2chan.us

Last night I went up to New People SF to see the two 120 minute Madoka movies. I don’t think they need a review here – I’ll say it was worth spending 5 hours of travel time for, but hopefully next time I won’t have to take public transit – but without spoiling the series, there were some interesting things about the movie adaptation.

First off, the theater turned out to be pretty small, with almost two rows just being people I knew from Twitter, there was none of the special merchandise, and our tickets were printed on receipt paper. This leads me to suspect that Los Angeles is the only US city Japan believes actually exists.

I don’t exactly remember the TV series scene-by-scene anymore, but as far as I noticed there weren’t many new scenes; new animation instead went into improving the witch fights and transformation scenes, animation fixes, and added OP/ED sequences that really seemed sort of out of place in a movie.

The few new scenes mostly seemed intended to make Homura even more of a main character1. Mami actually lost character development, along with all the adults – her wish isn’t shown and they spent almost all their onscreen time talking about romance. In exchange, Mami’s new theme is really good.

All of the cast rerecorded their parts for the movies, and this time actually knew what the story was ahead of time. I’m not sure it made much of a difference, but Kyouko and QB’s performances stood out as very good. (Kyouko’s the best anyway.)

My only complaint about the translation is that one of the seiyuu used the word sekaikan in the opening comment, and I doubt anyone understood what she meant from the subtitle translating it as “worldview.”

In the end I still think Madoka’s plot is very strong when seen all at once, but Kyouko does suffer a little too much and Madoka really doesn’t have a reason to keep following people around at night. Still, if you haven’t seen it yet you should all go and do it before it’s ruined by sequels!

Discussion questions:

1. Why does Kyousuke have to stay in bed if he has a wheelchair?
2. Why don’t Madoka’s parents notice she’s never home at night?
3. How do magical girls afford apartments?
4. Are the flights of doves and their teacher’s voice Hidamari Sketch jokes?
5. Define sekaikan.
6. Really, Anne Frank?

1. and MadoHomu the main pairing [↩]

This entry was posted on Monday, October 22nd, 2012 at 3:47 am by astrange and is filed under anime, movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.