Mahou Shoujo Madoka★Magica Movie 4: Walpurgis no Kaiten

Walpurgisnacht: Rising presents a sequel to Rebellion while somewhat focusing on Walpurgis in the second half. The most striking thing about this movie was how unexpected, both for the visuals and the scenario. In what is now standard for PMMM: Come with no expectations, and be totally flabbergasted.

I did not get the scenario very well because of my poor Japanese, but to not spoil, as new magical girls appear as new friends to the Quartet, in this new world, all the characters have differing plans for Madoka. The main protagonists are unexpectedly SayaHomu, with fake Homura being the troublemaker but an incredible character, while Kyouko ... and Nagisa+Mami have most of a fighting/supporting role. Meanwhile, Madoka is mostly being lugged around by the plot, but that's okay.

While being sometimes visually creepy, its actually quite more optimistic and less noir than Rebellion: It is no longer a façade but an utterly broken world that is all largely altered and controlled by Homura, while everything looks nice and happy for the main characters. The main theme is how magical girls are not acting for themselves, but for others, and why they do so. It is strong emotionally, but it thematically seems simpler than the earlier iterations. Some will see the links with Kazumi Magica at some points.

"Even if you ignored the story completely, there is still more than enough here to make the movie worth watching."

Visuals is where Walpurgisnacht: Rising shines the most (explaining the delays maybe), because with exceptions, every shot is perfectly crafted and unique, as you'll nearly never see the same thing twice, which actually makes the first third seem somewhat disjointed: there is a myriad of places with different ambiances that appear all throughout the movie. The details and creativity in the scenes make it a whole league above other anime movies and sometimes even overwhelming: It uses every trick in the Madoka style book and ramps it up ten-fold. It is more surrealistic than the Rebellion's world, except it is now the reality of the new world.

Music is on-par with the rest, but I do not think it was as good as Rebellion. It keeps some musical references to the original, and goes from complete silence to duper-epic, which is more impactful in the cinema. Even the sound design is good, which is important considering the quantity of destruction that happens.

Indeed, the pacing is fast and the parallel storylines, coupled with grandiose fights and décors, make oftentimes an over-the-top experience, if you like that.

PS: If you saw the post-post-credits scene of Rebellion, it's really the first minutes of the movie, but its more of a backdrop and not really related to the rest.

My biggest mistake was not refreshing my memory of the TV series beforehand (I've already corrected that oversight), because the movie is a direct sequel and doesn't make any effort to introduce new viewers.

The film grossed an enormous one billion yen in just four days. Does it deserve that success, and why did it happen?

Frankly, there's not much surprising about it. Lately, high-profile anime films have been breaking records one after another. *Madoka* has a huge fanbase in its home country, and it's still a successful franchise even years after the original release. That's especially impressive considering that direct sequels usually underperform.

I'm not a fan ... of the franchise. I only went to see it because I was curious about how Shaft was doing these days. So, despite not understanding what was happening in the script, I got tremendous enjoyment out of the visuals.

They really are stunning. There are countless bold, insane visual ideas, a mix of different styles, and beautiful action scenes. The film isn't beautiful in the way something like *Demon Slayer* is; it's beautiful because of its direction and style. The animation is excellent, though it's not on Ufotable's level. But it doesn't need to be.

That said, I do have a few complaints about the visuals.

The first, and biggest, is that I couldn't see any meaning behind the imagery. It felt as though these visuals existed simply because they were unusual and beautiful. I have a fairly broad cultural background, but I couldn't recognize any visual references in them, aside from a handful of nods to classic anime.

The second issue is the film's unconventional storytelling. Normally, I'd consider that a positive, but here the first half gave me the impression that someone had taken the text of a novel, left it completely unadapted, and simply overlaid visuals that only loosely connected to what was being said.

What I mean is that the characters don't really talk on screen. They do speak, but it's mostly off-screen, while on-screen we either see them from behind as they go about their business or simply look at cityscapes. The film never creates a real sense of place. Even though we're shown views of a relatively realistic city, the characters move through it off-screen, and the locations they actually appear in are completely different from the city and don't match its establishing shots at all. Instead, we get circus-like settings, phantasmagorical cafés, and fantastical temples.

Together, these two issues create a strange sense of dissonance. I'm technically watching a movie, but it feels like an audiobook being narrated over random imagery. In the second half, the storytelling becomes more conventional, and that dissonance disappears.

Although I didn't understand the story because I'd forgotten too much of the original and because it was too linguistically complex for my level of Japanese, I came away with the impression that there wasn't anything particularly special about it: once again, someone is trying to drag Madoka into another mess, and once again Homura is trying to stop it.

To sum up this review—which is unusually long for my account—I was surprised that I never got bored. Even with its flaws, the visuals are strong enough to keep you engaged. Even more surprising is the fact that a feature film with such an unconventional style is setting box office records in a country that, at times, seems to have had much of its creative spirit beaten out of it by the popularity of shallow, formulaic works like *Demon Slayer*.

I sincerely recommend you do not watch this movie. It exists for no other purpose than to tease another movie. It's the textbook definition of spoiler bait; Walpurgisnacht Rising gives us no conclusions or resolutions to any of the questions asked in Rebellion; its dialogue is vapid, and the abstract and experimental visuals that set Rebellion apart from any other movie outside of the work of Satoshi Kon have become equally vapid, more style over substance here. We get one interesting story, that of Walpurgisnacht, but frankly even this too is not explored enough. All of the characters feel like caricatures; Madoka is nothing more ... than a plot device with basically zero agency, and she's one of the better treated characters. Homura is the victim of a character assassination here as the movie not only sprints away from making any particular statement on what she has done to Madoka in Rebellion, it leans if anywhere, toward ENDORSING her actions which is utterly mind-boggling. Because the movie refuses to reach any conclusion whatsoever, this just feels extremely strange. The ending is not satisfying. It's infuriating, even, with it quite literally being the phrase "As you were then!" put into cinematic form. NOTHING changes, nothing at all, except for the knowledge of some characters. Even visually, whilst beautiful, doesn't hold a candle to Rebellion.

Frankly, this movie should have been one act of an actual sequel movie. It feels more like a beautifully animated cash grab than a sincere sequel. It's an insult to the genius of Rebellion, and an insult to the fans (many of whom will no doubt simply see the caricatures (faces) of the characters they like and be satisfied anyway). Where Rebellion genuinely shattered my impression of the original series and made me wonder how I EVER thought the story was finished with Madoka's sacrifice, Walpurgisnacht Rising does the exact opposite in having me question whether Rebellion needs a sequel at all.