Cinnamon Ass

Ah, the “venerable” magical girl show. Truth be told, I don’t really give much of a damn about anything mahou shoujo before Sailor Moon came around; I’ve not seen Princess Knight or anything else from the genre in the 70s, but the 80s stuff is a bit on the passive side for me. Less helping people with your magic disguises, more kicking their asses with implausible magical powers!

Anyway, I’ve been generally quite disappointed with the way the genre has been treated in recent years. The last truly great magical girl show was undoubtedly Princess Tutu; obviously you can’t expect everything to measure up to a show as great as Tutu or Utena or any other classic you can reel off the top of your head, but there’s been a paradigm shift in the way the core tropes of the genre are treated, particularly as the overall output of anime has not only increased but narrowed its focus to the otaku market.

Without wishing to write a thesis, the point of a “magical girl” show to me is the “transformation”. On a shallow level, I like well-animated stock footage (and the transformation sequence in Shugo Chara!, to return to the show at hand, is fantastic). More generally, however, it is the “change” and the implications of it that drive most of the better entries in the genre. Ahiru’s fairy-tale trinity persona of the Duck, the Human and the Princess Tutu drives the emotional core of the plot, beyond the meta-narrative weirdness that makes the show so compelling. EVERYONE in Utena is grappling with their identity and how they are defined by it, and their “transformation” into duellists, Brides etc. are a way of revealing different aspects of their personalities. For almost any other classic series, the transformation is simply a metaphor for growing up; increased responsibility etc.

What has been clear from both shoujo and shounen takes on the genre in recent years is that a lot of people don’t agree with me. Take Nanoha in all her various incarnations, the most popular recent magical girl show I can think of. The point of Nanoha’s transformation is not to discover something about herself she didn’t already know; it’s so she can blow shit up with pretty laser beams. Ratcheting up the moe/lolicon factor and using the magical girl conceit as a springboard for costume choices and titillating setpieces comes into play for Moetan and (to a lesser extent) Nanatsuiro Drops, and obviously smoking crack and throwing money around the offices rather than actually investing it in scriptwriting and animation teams brought us Kami-chama Karin a few months ago…

Shugo Chara!, on the other hand, distils its plot down to the basic foundation of magical girl shows - Amu is literally seeking to change herself. The Embryos, nefarious teachers/musicians/catboys, and the fight sequences, are merely the enjoyable icing on the cake; the whole show is about changing and becoming who you want to be, and that makes Shugo Chara! much more interesting than a lot of similar shows over the past few years.

It also doesn’t hurt that the direction is tight, the animation surprisingly good (episode 5’s football match is particularly interesting in a magical girl show; the director was assistant to Kazuki Akane on Noein, after all!), and the tone carefully controlled; we don’t have any ridiculously maudlin sap to contend with, and the humour is balanced with the tension of the Batsu-tama problems.

5 episodes in and we haven’t hit the Sugar Sugar Rune problem of being killed by repetition yet; obviously it depends on how long the plot is strung out for, but hopefully Shugo Chara! can sustain its enjoyability for a whole series. Unlikely, but you never know…

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 4th, 2007 at 8:11 pm and is filed under Shugo Chara!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.