Puella Magi Madoka Magica the Movie Part III: Rebellion
2013 · Yukihiro Miyamoto, Akiyuki Shinbo
Following Madoka's rewriting of the universe, sacrificing herself and her happy normal days to save all magical girls from the cruel fate that awaited them by wiping witches out of existence, the despair still manifest into creatures known as nightmares. Magical girl Homura Akemi continues to fight alone in the hope that she will be able to see Madoka smile again.
dir. Yukihiro Miyamoto, Akiyuki Shinbo · 2013
The theatrical culmination of the 2011 series that detonated the magical-girl genre from within, Rebellion is one of the most visually delirious works of mainstream Japanese animation. Studio Shaft, under chief director Akiyuki Shinbo, pushes its house style to the limit — vertiginous architecture, silhouette ballets, and above all the witch labyrinths designed by the art collective Gekidan Inu Curry: collaged nightmares of paper cutouts, stitched fabric, and Victorian scrap-art that feel smuggled in from Czech surrealism. Gen Urobuchi's screenplay picks up after the series' universe-rewriting finale and follows Homura Akemi, the franchise's tragic sentinel, into territory that turns a story about sacrifice into a genuinely unnerving meditation on devotion — what it means to love someone more than you love the world they saved. The ending split its fandom down the middle on release and has been argued over ever since, which is its own kind of tribute: few franchise films risk this much. Yuki Kajiura's choral score surges beneath it all like weather.
Lines of influence
- The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) — Originated the flat cut-out silhouette ballet — figures staged as black paper shapes against luminous color fields — the exact register Rebellion uses for its dance-of-shadows crowd staging.
- Alice (1988) — Czech surrealist collage stop-motion of scavenged objects and paper cut-outs is the explicit template Gekidan Inu Curry mimics for the witch labyrinths' tactile scrapbook animation.
- Belladonna of Sadness (1973) — Pioneered mixing experimental non-cel media — watercolor scrolls, collaged textures — into commercial anime, licensing the medium-clash between clean character cels and Inu Curry's craft-collage worlds.
- Angel's Egg (1985) — Established the vertiginous gothic-cathedral architecture and near-wordless silhouetted figures dwarfed by looming structures that Rebellion's cinematography of impossible cityscapes descends from.
- Revolutionary Girl Utena (1997) — Its Kashira shadow-play chorus and revolving-stair theatrical architecture pioneered the silhouette-theater device and stylized abstraction that Rebellion deploys around its magical-girl deconstruction.
- The Adolescence of Utena (1999) — Recursive surreal architecture and a divisive reality-warping finale prove out the feature-length deconstruction-continuation that reframes a whole series — Rebellion's exact structural gambit.
- Neon Genesis Evangelion: The End of Evangelion (1997) — The founding genre deconstruction that swaps external spectacle for the protagonist's collapsing psyche and courts a fandom-splitting apocalyptic ending — the divisive-ending mold Urobuchi extends.
- Le Portrait de Petite Cossette (2004) — Shinbo's early SHAFT gothic OVA prototypes the house style — stained-glass fragmentation, doll-like stillness, ornamental dread — later systematized across Madoka.
- Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei (2007) — Codifies the SHAFT visual grammar — typographic intertitle cards, flat graphic-design negative space, rapid symbolic montage — that Rebellion inherits wholesale.
- Bakemonogatari (2009) — Perfects the vertiginous empty-architecture cinematography and canted, depopulated backgrounds that give Rebellion's Mitakihara its uncanny stage-set emptiness.
- Kara no Kyoukai (2008) — Showcases Yuki Kajiura's signature method — invented-language Latinate choral incantations layered over strings — the same scoring architecture that carries Rebellion's emotional climaxes.
- Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon (1992) — Fixed the magical-girl template — transformation sequences, monster-of-the-week, friendship-as-power — that is the genre object Rebellion systematically dismantles.
- Mawaru Penguindrum (2011) — Uses collage cut-out crowd silhouettes and repeated ritual imagery to dramatize fate and self-erasing sacrifice, running the same craft toolkit parallel to Madoka's.
- Yuki Yuna is a Hero (2014) — Directly copies Madoka's structural bait-and-switch — cute magical-girl surface concealing a systemic sacrifice economy that consumes the heroines.
- Flip Flappers (2016) — Its 'Pure Illusion' dreamworlds are built by Gekidan Inu Curry themselves, extending the collage-cutout labyrinth aesthetic into a new surreal magical-girl vehicle.
- Wonder Egg Priority (2021) — Stages girls' trauma inside surreal dream-labyrinth arenas of shifting scale and symbolic debris — the psychologized magical-girl-adjacent world-space Rebellion popularized.