Puella Magi Madoka Magica: A fresh take on an old genre

When a friend told me Puella Magi Madoka Magica ( Magical Girl Madoka Magica ) was something I had to watch, I was pretty skeptical for one key reason:

I'm not the biggest fan of the magical girl genre. I watched Sailor Moon as a kid but I never loved it. The season climaxes of Sailor Moon were decent but the bulk of the series was annoying filler. After all, I'm tuning in to to see magic and adventure, not high school girls going through slice of life drama. Even when I was in high school I had no patience for watching the Sailor Scouts struggle with boys and grades and I have even less interest now.

Sailor Moon of course had a ton of clones. The basic formula of the magical girl story is simple: a mentor character (usually a magical animal of some kind) approaches a young girl and tells her or them that they have been appointed by destiny to wear ludicrous outfits, wield amazing magic powers, and fight the forces of evil. The girl and her team then battle evil while still enjoying a normal life and balancing the demands of high school against the responsibility of being a superhero.

After some foot dragging I sat down this week to watch the series and boy was I glad I did. Madoka Magica was actually a pretty awesome take on a tired old genre. They recycle the old Magical girl formula and twist it slightly: What would it really be like if a strange magical creature approached a young girl and asked her to risk her life fighting monsters?

The series serves as a deconstruction of the genre, maybe even a Gothic-ization of it. A key element in the series is that the main characters can and do die. It's brought up over and over again that the decision to become a "magical girl" is irrevocable and drags young girls into a war between factions they don't know and don't fully understand.

The basic plot centers around a mysterious creature known as Kyubey who approaches the girls and offers to make a contract with them: he will grant each of them one wish and in exchange they must pledge their lives to protecting humanity from dangerous creatures called witches.

The drama unfolds from there since, as you can imagine, fourteen year old girls don't have the best judgment and rarely fully appreciate what their wishes are worth and if they're really worth exchanging their normal lives for short violent ones as soldiers in this war.

Our main character Madoka, is notably not a magical girl. She wanted to be a hero just like the ones in her comic books but ultimately got cold feet after watching a friend and veteran fighter die fighting a witch.

Most of the series is spent with Madoka trying to restrain her newly empowered friends and make them reconsider their bad decisions. This keeps the audience's view of the situation more grounded since Madoka has no magical powers and is simply forced to watch her newly empowered friends go out of control.

There's actually not much action in this series. The focus is on how the girls deal with their new found powers and now must confront the witches which (as opposed to the monster of the week creatures from Sailor Moon) are depicted as extremely powerful, dangerous, and more than able to kill the girls.

Our main view of the magical girls comes from Sayaka, Madoka's best friend who agrees to become a magical girl in exchange for Kyubey healing the hands of the musical prodigy she has a crush on so he can play again. This situation is played very realistically since after being healed, Sayaka realizes he doesn't have much time for her anymore and that she had subconsciously made the wish hoping he would love her.

Sayaka wants to be a real hero and often refuses to compromise with those she finds objectionable. She even refuses assistance and support in moments of crisis; confident in her implicit plot armor to save her while she saves the world. Her unrealistic idealism and expectations colliding with a realistic world (even one containing magic) is a major source of conflict in the series.

The witches' design is really quite inspired being less a character and more like stepping into a strange 'yellow submarine' like movie. The CGI art style of the witches is good at jarring the audience and convincing them they are viewing a dangerous abnormality compared to the much more low key surroundings and character design.

The series is short at just 12 episodes and a dubbed version can be viewed on Netflix. Even for people who don't like the magical girl genre it's really worth checking out. My biggest complaints about it were simply that it was TOO short. That's a great complaint to have about any show. The ending was slightly rushed and had something of a deus ex aspect but the deus ex was adequately supported and earned by the narrative. The series hits a few false notes but I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Final Score 9/10

<Spoilers ahead. Seriously, do yourself a favor and watch the show first, you want to experience this organically>

Assuming you're not a fourteen year old girl yourself, you'll probably realize something is off about Kyubey when you first meet him. He makes no bones about how the girls are literally selling their souls for a wish. It is later revealed that the witches they fight are magical girls themselves. The magical girls must keep their despair in check because when a girl's hope runs out she's transformed into a witch and destined to curse as many people as she had helped in her magical girl career.

This is of course pretty cliche but the realistic way it is portrayed sells it well. This corruption ultimately happens to Sayaka in a very well done series of events that brings home the reality of the world they inhabit and the price of their wishes.

Sayaka is shown slowly losing hope in her mission and realizing the meaninglessness of her wish since she ultimately wished for something she didn't really want. She just wanted her friend to be happy and to love her but that's not what she wished her. She slowly realizes that she sold her life away for another person's pleasure without ever even telling him about it or her feelings for him.

Sayaka is a typical magical girl archetype: convinced she can change the world and make it better by doing the right thing and fighting hard. However, the series takes place in a realistic world and said world is much too heavy for Sayaka to shift.

She's unrealistic in her views of love and justice and she gets crushed by the weight of the world. She slowly realizes that just because she always does the right thing, it doesn't mean it will always lead to a good outcome.

Sayaka ultimately kills a few nameless jerks she meets on the subway who are bragging about the neglectful and borderline abusive way they treat their girlfriends. She then surrenders to hate and despair and transforms into a witch.

Kyubey is actually an alien who is turning girls into witches because this generates a lot of energy for his society to harvest. To the show's credit, despite Kyubey's duplicitous nature he's not an out and out villain. His people have no emotions and in his view he's simply making equitable exchanges between willing parties. He explains his motivations clearly anytime he's asked but never volunteers the information. He's learned over the years that humans don't take this information well.

Kyubey defends his actions by claiming that humans raise and slaughter livestock as well but Kyubey's people are far more decent to their livestock than humanity to cattle. After all, he only makes contracts with willing parties and gives a wish in exchange.

Kyubey is satisfyingly creepy: simultaneously both cute and friendly and disturbingly inhuman. Even at the end of the series he remains friendly to the girls and offers guidance on request. Kyubey never actually lies in the entire series but he does lie by omission and remains an intriguingly morally ambiguous character rather than an open villain.

This is a very refreshing twist on the genre and was a welcome addition to my viewing schedule.