Puella Magi Madoka Magica

Puella Magi Madoka Magica just appeared on Netflix UK and I've read how it comes highly recommended (eg here ). It has been hailed by one critic as the greatest television anime of the 21st century so far! It's my first delve into the Magical Girl genre - I know my daughter loved reading the manga of Puella, so I thought I’d give it a try.

I must say I nearly switched it off after ten minutes - the overly cutesy character style isn’t really appealing and the voice acting is super irritating. I realise the first few episodes of anything are for character building so I carried on accepting the slow pace. Personally I didn't really connect or like any of the characters. But man, the story really picks up midway through the series and increasingly covers some really dark twisted up stuff especially regarding one of the characters and her mental decline.

There really is a bit of an Alice in Wonderful vibe to the whole thing, but what makes it worse is the cute character design which tricks you into thinking this surely isn't going to be as dark and nasty as it is. And boy, that cat creature, how sinister is he/she??

There are battle scenes aplenty and I must commend the way they're animated - with 2D puppet like imagery that perfectly evokes the weird and trippy parallel world where the girls must battle evil entities called witches. But the battles aren't what makes this series interesting, it is the way the anime depicts the emotional development of the principal characters. As mentioned above, one of them suffers a very disturbing mental decline while the others also suffer in their own way too. It's all very dark and I was hoping for some sort of redemption arc, which does of course happen, but not in the way I expected.

In fact for all it's minor irritating flaws, Puella Magi Madoka Magica is indeed a masterpiece just for the ambitious story writing and epic finale, which was very much worth the build up. There are so many layers to this series that I can see why fans come back and watch it multiple times or read it again and again. In fact it moved at such a swift pace I found myself rewinding to catch things that were said earlier, just so I could understand what the heck was going on.


There are some spin off and follow-up titles - notably the movie series of the same. Forum fans comment that the movies 1 and 2 reprise the same events of the tv series so I'm only going to watch the third movie, Redemption, to see where the story goes next.




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