Note: This post is considered an episode review and it dives into spoilers for the movie.
Following the original 2011 TV show came Puella Magi Madoka Magica the Movie, a film series that re-tells and then continues the show’s story. I’ve always felt content with the original Madoka TV series so I’ve never actually seen these movies until now. I’m finally biting the bullet on them for the episode reviews. After seeing Magia Record Season 1, I might as well. The first two movies are compilation films. I generally see compilation films as glorified recap episodes and usually for episode reviews, I stick with one version of an anime so I could skip these movies. That said, I was curious to see how the show would fare in movie form so I ended up watching the first movie (I’ll obviously watch the second one next). I’m a bit of a completionist when it comes to episode reviews so I feel a little weird to cover the third movie of a series and not the first two so to appease myself, here’s a shortish writeup.
The first movie, Beginnings, is a movie edit of the first eight episodes of the TV series. It’s a lot of ground to cover, even with a 2 hour 10 minute runtime. I was afraid the movie would rush through things but while some material did get cut, most of it remains intact. The movie is entirely coherent even to a newcomer of the franchise, to the point that you could watch the movie instead of the show. There are only two omissions that I disagree with. The first is Madoka’s dream scene in the very beginning of the series. That establishes the mystery connection between Madoka and Homura and weirdly enough, Madoka still mentions the dream during the movie. The second is Mami’s backstory. Its exclusion does frame Sayaka’s wish as more impulsive and naive, and that suits her character arc, but not revealing Mami’s wish is weird and it kind of takes away from the tragic tone of Mami’s death.
Technically, there a lot of a changes between the movie and the TV show, more than you’d expect for a compilation film, but a lot of it boils down to presentational stuff. Shaft redraws a lot of the art, almost to an obsessive and unnecessary degree. Like, the animators redesign the interior of Madoka’s school but that’s the kind of thing that makes no difference in a story. Some of the alterations does spruce up the continuity and that I can at least understand. For example, the scene from Episode 6 where Madoka tries to stop Sayaka from fighting Kyoko and everyone learns the truth about Soul Gems has Madoka in her pajamas. That’s something you wouldn’t really think about when watching the show but I get someone wanting to change that because it is silly that Madoka is still in her school uniform late at night.
Aside from the art, there’s some new music composed for the movie. I don’t know if it really improves on the story but it’s nevertheless quite good. I’ve read the cast re-recorded some amount of dialogue but I don’t know to what extent. I’ll admit that I don’t get the necessity as I think the cast already did get a great job in the show, especially Aoi Yuki as Madoka. I doubt it was for better audio quality as it frankly doesn’t sound that much better compared to show’s audio.
There’s a tiny amount of new stuff in this movie. The characters are given entirely new transformation sequences. I like the transformations in the show but they are very brief. These new ones are longer and a lot flashier by comparison. Mami actually gets two transformations, one for her introduction and one for her fight against Charlotte. The animators could’ve easily repeated the same one for the sake of time so I admire that they went the extra mile here. There is also a new OP. I didn’t talk about it in my episode reviews for the show but yes, the original OP was one gigantic lie (though the lyrics are actually very relevant to the story). It’s hilarious then that the movie’s OP just spoils the whole story. Also, how dare this OP show Madoka’s childhood. Knowing her arc ultimately ends, watching her grow up with her friends and especially her family got me very emotional.
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