is as good as Evangelion. But I can say it's better than the Evangelion movies, if only for creating something new that genuinely stands up to the classics, as opposed to merely recreating the classics. And if they do end up remaking Sailor Moon as has been rumored, that'll be a fun comparison to make, between the two. And I'm not saying they should, you know, turn Sailor Moon into Madoka Magica any more than they should turn Lord of the Rings into Game of Thrones. But I for one would be pleased if Sailor Moon's new creators would acknowledge where the genre has gone lately, in their own way.

Final note: Could Netflix have possibly written a more generic and unappealing blurb for Madoka Magica? "Madoka has a magical encounter one day. This is the story of magical witch girls." Other than the highly disturbing spoiler that the magical girls are witches, which I refuse to believe is intentional but if it WAS intentional that's admittedly brilliant (because it seems like a stupid mistake until you actually find out it was true all along!) ...erm, but other than that, Netflix made this sound like the most generic piece of shit. And I hate generic pieces of shit, so if I had not heard on good authority that this show rocked, I never would have watched it.