An issue I see quite often in anime fandom is the cry of “it’s not a cartoon! It’s animation!” I’m as guilty of that as anyone, and even set out my own thoughts on the topic a while ago but quite frankly it’s a whole can of worms I can’t be bothered to deal with again. I will say though that Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica IS a cartoon. But what a cartoon it is.
“I am the bone of my sword…” and so on. Make of that parallel what you will
I have it on good authority that the magical girl genre isn’t always aimed solely at a young female audience and, if you look at how long ago the Cutie Honey franchise ran before Hideaki Anno did his live-action remake, it never was. In terms of premise and outward appearances Madoka is the sort of thing you’d expect to see kids tuning into on Saturday mornings but what makes it one of the first big pleasant surprises of 2011 is how much else is hidden up its frilly sleeve.
My mention of Hideaki Anno is quite deliberate in that he and Akiyuki Shinbo strike me as being remarkably similar…spiritual brothers almost. If Anno is the antisocial old-school otaku with a room full of mecha figures and 80s VHS tapes Shinbo is the tech-savvy kid brother with an extensive geometry set on his desk and a shelf full of textbooks that teach you how to use the colour filters in Photoshop.
To really put it into perspective, the magical girl genre is one aspect of the anime fandom I purposefully avoided completely from day one as a fan. There are certain things I have virtually no interest in: primetime soaps, most sports, owning a video games console, nightclubs…and magical girl anime is on that list.
Then there are the character designs: they have the innocent, harmless appearance of those in Hidamari Sketch, a show I enjoyed but for wildly different reasons, so I had no reason to believe it was going to ‘do’ serious at all. Simply put, I’ve never got any impression that the genre held any entertainment value for me; if Madoka Magica is just a magical girl anime with Hidasketch character designs, how then did it draw in a curmudgeonly snob like me?
Using the premise of great responsibility resting on characters who are really too young to fully grasp the ramifications of their actions is hardly new; because it retains so many of the tropes and clichés of the genre I’ve read claims that Madoka Magica is being cleverly subversive. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. For sure, the issue of granting wishes is taken very seriously indeed, and it’s weird that the title character hasn’t become a mahou shoujo when we’re at the halfway mark of the episode run.
The fights against witches, the Grief Seeds, all the weird and ‘magical’ bits strike me as a whole family of MacGuffins because the meat of the story – the stuff that keeps the attention of this cynical twenty-something male who usually couldn’t care less about kids with magical powers – lies outside of that. It’s a familiar type of entertainment (magical girl anime) that’s presented in a refreshing way (with Shinbo-isms and Kajiura’s music) and that is I think partly what makes it stand out.
I was intrigued by the idea that Kalafina were selected for the performance of the end theme and the BGM is quite simply superb. I wasn’t drawn to the show on that alone, but I was certainly tempted by the prospect of one of my favourite directors and one of my favourite OST writers collaborating again. The last time I experienced the combination of Shinbo’s direction and Kajiura’s music was the very experimental and decidedly un-commercial Petite Cossette, so what common ground could Hidasketch and Cossette, two such different productions, have?
I’m personally getting a real kick out of the sweet-and-sour blend of sprightly cuteness in the character designs and Kajiura’s haunting score combined with Shinbo’s nightmarish imagery. Some unlikely pairings pull a production in two directions at once with the end result of a directionless mess that doesn’t know what it wants to be; in Madoka’s case it’s a storytelling wolf in sheep’s clothing that turns around and gives you a vicious bite to the rear when you least expect it.
I believe it was the third episode when most of us following the show gave a simultaneous exclamation of “wow…shit just got real.” The dark undercurrents such as the so-happy-it-can’t-last setup of Madoka’s family, the quality writing in her mother’s sage advice and the fact that everyone finds Kyubey creepy aren’t what I expected at all. The whole idea of the magical girl genre – kids barely in their teens making Faustian pacts and fighting to the death – sounds hackneyed on paper but in this case it works. Not only that, it pulls it off with dramatic weight and palpable tension.
Shinbo has somehow made a magical girl cartoon that’s dark, gritty and unpredictable; I won’t go as far as a hyperbolic claim that Shinbo is doing for magical girl anime what Christopher Nolan has done for Batman, but I will admit that Madoka feels solid and its moments of emotion give it a degree of credibility I never expected it to have.
After a couple of big anime disappointments lately it was great to have my scepticism cast rudely aside and stop worrying over what I’m supposed to make of a show. It’s too early to say whether I’ll cite Madoka as a real favourite in the long run but right now I’m thinking of it as one of those titles that reminds me why I’m a fan and why I write for this blog to convey my enthusiasm: it’s inventive, deceptively meaningful and, well, just plain good at what it sets out to do.