Puella Magi Madoka Magica the Movie -Rebellion-

I told myself when I watched it that I wouldn’t review Rebellion. It’s a dense, dark, intimidating thing from any critical perspective. Both a tweak and coda of the series that spawned it, a look into the minds of its creators, sure, but something that somehow feels bigger than any of that. This is a film that gets compared to End of Evangelion a lot for a reason; they don’t just fulfill similar roles in their respective franchises, they’re about as hard to come up with anything new to say about.

Yet, here’s a thought. What if I simply didn’t?

Call this a thought-knot. Observations and musings and stray ideas. Critique as poem or the other way around. Call it half-coherent rambling. Call it pretense, if you’re so inclined. Writing a core thesis about Rebellion is an impossibility, at least it is for yours truly.

Yet the form demands structure. Let us begin.

It feels pedestrian to talk about Rebellion’s plot. Parallels to Paradise Lost and its knotty worlds-within-worlds setup have been discussed to death. Thematically, trying to untangle the twine ball that is whatever the hell this film is trying to say feels like a lost cause. Many, many, many factors went into Rebellion’s writing, from the deliberate to the incidental, from the deeply profound to the shamelessly practicalist. Allegedly, the film’s big twist in its final act came about at least in part simply because there were aspirations to make another film after it, and well, you can’t rightly have something end in a happily ever after if you’re going to follow it up, can you?

To talk about Rebellion is to destroy it. This is what “deconstruction” used to mean, in another time. Or at least close to it, the man who coined the term was clear that it was “not an analysis or a technique”. Yet, here we are.

It has been about a week since I finished Rebellion. The day I saw it, I thought the film might be good except for its finale. The day after, I thought maybe the finale was one of the most genuinely shocking I’d ever seen. Today, I think the entire thing might be brilliant, but not the sort of auteur brilliance that is generally associated with the sort of admittedly “lowbrow” anime criticism I usually traffic in. There is something sort of wickedly sublime about Rebellion. The way its paper-shapes are arranged all wrong, the light that leaks from every source that emits it.

It’s well documented that the film’s first third is a pastiche (some might say parody, others, less inclined to give Urobuchi and company the benefit of a doubt, may say skewering) of a magical warrior-style mahou shoujo series. The symbolism even in this part of the film has been analyzed front-to-back for most of the last decade. Even taken on a base level, it gives us some of the downright coolest henshin sequences the genre’s ever seen. A thought I certainly have about the film is that an entire series done in this style would be absolutely flooring. The currently-airing Magia Record is great in part because it occasionally is that.

In part I think what Rebellion unintentionally reflects is the difficulty of grappling with Madoka Magica’s own legacy. The series itself has grown, witchlike, into a long and crooked shadow. Every magical girl anime after Madoka has that shadow cast upon it. I’ve made this point before, but it’s worth reiterating here because Rebellion in some ways feels like one of the first “post-Madoka” entries into the genre. Despite being a part of that same franchise in terms of characters and the like, it’s not unreasonable to read the entire film as a thesis on what you even do when you’ve made something like Madoka.

Rejecting it all and burning it to the ground is certainly one option. It’s the option many of Madoka’s absolute worst imitators have taken, but if we take what happens here to be that, it’s put to different ends. Spare a thought and a tear for the character of Homura, a personage so skewered by the tragic narrative she finds herself in that her self-destructive tendencies bring the whole universe down around her. Spare two prayers too for Madoka herself, probably the least interesting character in the main series, here, her character is given a subtle glow that actually does make her feel like the ur-mahou that the original series’ finale tried to paint her as. It’s a subtle, subtle difference, but it’s there.

Of course, what even is a magical girl?

That’s a shockingly tough question. People both far more and far less qualified than myself have weighed in, and there is no consensus. The history of the genre (beginning with Himetsu no Akko-chan, it’s generally agreed) is well-documented, but as for what a magical girl herself should be. What qualities she should have, what kind of femininity she should embody--if “she” even needs to be a girl at all--what abilities, what demographic is the work she’s in aimed at, all of this is the subject of ongoing, sometimes fierce, debate, in all forums of art discussion among people who care about anime as an artform.

Rebellion feels like an earnest engagement with the genre--moreso I’d argue than its parent series--by virtue of offering no definitive single statement on the subject.

Madoka, the omnibenevolent goddess, is as much a magical girl as her counterpart Homura, the selfish devil. They act with the abilities they have to their own goals--diametrically opposed as they are. Certainly so are the other Puella Magi (this movie marks the first time the term is used in-universe). The mahou-ness is a hard quality to quantify, as hard to hold as water. Magical Girls are known when they are recognized. This is what sets Madoka Magica apart its least imitators; series that create no earnest engagement with the archetype, instead content to simply play dress-up.

What else is there to say?

Well, on a pure craft level, the film is basically untouchable. Gekidan Inu Curry and Akiyubi Shinbou are masters of their medium(s) and Rebellion is an arguable peak of all their powers. The film is bowl-you-over gorgeous.

Specific sequences need no mention beyond brief descriptors. There’s the gunfight. Sayaka summoning Oktavia. Homura breaking out of her prison. All of this a haunted choir.

One thing to be said in the concrete: Rebellion is a film whose reputation has changed over time. It will not, I think, ever truly settle. That long crooked shadow has only recently begun to be broken up by new lights. By series who have taken this film’s tone, one of the least ambiguous things about it, as something of a challenge. By series also, who seek to build on what it has accomplished. Art begets art. Influence begets influence. Madoka has a thousand and one daughters, some of whom have daughters of their own. I call it like I see it, and I see brilliance.

Who, really, is dreaming?

And if you liked this review, why not check out some of my others here on Anilist?