New ‘Madoka Magica’ Movie Announced

 

There is a new trailer now available for a second sequel to Puella Magi Madoka Magica, the magical-girl title from Studio Shaft that reshaped the magical-girl genre.

This new movie is entitled, deep breath, Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica Movie: Walpurgis no Kaiten. I assume an official English-language release, when and if it happens, will bring the title back into line with the other English-language titles (i.e., have “Puella Magi” instead of “Mahou Shoujo”).

No release date appears to be available as of this writing.

This is the fourth movie. The first two were a reshaping of the twelve-episode television series, and the third, Puella Magi Madoka Magica: Rebellion was a sequel, which famously reversed the first’s already controversial themes. The creators indicated at the time that they did not consider the story complete yet, so it is possible that this fourth film, which has been a long time in coming, will be the finale to the Madoka saga.

I have to admit I have never seen Rebellion. Not only is it harder to find in the U.S. than the original series is, but I have never bothered to look for it for the same reason I’ve never been able to bring myself to watch The Godfather: Part II. The original is such a masterpiece, and so complete in itself, that I feel no need to see it continue. The fate of Madoka at the end of the original show is about as final as a character’s fate can get, so I sincerely doubt there is any way to continue her story that will not feel contrived to me.

Also, I must admit that I am ambivalent about Madoka: It is unquestionably one of the greatest magical-girl stories of all time, but what it has done to the genre has not been good: It was followed by too many imitators eager to copy its angst or its violence without understanding the purpose of either. I once naïvely hoped that Yuki Yuna Is a Hero, which openly challenged Madoka’s themes, might close out the “Madoka era,” but that was not to be.

Perhaps the true answer to Madoka has not yet been made. Princess Tutu, which was created as an answer to Revolutionary Girl Utena, successfully refuted Utena’s ideas in part because it was Utena’s artistic equal. You can set those two shows side by side and note that both, though flawed, are excellent works that stand shoulder to shoulder. However, the series that can both answer Madoka and stand beside it unembarrassed has not yet been made.

Most Popular Magical Girls on YouTube

This interesting graphic from VirgoX shows searches for different magical girl titles on the YouTube platform over time.

It is not surprising that Sailor Moon consistently holds the top spot. Other titles switch places, but the graphic remains, on the whole, consistent across the twelve years it examines. I am surprised that Puella Magi Madoka Magica didn’t move up higher after it made its appearance. I would also have expected more searches for Pretty Cure.

Not clear, however, is how many titles were examined. There are quite a few that VirgoX presumably didn’t look at.

Crunchyroll on the History of Magical Girls

Yet another video on the history of the magical girl genre, this time from the YouTube channel of Crunchyroll, the streaming service.

Any of these are necessarily selective, though I find this one slightly more irritating than usual. When it comes to discussing Sailor Moon, it focuses on gayness while ignoring more sigificant accomplishments and also claims Sailor Moon basically introduced homosexuality to anime—a statement as ignorant as all the claims from a few years back that Black Panther was the first movie with black people in it. Crunchyroll also treats of Puella Magi Madoka Magica as the first self-aware or self-critical magical girl series, a claim so common yet erroenous that it’s produced a cottage industry of blowback.

The genre has always been self-aware and included some amount of self-mockery, so much so that self-awareness may be one of its central characteristics, but it has also seen deliberate deconstructions before Madoka. What Madoka accomplished that its predecessors didn’t is a complete reorienting of the genre toward uglier content and more nihilistic themes. Madoka, like Sailor Moon before it, turned the whole genre into its imitators.

Aside from that, well, whatever; a lot of commenters over on YouTube have complained that this video fails to mention some particular series or other, but since this is a half-hour, condensed discussion, a lot is necessarily going to get excluded.

In any case, collecting historical overviews of the genre is part of my schtick here, so I repost them as I find them.

It may or may not be coincidental that Crunchyroll has recently acquired the rights to Healin’ Good Pretty Cure, which I believe is the first Pretty Cure series—except the original—to get licensed in English (not counting the brutally localized Glitter Force adaptations on Netflix). To a magical girl fan, that’s significant, and I hope it means more Pretty Cure series will appear on the service in the future. Since I refuse to use pirate sites, I still haven’t been able to watch most of this magical girl mega-franchise.

At the time of writing, however, only episodes 13 to 17 of Healin’ Good are available, but a notice indicates that episodes 1 to 12 will appear later. This perhaps represents some problems with the licensing.

Happy Sailor Moon’s Birthday

It is the official birthday of Sailor Moon today. As is fitting for such an event, the studio has released a video displaying the transformation sequences of Sailor Moon and Sailor Chibi Moon for the upcoming Sailor Moon: Eternal movie, as reported at Sailor Moon News.

Here is the video; the transformation starts about two thirds of the way in. Anyone familiar with Sailor Moon Super S, the series of the original anime that followed the Eternal arc, will notice the influence.

This movie is set to continue the (decidedly troubled) Sailor Moon: Crystal anime series, which sought to follow the manga more closely than the original anime did. Although it had a few innovative ideas (I am one of the few who likes the more developed backstory on the sailor scouts and the four Kings of Heaven), the show was troubled by poor animation and a variety of bad choices. Although a new director and new character designs improved the third series considerably, it still pales in comparison to its predecessor.

I can’t honestly say what I think about the upcoming Eternal movie, though I’ll be interested in seeing it. Super S is generally considered the weakest series of the old anime, so at least the new movie has less to compete with. It seems the production on this film has taken an awfully long time, which means either they’re being meticulous with it or the difficulties of the reboot are continuing.

Also, as I’ll explain later, I have a certain fondness for Super S, though I agree it’s not as good as the series that immediately preceded it. Its most notable feature, oft ridiculed, is a story arc in which a prepubescent girl falls romantically in love with a talking horse. A lot of people think that’s weird or creepy.

I think it’s funny as hell.

Women and Swords



This particular subject has come to my attention more than once in the last few days. As it happens, I recently submitted an essay for a book on writing (I’ll let you know if my submission is published) on how to create likable and believable “strong female characters.” This expression, “strong female character” gets tossed around a lot these days by people who never clearly define what they mean by it; and the characters presented to us nowadays in comics and film as “strong female characters” seem often catty and unlovable as well as overpowered.

My perennial interest in this topic has led me recently to return to the first two Alien films, which created a memorable and believably tough character in Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley, and I’ve also been exploring the original Video Girl Ai and Battle Angel Alita, manga that are now considered “old” according to the short memories of weeaboos, and both of which offer some high-octane feminine ass-kickery.

I’ve recently started watching Shadiversery, a YouTube channel by an Australian sword, history, and RPG enthusiast. The channel is mostly him going on about his subjects of interest, and I’m sure other enthusiasts or qualified experts would disagree with him on points, but he nonetheless appears for the most part to know what he’s talking about, and he offers an array of interesting opinions and factoids. When writing Jake and the Dynamo, I relied on him (and a few other YouTube channels) for the descriptions of Magical Girl Lady Paladin Andalusia’s sword work. Without the miracle of the internet, the descriptions of her sword would have probably been more Hollywood-ish.

Discussion

I’m fond of Shad because he avoids political dogmatism and just discusses his hobbies and interests with honest enthusiasm. Here, he takes on Andrew Klavan, another YouTuber I’ve sometimes appreciated, who sharply criticizes The Witcher for its depiction of women and swords. Shad reasonably breaks down the subject and corrects Klavan’s over-generalizations. Especially, Shad points to actual, real-life European martial-arts competitions that are mixed-sex, and in which women can effectively compete. He admits the disadvantages of reach, strength, speed, and endurance, but also emphasizes that weapons and skill can sometimes overcome these.

He points out something here that also happened to come up in another interaction I had recently: Klavan drastically overestimates the weight of a typical sword. Another acquaintance of mine, the prolific pulp author Ben Cheah, commented that he was reading an isekai series in which a guy who could handle an AK-47 could not lift a sword because it was too heavy. Cheah points out, correctly, that the sword should be considerably lighter than the variable-fire rifle.

Back to the original topic, I notice this issue coming up a lot when I listen to people skilled in martial arts talking about women in combat. Knowledgable as they are, they often get quite rigid on the subject. They correctly point out the physical disadvantages that a woman will almost always have in a fight against a man but tend to ignore other factors like differences in skill or technique—or chance.

Biology

After rebutting Klavan, Shad explains, reasonably, why it was practical, historically, not to have women in combat. He points specifically to biology: Men are naturally more aggressive, women are severely disadvantaged physically when pregnant, women are needed to produce the next generation when the men are off killing each other, and men naturally want to protect women.

Something else I would mention that he doesn’t—females generally fight differently from males, as attested by bar bouncers, soldiers, and anybody who scrapped on the playground as a child. Men create honor codes and fight for pride, and they peacock around before they start beating each other. Women, by contrast, can go from zero to claw-your-eyes-out in under a second. The reason for this may also be rooted in biology: Males establish social rank, either individually or nationally, through combat and dominance. Women, however, fight to protect their lives or their children. That’s why it’s usually the men go to war while the women only fight when the men are all dead.

Edit: As an additional forehead-slapper, someone in the comments on Shad’s video mentions St. Joan of Arc as a real-life warrior woman, so it is worth pointing out that, although St. Joan rode with the troops, she never fought herself and claimed she never personally killed anyone. However, I am made to understand she was a decent strategist who advocated an aggressive use of artillery, but that’s a role quite different from wielding a sword and hacking people.

Tod on Historical Armor

Came across this interesting video from Tod’s Workshop on why movie props in “sword-and-sandal” films are often inaccurate. As he explains, the reasons are often purely practical rather than because of poor research.

There are interesting points here. In a few of these cases, I can possibly think of ways of getting around these problems. He points out, for example, that sabatons—pointed armor shoes&dmash;are a safety hazard on-set. He’s undoubtedly right, though they could possilby get around that by making them with rubber instead of metal, something that’s often done in movies anyway for armor or other props used in stunts.

Some of his other points, though, are things that probably couldn’t be got around easily: Brightly colored props causing strobing in the camera, helmets covering A-list actors’ faces, and swords with sharp points presenting an insurmountable safety issue.

I Seriously Need to See ‘Evil Dead: The Musical’ …

Anyone know of a good version on a streaming service or something?

Chobits: Peace and Fear

I hate Chobits, as I’ve made clear more than once. I have enough on my plate that my essay on it is long in coming, but in the meantime, I recommend the above YouTube video from a user by the name of “Hiding in Public.”

Hiding in Public has a very different take on Chobits from my own, but I find it quite thoughtful, so I think it is worth hearing, and after I get my own essay up, his discussion will make for a good counterpoint to what I’ll have to say. Check it out.

Cherry 2000!

I am, against my better judgment, presently working my way through the anime adaptation of Chobits in order to write my long-promised essay on the same. In the process, however, I have inadvertently discovered that the campfest Cherry 2000, which I haven’t seen since I was a kid, is available free and legal on YouTube.

So I’m going to watch that, and I’ll put up a review when I’m finished. This will be relevant to my discussion of Chobits, since Cherry 2000 is about a man who goes looking for a replacement for his robot sex doll and finds a real woman instead—almost the opposite of Chobits’s plot.

I’m kind of excited in a silly sort of way. The last time I saw this movie, I was a little kid and came across it randomly while flipping channels in a motel room. My reaction was along the lines of, “What the hell is this?”

‘Alien’ vs. ‘Bloodchild,’ Part 3: The Director’s Cut

Before we get into a further discussion of the themes of Alien, I want to spend a little time on the director’s cut, which released in 2003. Ridley Scott went back over the film, tightening up parts and adding in a few deleted scenes. Unusually, the end result was a minute shorter than the original theatrical release.

My personal opinion about “director’s cuts” in general is that I don’t like them. In my experience, more often than not, a director’s cut is analogous to a novelist who goes over the head of his editor and includes a bunch of material he was advised to take out. More often than not, it’s material the final product was better off not having.

The biggest change in Alien is a scene near the end in which Ripley finds two of her crewmates cocooned into a wall by the alien’s secretions, a scene that anticipates the alien hive full of ill-fated colonists in the sequel—a concept James Cameron apparently came up with independently. Although kind of a welcome detail in hindsight, it disrupts the tension of movie’s climax, and for that reason the film is better off without it.

Also, I have twice now seen fans interpreting this as depicting human victims transforming into alien eggs, something that would contradict the alien life cycle that the franchise ultimately developed, though I admit this interpretation does not appear to me to be warranted by anything in the scene.

The only included scene that I thought made an improvement is after the first crewman, Brett, gets killed: Two others rush in to see the alien dragging him away, which makes for a better transition to the next scene.

Aside from that, most of the changes are almost impossible to notice except to someone who’s memorized the film.

I thought something similar when I watched the theatrical and director’s cut versions of the sequel Aliens side-by-side. Aliens is an action movie, and the theatrical version is faster-paced and more intense. The added scenes—a monologue by a marine, a pointless subplot featuring automatic gun turrets, a lengthy scene featuring the doomed colonists—accomplish nothing except slowing down the action. Again, there’s one exception, the detail that Ripley had a daughter who died while Ripley was in suspended animation, which anticipates her relationship with the orphan girl Newt.

Also, I have to add one additional curiosity: I have never thought Alien, with its deliberately slow pacing, was very scary. I recently showed it to the magical girl for the first time, and she made the same comment, that it was an impressive film but not particularly frightening. She was clearly much more moved by Aliens, which made her jump or squeal several times and during which she showed a lot more emotional engagement.