![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerI took some small notice of the news the anime series Puella Magi Madoka Magica was being turned into two movies in advance of a third new feature, a bit more notice of the movies reaching this side of the Pacific in a traveling road show. That still only provoked idle daydreams of the trip required (even if it shrank a bit every now and then) to see them in advance of a home video release over here, though, but then all of a sudden there was some fresh news that the movies would be crossing to my side of the border in a special two-days rush, and one of the theatres they'd be showing in was the recently built but otherwise ordinary multiplex just a few minutes drive away, where Funimation had brought the first two "Rebuild of Evangelion" movies and where Aniplex of America was following, at least giving us the chance to keep from making too many complaints about "blind buying." Right away, I was thinking ahead to seeing them.
A screening in a group context seemed to tie in with how I'd first become interested in the series. I suppose I was lucky enough to pick up on the interest of others in a "magical girl" series with a creative crew I was told was impressive and start with the "fansubs" after a relative fallow period of following shows "as they were airing." Ahead of some people, perhaps, I was interested in the unusual animation of the "witches' labyrinths," and then as things got steadily more dire for the characters the speculation and anticipation got still more involved. In the midst of all of it, though, the real world asserted itself in the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, but the delay in the last two episodes airing might have just added to the feeling of payoff in the end. The series might have wound up successful enough for there to be pushback against it, but to me I can see it as managing to subvert its own subversions. I wound up going "all in" on the series (from a certain perspective, anyway), buying all three deluxe editions and the manga as well "just because." (However, it might yet be the whole experience made a string of starting into series the collective mood got unpleasant for fast have that much more sting...)
On the night the first movie opened, I checked the movie theatre site one last time only to see the showing in some of the theatres in the big city itself had sold out. A little concerned by this, I wasted no time in getting to the local theatre, but there it just seemed all the posters had already been given out. The theatre wasn't too full and the audience did seem university-aged or so; I noticed there seemed to be a good number of young women in it and did think of my impressions of how much certain groups of fans push pairings of some of the series' female characters. Then, after a lot of attempts to put together "what I really wanted to say," I wound up thinking that just might be my own hangups on display. I had heard the animation had been touched up, but throughout the first movie it seemed in an almost subliminal sort of way; some of the long shots of the characters did look a little off to me somehow. With the series just twelve episodes in length (if making quite good use of its length), the first movie didn't seem to be cut down very much even covering two-thirds of the whole. For the second movie, things seemed even more a matter-of-fact presentation of the existing episodes, and that just might have left me thinking it was nice to have seen the series larger than life at the movies (although there were times when trying to take in the subtitles meant everything else was relegated to peripheral vision) instead of waiting to get more discs later.
A screening in a group context seemed to tie in with how I'd first become interested in the series. I suppose I was lucky enough to pick up on the interest of others in a "magical girl" series with a creative crew I was told was impressive and start with the "fansubs" after a relative fallow period of following shows "as they were airing." Ahead of some people, perhaps, I was interested in the unusual animation of the "witches' labyrinths," and then as things got steadily more dire for the characters the speculation and anticipation got still more involved. In the midst of all of it, though, the real world asserted itself in the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, but the delay in the last two episodes airing might have just added to the feeling of payoff in the end. The series might have wound up successful enough for there to be pushback against it, but to me I can see it as managing to subvert its own subversions. I wound up going "all in" on the series (from a certain perspective, anyway), buying all three deluxe editions and the manga as well "just because." (However, it might yet be the whole experience made a string of starting into series the collective mood got unpleasant for fast have that much more sting...)
On the night the first movie opened, I checked the movie theatre site one last time only to see the showing in some of the theatres in the big city itself had sold out. A little concerned by this, I wasted no time in getting to the local theatre, but there it just seemed all the posters had already been given out. The theatre wasn't too full and the audience did seem university-aged or so; I noticed there seemed to be a good number of young women in it and did think of my impressions of how much certain groups of fans push pairings of some of the series' female characters. Then, after a lot of attempts to put together "what I really wanted to say," I wound up thinking that just might be my own hangups on display. I had heard the animation had been touched up, but throughout the first movie it seemed in an almost subliminal sort of way; some of the long shots of the characters did look a little off to me somehow. With the series just twelve episodes in length (if making quite good use of its length), the first movie didn't seem to be cut down very much even covering two-thirds of the whole. For the second movie, things seemed even more a matter-of-fact presentation of the existing episodes, and that just might have left me thinking it was nice to have seen the series larger than life at the movies (although there were times when trying to take in the subtitles meant everything else was relegated to peripheral vision) instead of waiting to get more discs later.