Not only has Puella Magi Madoka Magica been awarded the Grand Prize for Animation by the government’s Japan Media Arts Festival, it seems to occupy pride of place at the exhibition with a huge display, and for reasons nobody is quite sure of Mercedes Benz has got in on the act with an official Madoka itasha as well…
Madoka got an entire room to herself, with much of the rest of the event taken up by high-brow modern art nobody is much interested in, although there are also plenty of anime, manga and game works about:
The event itself runs from the 22nd of February to March 4th at the National Arts Center in Tokyo.
The nearby Mercedes Benz Connection displayed a rather colourful if not very imposing Madoka itasha as well:
QB is also on the front of the car…
soooo what the hell is BMW doing as a countermeasure to this?
Almost a year from the end of Madoka, let’s see if it can sustain its popularity for another year.
Mumi has big tits.
I also believe Madoka is overrated. Specially Aoki’s designs, which seem to me quite disproportionate regarding character design.
Madoka’s best feature are the soundtrack, labyrinths and witches. I really praised those features. The rest is quite the same thing we’ve seen in other animes.
Back to the topic, I really wish I had those witch illustrations, and that itasha looks quite crashable.
Yes, many of the elements in madoka have been seen b4(lyrical: replace g.seed with j.seed and nearly no diff.), but you don’t judge a smoothie just because it has bananas.
I liked the character designs… That’s mostly a matter of personal preference though. As for the deconstruction of the magical genre genre, I think it actually does it better than Evangelion did with mecha, though Evangelion gets so much more credit for that (also the idea of ‘modernizing’ anime during that era).
The idea of dark edges around magical girl anime has always existed in pretty much every magical girl show. The idea was always there, but I think Madoka did it the most blatantly way possible.
That said, the Japanese media and anime fandom do tends to dogpile into the popular flavor of the month. I sometimes think that’s unfair to Madoka as a series.