Puella Magi Madoka Magica Review

For two episodes Madoka Magica looks like the genre its character designs promise. Ume Aoki draws round faces and big eyes, a small white creature called Kyubey offers Madoka Kaname any wish she likes if she will become a magical girl, and an older girl, Mami, shows her how glorious the fighting can be. The third episode ends that pretence, and the rest of the twelve are about the contract: what the girls actually become, what the witches actually are, and what Kyubey, who never lies and never tells the whole truth, is harvesting.

Gen Urobuchi's script is built like a trap, and the tenth episode, which reveals what Homura Akemi has been doing all along, recasts everything before it. Akiyuki Shinbo's staff at Shaft stage it with the studio's angular compositions, the witches' labyrinths are collage nightmares by the art unit Gekidan Inu Curry, and Yuki Kajiura's score gives the despair an operatic scale.

The animation is limited in places and the world beyond the five girls is sketched thinly, but the acclaim is close to total. It took the animation Grand Prize at the Japan Media Arts Festival and the Tokyo Anime Award for television, and its last two episodes, delayed by the 2011 earthquake, closed on an ending the genre has been answering ever since.