Puella Magi Madoka Magica the Movie Part III: Rebellion · 11:48pm Jun 18th, 2015
I said I'd post something every Thursday, didn't I? Fortunately I sneakily wrote this ahead of time in case I put it off until the last moment.
No cow is too sacred for me to tip. I’ve insulted Shakespeare, Hemingway, Joyce, Flannery O’Connor, William Faulkner, and Philip K. Dick. Now I’ve finally worked up the courage to take on
There are a lot of things to like about this movie! The animation is continually fresh and compelling, maybe even more so than in the TV series. The characters aren’t developed any more from the original, and the main character (Homura, not Madoka) is even taken down a notch and made into more of a plot device, but they’re still good characters. The plot builds on the fine structure of Madoka Magica, and it has three nice twists. In fact, this movie has everything going for it, except for the climax which everything else in the movie exists only to support. That part sucks.
But it sucks in an interesting and illustrative way.
You can write a story, like a computer program, top-down or bottom-up. Top-down means starting with the big picture: the themes, the character arc, the target audience demographics. Bottom-up means starting on the ground, with little pieces: a lamppost in a forest (the image CS Lewis claimed began the Narnia chronicles), a hobbit-hole.
The top is where ideas have significance. The ground is where the concrete events that inspire emotions in monkeys happen. Writers call the top-down writers “plotters” and the bottom-up writers “pantsers” (writing by the seat of their pants).
Stories written bottom-up have characters and story that develop naturally and feel real, but they often wander without focus and might not seem to have much of a point. Stories written top-down have a tight plot structure, and a theme, if the author wants one, but their characters are often wooden and their events feel plotted.
Animators are visually-oriented people. They think of scenes, or even of exactly how somebody turns his head when startled or jumps when she’s happy. They’re trained to think this way; Walt Disney said every movement by every character must convey that character’s personality.
That’s why films made entirely by animators, like Double Rainboom or the short films of the Quay brothers, are beautiful and suck. They start at the bottom and never look up.
If you start at the top, you’ve gotta connect to real, believable situations and events at the bottom. And that’s where PMMMtMPIII makes its epic, face-grinding fail.
The climax, where the story reaches out and grabs you, has to connect the top and the bottom. Hamlet’s long-brooded rage bursts out in a sudden bloodbath, re-asking the question whether ‘tis nobler to suffer outrageous fortune, or by opposing end it. Aslan is crucified killed, then resurrected, conveying Lewis’ theme that the Bible is true. Darth Vader is what, you don’t know?. The plotter can studiously tie together scenes and plot points according to the advice of Jack Bickham, but it won’t make anybody feel anything unless somewhere among the things on the bottom being connected together is a beating, bleeding heart.
PMMMtMPIII didn’t have that.
I know it didn’t have that because the climax was obviously written entirely, 100% top-down. The writer said, “At the climax, Homura has to die because it’s the only way to save Madoka, and Madoka has to die because it’s the only way to save Homura, and then the Power of Friendship will overcome all of the anybody having to die for anybody, because that is the most-emotional thing possible!” Then he spun out a bunch of Trekkish technobabble to pretend that was a coherent plot instead of three mutually-inconsistent statements.
The problem isn’t the technobabble or the logic. The problem is the climax was planned entirely in the abstract and has no connection to real events or necessities. The abstract conditions the climax was supposed to meet were not even theoretically possible of being realized in any concrete reality, but even if they had been possible, the climax still would have sucked, because there was no blood in it. There was no concrete image or event that inspired the climax. Only the abstract idea that these girls really really loved each other.
That’s not a story. That’s a mission statement. It didn’t make sense because there was no ‘there’ there, in the same way that an action scene description might make no sense if the author never bothered to figure out where everybody was standing.
If you’re a huge anime nerd, you’re probably already in the comment box typing furiously: “... but the exact wording of Homura’s wish in episode 10 means that…” Just stop. I don’t give a shit. I don’t care if you can cobble up a post-hoc logical explanation. I’m not even going to talk about the third plot twist where Homura becomes a demon (which the writer complained bitterly about being forced to write), because the movie had already crashed and burned by that point. Nobody in the world watched that movie, followed the logic of your brilliant explanation and understood as a consequence the true tragedy of PMMMtMPIII. No; they followed the tears and shouting of the magical girls and understood the only thing that the writer had understood: These girls are all willing to die for each other.
And then they cried.
Or not.
Stuff like this is why the internet is such a beautiful place.
To be fair, Philip K. Dick mostly has it coming. People who praise his work effusively usually haven't read much of it. VALIS, for example, comes across as a footnote-encrusted transcript of a middle-aged guy deep in the grip of amphetamine psychosis rambling into a shoebox tape recorder. "God is an alien satellite that shot unknowable things into my head in a pink laser beam of pure information. I can prove this because it taught me how to speak fluent koine Greek and a full prophetic account of this can be found in the translations of the fourth Nag Hammadi codex. Also, Richard Nixon is the Antichrist." Wow, man.
Dick's novels mainly fit a predictable formula. Man thinks he's going insane. Man seems to find, then discard, physical evidence of the ineffable, suggesting that REALITY ITSELF is COMING APART AT THE SEAMS and CTHULHU is wrestling JEHOVAH and the DIES IRAE is UPON US... oh, wait, never mind. He starts all of these--well, in the Turkey City Lexicon they call these "ontological riffs," and then frustrates the reader by saying "oh, wait, no, I was just hallucinating all that because I'd been snorting Dexedrine for three straight weeks without sleep or food, never mind." "Oh, wait, no, the viewpoint character was being brainwashed but the weird stuff was him breaking through it and going, ya know, sane." Wow, man.
So, aspiring writers: don't be a Dick.
...what were we talking about, again?
I love this quote. Imagine if the animators of this community who do longer projects hired fanfic writers to help them write the scripts.
Also, I think this is why I think "the book of life" is merely a very good movie, while my animation and visual arts oriented pegasister friend thinks it is literally the best movie ever.
True dat, bro.
Though I disagree with the whole "top and bottom meeting" babble. Characterization was covered in the original movie and series, so I can give that a pass in favor of watching awesomely-animated chicks beating the shit out of each other. If they had just chopped off the end and let Homura be saved I would have been perfectly-satisfied with the conclusion of the series.
But this series couldn't let us have nice things. I'm still hoping for a Part IV to give a satisfying goddamn ending.
Quickie before I actually read the post:
Shitting on Rebellion is hardly sacred cow territory. The fandom was pretty split on it from the beginning, if I recall. Perhaps things have settled down into a pro-Rebellion stance, but if I had to diagnose that I'd say that it's because the general hype around Madoka has died down. Many fans (especially those who dislike Rebellion) are inactive.
Fate/Zero might be a better choice, or Urobutcher in general.
Edit:
It sounds like you're trying to say that a really good project (such as an animated work) will be one that marries top-down and bottom-up methodologies. I absolutely agree.
So long as we're focused on writers, I think the real tragedy in Urobuchi "losing control" of the Madoka franchise is that the entire reason that he wrote the work was subverted. Perverted, even.
One of the things on my user profile is a link to the Afterword of Fate/Zero where Urobuchi talks about wanting to write a story with a happy ending.
Madoka was that story. But no more.
I am unable to get excited by madoka magica after confirming that I seem to have guessed the entier plot of the series by the announcement without having bothered to see a single episode. Somehow between Type-moon and Mohiro Kitoh works this storyline became rather predicatble.
Not having seen the movie, can't directly comment, but the plotter/pantser distinction and the dissection of the movie was good food for thought. Thanks for that.
Hopefully it'll help me put together a better Writeoff story. At least that's what I'll tell myself to justify sitting here reading my FIMFic feed instead of writing.
That seems to be a common issue with most anime movies. Off the top of my head, I remember the same happening with the Gundam 00 movie and the Eden of the East movies. It is also pretty common with those long-running shonen series movies.
In a way, I believe that is intrinsic to the fact that they are adapted from things that are already established. When you plan something top-down from scratch, you have absolute control over your pieces. However, you can't really do the same when working with existing characters, meaning that you either plan things from bottom up, or add in enough contrivances to allow that scene you planned happen. See also: Poor fanfiction.
Also, the next blog post you do will remove the "Taken by the Tetris Block" cover from your side bar. Such a tragedy...
I'm not much into anime but I've seen a similar thing in underground comics, most noticeably National Lampoons's Heavy Metal imprint. That introduced me to the fact that people who can draw well can't necessarily write well: the art was gorgeous but the dialog and storytelling were the verbal equivalent of fingers that attach directly to the forearm.
This seems to be a thing in nerddom: writers know perfectly well they can't draw and if they forget that, lots of people will remind them. So they seldom do us the disservice of trying. But artists...I dunno, man. It's like they think I CAN SCRIBE WORD-FORMS WITH MY DRAWING APPENDAGES AND MAKE WORD-NOISES WITH MY MOUTH-MEATS THEREFORE I AM AS GOOD WITH WORDS AS I AM WITH ART. And the fans seldom call them on it.
Whereas I know that my writing appendage are better employed making daiquiris than in drawing.
Also:
Whoa. Mixed metaphor. How about "No cow is too sacred for me to tip?"
3166981 What, folks are too high and mighty for cow-pissin where you come from?
3167855
Folks 'round here don't go mixin' up their metaphors, pardner.
An' we don't cotton to no portmanteau words, neither.
(ocarina trills menacingly)
I liked it a lot, even the climax, and I've been hard-pressed to try to explain why to anyone else who has also seen it. I just think it's neat and it's something I've never really seen done in a story before. I think the climax does have meaning. I agree it is quite unsupported, but I was able to buy into it because I bought into Homura's despair in the anime proper. I believe she would do anything, even something incredibly crazy, to be with Madoka.