I completely forgot about it, so finally watched Puella Magi Madoka Magica The Movie Rebellion tonight.
Top notch quality of course, amazing animation, sound, voice acting, music, colour... it's all there. Too bad it's just like every other damn sequel out there where the creators abandoned what made their creation great in order to... well I don't know, make money, please the fans, who knows.
The movie abandons the masterful pacing and tight story telling that the original series and wastes it on cutsey transformation sequences, meaningless songs, and pointless battles (oh god amazing battles, but still pointless so ultimately emotionless). It gets caught up in its on mythos to the point that the last 20 minutes is trying so hard to get metaphysical that it abandons its characters entirely and re-makes them to fit. It's almost like someone told the writers "This is great, but we need 20 more minutes, write something that'll require us to make another one."
I don't want to get to specific, so the rest is spoilered.
Spoiler!
At the end you feel like the whole point of the entire TV show and the entire movie we just watched is thrown away and we're back at the beginning. Uh, the whole point of a good story is how the characters develop, or maybe why they don't, but definitely not this.
And actually after a bit of searching I found this from the writer:
Quote:
|
Urobuchi: From the start, the idea was “Homura becomes a witch, and the story takes place inside her barrier”. But at the time, I wanted to end the story with Madoka taking Homura away with her. So, I thought the story would end this time for real (laughs). But both Iwakami-san and Shinbou-san were like, “No, we want the story to keep going after this” and wouldn’t give me the OK. So then when I was getting really worried, Shinbou-san was like “Might as well just make Madoka and Homura into enemies”. And that suggestion was basically the breakthrough. I really agreed that Homura might be plausible as Madoka’s equal opposite.
|
So basically that's it, the bosses decide for whatever reason that it has to continue so they have to come up with something that doesn't serve the story, but rather change the story to serve the arbitrary requirement. Even if it's a pure motive, like wanting there to be more Madoka Magica, it's still wrong.
That's why most sequels fail, and that's why this one does too.
A sequel should expand on the original, or challenge it (and not by ignoring it or just deciding it's different), or at worst be its own cohesive story in the universe. Rebellion takes the messages (and there are many) of Madoka Magica and undoes it. It takes how it's a deconstruction of and then an affirmation of the whole magical girl genre and undoes it.
And compared to the original series it's just bad storytelling. The original series gets stronger with every re-watching, while Rebellion felt like it got thinner just in one watching, I could be wrong but I don't think it'll get stronger the second time I watch it.