#anireco

So the SHAFT 50th anniversary event is going on and apparently someone is volunteering / working it and posting day over day changes to twitter? Anyways there's Concept Movie and Movie 4 structual scenery, as well as stuff from Monogatari and Magia Record. (The image has a link, clickthrough to look at ALL of these, it's INCREDIBLE.)

If we take another look at the center of the desk, with what I presume are the original Nightmare plushies, we can see the Witches book from the WnK trailers, as well as butterflies, a motif that's becoming more and more overt between Concept Movie and the new trailers. oh wait, we also get Ballet Madoka from the Concept Movie too!

Oh the top of the desk? How about Madoka and Homura dressed as Gretchen and Homulilly, same as seen on the Grief Book. The stone from the end of Rebellion with the insignia of the Law on it, as well as the windows to the law shown tied up with a ribbon? Oh they're split and laying in a pile now.

Iroha seems neat, and I like her already. Based on her design I was kinda afraid she'd wind up feeling like a "We have Madoka at home" kinda character, but she feels fairly distinct and pretty likable on her own merits. I'm looking forward to learning more about the mystery of her wish and her erased-from-existence sister(?)

Yachiyo was more standoffish than I was expecting given all the sweet IroYachi fanart I've seen, but I guess it'll be a good arc of them slowly learning to trust each other and fall in subtextual love. (On that note, given it's more recent than the original show, I wonder if the yuri will be more blatant or not. Rebellion being the canon-gay-est thing ever aside, anyway.)

Kuroe is pretty cool, I like her maybe-alliance maybe-friendship with Iroha a ton, but given her lack of a family name and her absence from the OP, I'm scared for her. Hopefully it's just a case of choosing to stay behind in Takarazaki, and not dying horribly or witching out to propel Iroha over to Kamihama.

What was with those giant stuffed bears on unicicles stuffing kids in bags, during that conversation between Iroha and Kyuubey? I thought it was another Labyrinth at first, but the sheer nonchalance Iroha had about the whole thing left me super baffled. Are we just never going to address that??? Is this something I should be reading into, or is it just Shaft being Shaft?

The music still slaps, and I especially loved the track that played during the second encounter with the train-bound salamander/noodle Witch.

Baby Kyuubey??? Not sure if trustworthy, but randomly singing doesn't seem like something Normal Kyuubey would do, so at the very least it's probably a distinct entity. Maybe an incubator terminal that got magically hijacked and reprogrammed and chibi-fied somehow?

That dream sequence at the end of all the Magical Girl refugees desperately coming to Kamihama legit got me a little teary-eyed. I hope they find what they need there. I have a bad feeling they might not.

On one hand, it's kind of a shame we're probably only spending this first episode, maybe the second as well, in Takarazaki, because holy fuck is it gorgeous. On the other hand, if it was the main setting for the bulk of the anime, I wouldn't be able to hold myself back from watching the rest and suffering through the apparently-terrible ending, just for more of dat sweet, sweet architecture. Kamihama being the main setting, and a lot more visually conventional based on the small glimpse we got here, makes me feel a lot better about just going with the VN style story delivery instead. You don't understand just how much I appreciate the vibe of a place...

But I would love a full OVA or something of just Iroha and Kuroe hanging out in Takarazaki before the show, or something. Either that, or something following off the game's better ending, where Iroha takes Yachiyo back home to Meet The Parents when they get back from overseas.

The other notable characteristic of the platform is that it is full of bird perches and birds. It is painfully obvious that no sensible urbanist would construct such a train system, and this is only one of many oddities present in the two cities depicted in this anime. On the trains themselves, there are electronic signs which proclaim “the only good witch is a dead witch!” and other messages that have no place being on a non-magical train.

For a long time, my pet theory was that these aesthetic choices represented a sort of power creep for the Madoka series. While the original show had relatively grounded setpieces for its mundane world (a school with glass walls is a strange design choice, of course, but not quite surreal), many of its most striking and memorable scenes (such as the dream sequence/previous timeline that opens episode 1 and was inexplicably cut from the first movie) take place in surreal and illogical places, usually because of the influence of witches, but occasionally due to magical girls.

Rebellion built upon this surreal aesthetic, but due to its central conceit of taking place within a labyrinth, the surreal settings of explicitly magical places were permitted to leak into domestic and mundane settings, and this only continued to intensify as Homura’s mental state worsened. My theory, then, was that the Magireco anime was taking its visual cues more from Rebellion than from the original anime, hence the strange and illogical architecture and design appearing in places otherwise separate from the influences of magical girls.

As of yesterday, however, I have a new theory. The Magireco adaptation has fundamentally surreal and magical backgrounds because it tells a tonally and thematically different story from Puella Magi Madoka Magica. A sizeable chunk of Madoka’s central conflict is one between the mundane and magical parts of its setting, and Madoka’s struggle to determine her place within it.

Madoka’s entirely non-magical mother, Junko Kaname, is a major influence in her life, and Madoka is hesitant to make any sort of contract with Kyubey due to her own indecisiveness (as well as Homura’s urging her not to, and the gruesome deaths of Mami Tomoe and Sayaka Miki), but still finds herself ultimately driven to engage with the world of magical girls and witches, if only out of concern for the people around her. For the majority of the show’s run, Madoka is not a magical girl.

Similarly, most characters’ arcs involve some interaction between the mundane and magical world. Sayaka Miki and Kyouko Sakura use magic to try and improve the world around them, to disastrous or unsatisfactory ends, while Mami Tomoe and Homura Akemi find themselves isolated from the mundane world and its people by the pressures of their roles as magical girls, and that isolation ultimately gets them killed and trapped in a loop of tragedy, respectively.

The anime adaptation of Magia Record has no equivalent character to Junko Kaname, and its central conflict is ultimately a struggle between magical girls, rather than something that involves the mundane world to any particular extent. While the anime incarnation of Alina Gray’s ultimate goal is to turn all humans into witches because ????, this is revealed very late into the series and frankly seems to have been made up on the spot by the writers. All of the show’s major characters have already contracted with Kyubey before the plot begins, and while the precise circumstances of the contracts made by the three members of the Magius are important to the plot, it is the nature of their wishes (rather than the circumstances in which they were made) that make them important.

As such, my conclusion is this: the Magia Record anime adaptation makes use of surreal backgrounds and aesthetics in such a way that (intentionally or not) it reinforces that this story is one about magical girls and only magical girls. Just as there is no thematic room for mundane humans in this story, mundane architecture and urban design are similarly excluded.

Includes Tamaki Iroha, Nanami Yachiyo, Minami Rena, Rumor Tsuruno, and Holy Mami! (All anime units!)