Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magika -- Review ★★★☆☆

I really wanted to like this series, and it seems like everyone else did, so maybe I'm just crazy, but I have some pretty serious problems with Madoka. I won't say it's an outright bad show, but that's almost more of an admission that everyone else would recommend it even if I'm not totally on board, so I might as well side with the crowd. Ultimately, I'm just really ambivalent about this series, and I'm not really sure how to best express that, but I'll give it a shot.

The set-up for Madoka is perfect. It's basically the Evangelion of magical girl shows. Some normal high school girls run into this little furry cat lookin dude who offers to grant them wishes and magical girl powers, but the deal isn't really all it's cracked up to be. I'm all for dark, mature interpretations of typically benign, optimistic genres, but Madoka fails to deliver in that regard. I was expecting something deep, engaging, and psychological like Eva, but what I got was a bunch of whiny 14-year-old girls whining about 14-year-old girl problems. Not to mention a patently offensive explanation for why these events happen the way they do that essentially boils down to "hey, have you heard of entropy?!" There's a stretch in the middle of this series that hits all the marks for your typically crappy, generic sci-fi story, and the central conflict these characters face hinges on a bunch of idealistic assumptions that made me as the viewer want to root for the bad guys, cuz they were the only ones being rational! The ending is also pretty cheesy and barely makes any sense, which is a bummer because I actually was enjoying some of the plot twists in the last couple episodes, and the character interactions were finally becoming interesting, but then things conclude in a pretty weird way that sort of left a sour taste in my mouth.

But it's not all rubbish, and that's the problem I'm having. The story has a lot of potential and oscillates between good and bad with each new revelation, which makes my job reviewing the series that much tougher. As a whole, the series is totally competent, but a couple spots in particular really grind my gears. Similarly, there are a few characters here I really like, and interesting things happen to some of them, but then I feel like one of the best characters only shows up near the end of the series and is totally underutilized and serves no real function in the plot. But then I wonder if I'm just being overcritical (which is a thought that shouldn't normally occur to a reviewer), because Madoka was a MASSIVE success with tons of fans, many of whom lauded this as the best anime ever (though I think many of those people recanted that position once the hype over the show died down). So I'm not sure if I'm just not seeing whatever it is these people freaked about, or they weren't seeing the things I take issue with.

Despite my inner struggle over Madoka's content, there's one thing we can all agree on: this series is gorgeous. I've mentioned before that I'm a huge fan of Shaft's art direction, and they really outdid themselves in producing this series. For my money, this is one of the best looking anime that exists, with a particularly avant-garde approach to representing the magical world the girls enter at various points in the story. Madoka makes brilliant use of color and texture, as well as mixed-media/cutout animation that does an excellent job establishing a sense of place, or rather a separation from a sense of place. I would liken it to the moment in The Wizard of Oz when everything switches from black-and-white to color. You know instantly that things have changed in a major way, and these girls certainly aren't in Kansas anymore. Seeing these characters adapt to these changes and strange opportunities laid out before them is what makes the good parts of the story work. It's just a shame that the justification for this world falls apart once the exposition hits.

So do I like this series? Sort of. Will you like this series? Probably. In fact, that's the true basis of my overall recommendation of this series. I'd be willing to bet that my criticisms of Madoka won't be a major concern for the majority of viewers, so I'm willing to give this show a pass even though parts of it gnaw at my toes at night. And even so, I still throw on the first episode from time to time just to watch the pretty art whiz past my face and listen to the excellent soundtrack. This series is so lavishly produced, you can't really stay mad at it for too long. So check it out, and hopefully you'll like it a little more than I did.

--The Anime Hipster