Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica (also known as Puella Magi Modoka Magica in Latin) has to be one of most anticipated Magical Girl in the 2011 Winter Season. This show has some similarities with Nanoha since Akiyuki Shinbo directs this show. Subsequently I enjoyed the show and wish to share my thoughts about the first episode.
If you had watched the first season of Nanoha, you might notice some of the similarities with Madoka Magica. First off, Madoka saves a magical ferret creature, Kyubei that is calling her for help through telepathy. Second, Madoka has two best friends. One of them eventually becomes a magical girl with her. Lastly, the girls encounter a battle towards the end of the episode. In a way, it feels like the first episode of Nanoha since it followed a similar fashion except a few noticeable differences.
While the first episode of Madoka Magica had a similar fashion with Nanoha, there are some differences. Most importantly, we are introduced to the antagonist, Homura Akemi in the first episode. She was depicted as the destroyer the whole city in Madoka’s dream. As a result, Madoka became anxious of the girl. Homura is also shown as an anti-social girl whom attacks the magical ferret and creates a really scary horror-esque experience for the other girls. Fortunately, a cute blond hair girl uses her magical power to fight Homura off and save them from the horror.
The animation is good and appealing even though the mileage may vary with any Shaft productions. If you seen ef – a tale of memories/melodies or any other shows made by Shaft, you probably see some rather random scenes. This applies to this show, except its really grotesque and weirder than ever. For instance, Homura creates an illusion of a nightmare to make the girls scared. Furthermore, The colors are rather soft and present to look at if you look past the nightmare fuel. Also, the music seems to be good. Since it’s the first episode, I expect to hear more good music in future episodes.
Besides the action that happens in the latter part, there are some nice slice of life moments. In the beginning, Madoka’s younger brother tries to wake is mom when in fact, he is doing it completely wrong… You are supposed to open the shades and take the blanket off the person. Soon after, he had tomato around his mouth when he was eating his breakfast. When Madoka walks to school, she meets her friends. One of her friends notices that she looks different appearance and starts to tease her. I guess this can happen to anyone if someone changes his or her appearance drastically.
Overall, I think this show has a good start, especially after the long inactivity of a pure Mahou Shoujo genre (excluding Nanoha Movie 1st). Like Sora no Woto from last year, the story in Madoka Magica is unpredictable since it’s a completely original story. I hope the story remains interesting in future episodes.
I don’t think the blond girl fought off Homura, but a different force. She did say something about the witch passing, didn’t she? I assumed that meant there was someone else out there trying to affect the world.
Leaves open a lot of mysteries for sure, and that’s partly why I’m excited to see what comes down the line from here.
I noticed nice I was pushing this post really late at night… My mistakes, but the persons motives to make this illusion or destroy the city is still unknown…
Otherwise, I’m pretty interested in the show like you are… I still wonder how the full op/eds will play out…
Well, I wasn’t that thrilled with the first episode and as a result dropped the show. It’s not that there were too many things wrong with it — to put it simply apart from the cute animation, characters and music, which were all BTW somewhat bleak and not in itself worthy of watching the show, there was little else about it that grabbed my attention. Okay, the breakfast scene was nice, but you get nice looking food in almost any anime nowadays :p
So yeah…I will keep an eye on this but I’m 99% sure I won’t be picking it back up – two seasons of Nanoha (the 3rd sucks so I dropped it) and the movie were quite enough for me to develop a tolerance to Mahou Shoujo genre, there are better animes to watch and life is short.
Since you brought it up, this show seems to feel darker compared to other magical girl shows that tends to be fluffy and cute. It’s different, but at least it sticked to the genre.
StrikerS is not that good since they cut too many characters from the story, doesn’t feel like a magical girl show and too much on the training scenes is the comments I usually hear. Basically, the title is really misleading, but whatever… I won’t watch the 3rd season because of its reputation.