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Puella Magi Madoka Magica
魔法少女まどか☆マギカ
2011 · TV series · 25 min episodes · 1 season
AnimationDramaScience FictionFantasy
She has a loving family and best friends, laughs and cries from time to time... Madoka Kaname, an eighth grader of Mitakihara middle school, is one of those who lives such a life. One day, she had a very magical encounter. She doesn't know if it happened by chance or by fate yet. This is a fateful encounter that can change her destiny. This is a beginning of the new story of the magical witch girls.
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4 comments on Hacker News
If you aren't turned off by the girly aspect of it (The director previously worked on Sailor Moon) Revolutionary Girl Utena is comparable to Evangelion in terms of being ambitious and Avant-guard. (The movie is meant to be watched after the show. There's a fan website with a bunch of essays analyzing the show still active, there's a lot of subtle stuff going on in it, it was also partially inspired by japanese avant guarde theater in the 70s counterculture era.) I feel the dub hurts the material because the actors sound like they are doing children's theater so it's best watched subbed.
Big O is also a good show though it gets better as it goes along. It gets kind of abstract and embraces a sort of "theater of the absurd" sort of atmosphere so don't go into it expecting a typical narrative to the story.
If you like American superhero movies or comics at all Tiger and Bunny is a great Japanese show with a unique take on them.
Puella Magi Madoka Magica was sort of described as a "deconstruction" of Sailor Moon type shows, a writer with a horror background does a grim and gritty story that starts off like a Sailor Moon sort of thing and goes somewhere else.
Most American cartoons like that have very episodic designs. This presumably is great for business, as you avoid a series of uncomfortable questions about what happens to your cash cow when your series comes to an end or takes a turn that people aren't interested in anymore. It also means that new viewers are missing very little, so you can run a bunch of cartoons and not worry about getting people hooked up front in Ep 1 and you can experience business synergies from broadcasting a variety of cartoons and getting people to try new things (it's very low risk).
With live actors, I guess dealing with your stars is already a series-longevity issue, so maybe people are more willing to countenance finitude? And there are different kinds of hype-train available with real actors, and the audience for live shows has self-segregated.
My dream is that some day someone at Cartoon Network who watched Puella Magi Madoka Magica will get an experimental budget to launch a dozen episodes of a real, serious cartoon series with incredibly good writing, and win all the awards. (Bonus points if they also troll people into thinking it's fluff for the first two-and-a-half episodes and try to break their minds.) In the meantime, I guess there's Steven Universe? which at least deals with serious issues a little (still in episodic ways)
> 5 hours is more than enough of a chance to give a series.
Five hours is more than enough. Five hours is enough time for the writers to take a genre, deconstruct it, salt the earth, collect all the pieces in one place and build a bonfire, dance around the flames thrice widdershins while invoking ancient and mysterious rites, take off and nuke the site from orbit (just to be sure)... and finally, on the site of the wreck, rebuild it all again more beautiful than it had ever been, in the process winning every award in the book and forever altering the future of the genre.
But then, maybe I've just been utterly spoiled by Puella Magi Madoka Magica (12 episodes, 300m). :b
Even if you're a staunch ally of safe, conservative family entertainment for its own sake, Disney was pretty damn crappy for a while. Look at their animated stuff in particular for plenty of mediocre storylines and bland animation (e.g. The Aristocats, The Fox and the Hound, Robin Hood). Children deserved better!
Eventually some meaningful competition from the likes of Don Bluth started to push them in the right direction (Secret of NIMH, Land before Time, All Dogs Go to Heaven, etc.) and not too long afterward they were doing things like Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin. Quite an improvement, though I dare say the storylines have never quite caught up. (Of course, all of Bluth's stuff would later be undermined as it was sequel-ized to Hell and back, like The Land Before Time XXIV: Teach Your Kids Roman Numerals Edition...)
Right now, though, after seeing Pixar's homages to Ghibli, I'm anticipating the impact of recent works like Puella Magi Madoka Magica, which really pushed some boundaries in Japan. (If you're not familiar with it, I'll just say... imagine if Pan's Labyrinth had been actively marketed to little children as a happy family film and an homage to Alice in Wonderland... and then translate that willful deception and the profound darkness onto Sailor Moon.) If it does make a splash in the youth entertainment industry at large, that will be quite interesting indeed.