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recentanimenews · 3 years

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FEATURE: Madoka, Wonder Egg Priority, and the Future of Late-Night Magical Girl Shows

Beware! This article contains spoilers for the beginning of Puella Magi Madoka Magica.

It is January 21st, 2011. In the shadows of a witch’s labyrinth, two girls named Madoka and Mami form a close bond. Mami is a magical girl, powerful but lonely. Madoka decides, then and there, to fight by Mami’s side. But then, in the middle of combat, the witch Charlotte transforms into a giant worm and bites off Mami’s head. Madoka’s eyes widen in shock. A broken china cup seeps tea on the ground. Smash cut to the wails of goth rock trio Kalafina as black clouds roil and a single flickering shape strides toward oblivion. Three episodes in, Puella Magi Madoka Magica threw down the gauntlet. Over ten years later, the mark it left is still there.

Puella Magi Madoka Magica was special. But why? Not because it was the “first dark magical girl series.” Sailor Moon, the modern magical girl standard-bearer, became popular not just because of its charming characters but because the show could do things like briefly kill everyone during the series finale. Even magical girl series aimed at younger audiences, like Ojamajo Doremi, tackled subjects like the death of a pet or the aftermath of a divorce. Not to mention the infamous 46th episode of Magical Girl Minky Momo from 1983, when the titular heroine was hit by a truck! Truly, everything has been done before.

The secret to Madoka Magica’s success is that it is not really a magical girl show. It is a suspense thriller cunningly disguised as a magical girl show. It has as much in common with Kamen Rider Ryuuki as it has with Sailor Moon, and was written by Gen Urobuchi, a former eroge game writer who ran in the same circles as Kinoko Nasu and Hoshizora Meteo. Madoka Magica is not interested in the slow process of endearment by which magical girl series ease you into the daily routines of their characters — the weekly monsters, transformation stock footage, holidays, and very special episodes. It presents as such only as long as it takes to put you off guard, and then (clad in the gorgeous raiment of art team Gekidan Inu Curry) it goes for your throat.

So it was that Madoka Magica became the standard-bearer of a new kind of late-night anime. Rather than “cute girls doing cute things,” let’s call this genre “cruel things happening to cute girls.” Take something charming and unassuming, like a magical girl story or a high school slice-of-life show. Populate it with fun, marketable characters. Then set those characters screaming when the real story pops out like a jack-in-the-box. The frisson between cute and scary hopefully generates enough charge to catch the attention of audiences, but — most importantly — audiences don’t have to reach that far to engage with it. That is because these shows are built off those same conventions that anime fans are familiar with. Those conventions just happen to be evil this time.

As often happens in the entertainment industry, the success of Madoka spawned many copies. These projects did not have Gen Urobuchi, and they were often not lucky enough to have an art team as singular as Gekidan Inu Curry. All things considered, they tried their best. YUKI YUNA IS A HERO brought a different former eroge game writer, Takahiro, on board. Magical Girl Spec-Ops Asuka made its team of magical girls a proper military unit. More recently, GRANBELM added giant robots to the stew. I’d say Granbelm is my favorite of these, if only because the giant robots were pretty cool! I’d love to see them in a Super Robot Wars game one day.

Some of the more interesting entries in the “cruel things happening to cute girls” genre didn’t have any magical girls in them at all. Selector Infected Wixoss was a card battle show about teens fighting for wishes; writer Mari Okada smartly changed focus from the cruel system tearing the characters apart to the way that individual selfishness keeps cruel systems running perpetually. SCHOOL-LIVE! featured a group of schoolgirls continuing their slice of life activities within a world devastated by a zombie apocalypse; the anime production was bolstered by a murderer’s row of writers from Nitroplus, Urobuchi’s former stomping ground. Episode 3 — a flashback to teacher Megumi on the day of the outbreak — is a genuine triumph, precisely because it is so earnest. Rather than pushing hard to shock or disgust the viewer, it allows the characters to breathe in the moments leading to disaster and lets the horror come naturally.

Traditional magical girl shows, in the meantime, have been doing just fine. We’ve seen several good seasons of Precure and two fantastic ones, the all-rounder Go! Princess Precure and uneven but groundbreaking Hugtto! Precure. Sailor Moon’s Crystal remake seasons and movies have steadily improved after a rocky start. The first few seasons of magical idol series Aikatsu are charming and introduce a fun legacy quirk that ties together characters from different seasons. Even Ojamajo Doremi has seen a follow-up film that puts the spotlight on the generation who grew up watching it.

Madoka’s successors, on the other hand, are in a trickier place. Some of them have been successful, others have been good, but none have recaptured that lightning in a bottle that made Madoka a hit. Even a recent Madoka Magica series based on a phone game, written by Gekidan Inu Curry themselves, came and went without much buzz.

In the years since Madoka aired, there have been plenty of folks who have expressed their reservations about the “cruel things happening to cute girls” genre. After all, magical girl series can be revolutionary or transgressive without being cruel. Hugtto! Precure introduced the series’ first male Precure (equally comfortable wearing dresses as skating outfits) and featured a romantic partnership between two of its female leads. Go! Princess Precure’s best fight scenes are as spectacular as anything in this year’s Jujutsu Kaisen, yet remain perfectly accessible for its target audience of young girls. Madoka's progeny may have been targeted at older — and often, male — audiences, but outside of some blood and gore just a few of these series were more genuinely mature than the children’s series they riffed upon.

Image via HiDive

I do still see a future for late-night magical girl shows. In 2016, a weird magical girl series called Flip Flappers aired. Directed by animation wunderkind Kiyotaka Oshiyama, it featured two girls in love traveling through many strange and colorful environments in search of macguffins. Hidden inside a candy coating of marketable elements was everything from the Freudian fairy tale theories of Bruno Bettelheim, to architectural oddities such as thomassons, to occult figures like Jakob von Uexkull. Flip Flappers harnessed some of Madoka Magica’s sense of danger, putting its cast into intense and scary situations from the very first episode. But it was not a show about girls being tortured by an evil system; it was a show about girls exploring surreal dreamscapes. A new genre had been created: “cute girls doing weird things.”

Here are the cornerstones for the “cute girls doing weird things” genre: you need girls of course, maybe even magical girls, but the rules behind their magic are nebulous. Rather than take children’s genres and corrupt them, you build out atmospheric settings, drop in the characters, and see what happens next. You give the cast room to express themselves within the bounds of the story, rather than leading them down an assembly line to their doom. The malevolence of Madoka is not off-limits, but more useful still than malevolence is uncertainty. The goal is to unsettle the viewer rather than disgust them.

Image via Funimation

Five years after Flip Flappers, a new show walks these same steps: Wonder Egg Priority, an original series from CloverWorks. Of course, Wonder Egg Priority is aiming at something totally different than Flip Flappers. Its spooky environments are incidental. Its main aim is, through riffing on the work of Kyoto Animation and famed director Naoko Yamada, depicting in full and uncompromising detail the difficult emotional lives of teenage girls living in the modern-day. Those lives just happen to be filtered through an anime lens of trauma manifesting as horrific creatures that have to be destroyed, and girls that need to be saved. Yet to me, Wonder Egg Priority captures the dreamlike atmosphere that Flip Flappers achieved in its best moments — the means by which characters exploring unfamiliar spaces reveal themselves in new and different forms. Despite being made of familiar parts, in execution, I think it is something new.

Somewhere between Flip Flappers and Wonder Egg Priority lies the future of late-night magical girl shows. They should not ever replace the ones made for kids; those do perfectly fine on their own, thank you very much. But in their embrace of uncertainty, I recognize a ghost of what I once felt when I first saw Charlotte’s gaping maw. The sensation that the ground had disappeared, and that — like magic — anything was possible.

What's your favorite recent magical girl show? Are you excited for the newest season of Precure? Does Wonder Egg Priority terrify you on a weekly basis like it terrifies me? Let us know in the comments!

Adam W is a Features Writer at Crunchyroll. When he isn't reciting lines from Revolutionary Girl Utena, he sporadically contributes with a loose coalition of friends to a blog called Isn't it Electrifying? You can find him on Twitter at @wendeego

Do you love writing? Do you love anime? If you have an idea for a features story, pitch it to Crunchyroll Features!

By: Adam Wescott

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recentanimenews · 4 years

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Celebrating Everyone's Favorite Anime Butcher, Gen Urobuchi

There was a city that purged its citizens of emotions in the aftermath of a great disaster. Many years later, an enforcer of justice stalks the streets with his partner and eliminates those who defy society's rules. But after he encounters a man reading classic literature, his outlook on life changes completely. Can he overcome the cruel, oppressive world in which he lives?

If you’re an anime fan, you’re probably thinking: “Oh, I love PSYCHO-PASS!” But this was Equilibrium, a 2002 box office flop starring Christian Bale just a few years before his star turn in Batman Begins. The film received middling critical reviews, but clearly someone had their eye on it. Just one year later, a scriptwriter at the then up and coming visual novel studio Nitro+ co-produced an unofficial sequel to the movie: Jouka no Monshou. Only a few hours long, it expanded on the themes and worldbuilding of the original film, particularly fleshing out its infamous, fictional martial arts style of “gun kata.”

That December, in 2003, Nitro+ released the visual novel Song of Saya. Advertised as a charming college romance, it was instead a gruesome and disturbing horror tale that took influence from the stories of H.P. Lovecraft and video nasties like Possession. And the man who wrote the script? The writer of Jouka no Monshou, our friend and birthday boy Gen Urobuchi. Less than a decade later, with a successful light novel prequel to Fate/Stay Night under his belt, he was brought on to write 2011’s late night smash hit Puella Magi Madoka Magica and became one of the most famous scriptwriters in the anime industry.

Standing out as an anime scriptwriter is no mean feat. The medium is so collaborative that directors, producers and animators often have just as much say as the person who’s been designated for “scenario writing” or “series composition.” Of the handful of writers who have managed to make a name for themselves outside of the creative staff they associate with, perhaps only Gen Urobuchi and Mari Okada have made a mark for themselves this decade as figures so singular that they’ve been given the keys to direct work of their own.

If Mari Okada’s brand is melodrama, creating plots where characters overcome societal expectations to loudly express their feelings, many have claimed Urobuchi’s specialty is “tragedy.” His stories are full of great men laid low, young women whose innocence is shattered, decent people transformed through hardship into depraved monsters. Vicious worlds governed by amoral gods, where the strong prey upon the weak and those who are not strong must struggle to survive.

Those who love his work compare him to Dostoyevsky, or to classic Greek tragedy. Others despise his sometimes schlocky violence, frequent reliance on the same character archetypes, and—most of all—the number of women in his work who end up strangled to death, among other horrible fates.

But I brought up Jouka no Monshou and Song of Saya earlier in this piece to reclaim Urobuchi’s career: not as a writer of tragedies, but a writer of pulps. Urobuchi is not an original writer. By his own admission, his work borrows heavily from others. Madoka leans heavily on past, meaner seasons of Kamen Rider and the cosmic horror of H.P. Lovecraft. Fate/Zero greatly expands the universe of Fate/Stay Night, but many of its cruelest twists are extrapolated straight from the latter routes of the original game. PSYCHO-PASS in particular features just about everything Urobuchi enjoys writing about: a dystopian city right out of Equilibrium, freaky body horror involving brains in jars and shocking murders, and a battle of wits between a conflicted agent of the law and an amoral criminal mastermind.

Urobuchi’s great skill at a writer is taking these complex plots built of recognizable parts, and then streamlining them into vicious and efficient suspense machines that surprise even when you know what horrors are coming. The big reveal of Song of Saya—that the little girl the main character befriends is really something horrible and other—is brought out again and again in his later stories, from the secret origin of the squid aliens in Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet to the symbolic fruit trees in Kamen Rider Gaim. Nearly every time, it works like gangbusters. Maybe it’s that Urobuchi is always careful to give us at least one character who is in on the take, bending society around them to fulfill their dreams. The assassins, obsessives and professionals, the ones who cut through the universe like butter and know exactly what kind of story they are in. When Kiritsugu obliterates an opponent in the Holy Grail War with a dirty trick, we nod along because in that situation we would have done the same thing. But then Kiritsugu is laid low, and we are shocked. If Kiritsugu knew the axe hanging over his head, and was still crushed when it fell, couldn’t the same happen to us?

My favorite recent work by Gen Urobuchi is the first season of Thunderbolt Fantasy, which represents everything I find appealing about his creations. First, it’s a labor of love, spotlighting a puppet troupe that is hugely popular in Taiwan but unknown elsewhere. Second, it’s a classic story of good versus evil that trims away many of Urobuchi’s excesses while remaining distinctive and flavorful; the puppets suffer extreme bodily harm up to and including decapitation, but there’s a refreshing lack of sexual or sadomasochistic violence. Third, despite being a wuxia story where powerful martial artists beat the tar out of each other, success is determined by trickery and guile.

The most dangerous force in the story is not the memorably named Screaming Phoenix Killer, or the ruthless Mie Tian Hai. It’s the thief Lin Xue Ya, who despite being the most talented swordsman alive would rather lie and cheat his way through life, humiliating people who think they have the world figured out. After all, it’s far more entertaining that way!

But Lin Xue Ya makes a serious mistake at the end of Thunderbolt Fantasy, putting the fate of the world at risk and endangering his life of fun and amusement. It’s ultimately the wandering monk Shang Bu Huan, a truly decent human being, who saves the day. Just like Madoka saved Homura from succumbing to despair, or how Akane surpasses even Kogami as the greatest threat to the Sybil System. Urobuchi caters to the bloodthirst of his fans, throwing them for a loop again and again. But at the end he’ll give us a hero. Thank you Gen Urobuchi, and happy birthday!

Are you a fan of Gen Urobuchi? Are you looking forward to his most recent project? Let us know in the comments!

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Adam W is a Features Writer at Crunchyroll. He sporadically contributes with a loose coalition of friends to a blog called Isn't it Electrifying? Did you know that Gen Urobuchi, Kinoko Nasu, Romeo Tanaka and Hoshizora Meteo are all friends? The more you know. You can find Adam at: @wendeego

Do you love writing? Do you love anime? If you have an idea for a features story, pitch it to Crunchyroll Features!

By: [email protected]

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