If you are going to make time travel a part of a story, then you need to make it the focus of the story and actively explore the many paradoxes that time travel story lines throw up. Without getting into spoiler territory, there’s also a time travel plot strand that’s thrown into the movie, and handled terribly. I assume by the dialogue of the animal-like thing that awakens the power of the magical girls, Kyubey, that it is meant to be a benevolent benefactor, but it’s difficult to shake the impression that it might be the most sinister thing in the entire anime, and I have narrowed that impression down to the fact that the character and the voice actor simply don’t gel as well as they probably should. This also leads to some odd moments of characterisation. The voice acting is uneven across both the Japanese and English dub, with some key characters coming across as more irritating than they should be thanks to the voice acting. It’s only in the witches’ labyrinths that there is an explosion of energy and movement. Some interesting use of colour aside, the anime uses many of the same tricks as cheaper anime series, with long pauses with no animation to chew up time, and highly static backgrounds to save on animation effects.

The quality of the art, as purely inventive as it is, isn’t quite up to standard for a feature film, either. Because this is a movie (spread across two discs) as opposed to a longer anime series, the pacing of Madoka Magica is snappy enough, though it does feel more like an extended episode of a standard anime than a proper animated film like what Studio Ghibli would produce.

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