There is a scene in the Magia Record anime adaptation’s first season that stands out to me. I don’t entirely recall what goes on in it, but I remember the background vividly. It is the platform of a train station, suspended off the ground so as to access the suspended train tracks. Oddly, it seems to be connected to nothing save for the train trait; there is neither an elevator nor stairs for pedestrians to get on or off the platform, and there is only one train line connected to it.
The other notable characteristic of the platform is that it is full of bird perches and birds. It is painfully obvious that no sensible urbanist would construct such a train system, and this is only one of many oddities present in the two cities depicted in this anime. On the trains themselves, there are electronic signs which proclaim “the only good witch is a dead witch!” and other messages that have no place being on a non-magical train.
For a long time, my pet theory was that these aesthetic choices represented a sort of power creep for the Madoka series. While the original show had relatively grounded setpieces for its mundane world (a school with glass walls is a strange design choice, of course, but not quite surreal), many of its most striking and memorable scenes (such as the dream sequence/previous timeline that opens episode 1 and was inexplicably cut from the first movie) take place in surreal and illogical places, usually because of the influence of witches, but occasionally due to magical girls.
Rebellion built upon this surreal aesthetic, but due to its central conceit of taking place within a labyrinth, the surreal settings of explicitly magical places were permitted to leak into domestic and mundane settings, and this only continued to intensify as Homura’s mental state worsened. My theory, then, was that the Magireco anime was taking its visual cues more from Rebellion than from the original anime, hence the strange and illogical architecture and design appearing in places otherwise separate from the influences of magical girls.
As of yesterday, however, I have a new theory. The Magireco adaptation has fundamentally surreal and magical backgrounds because it tells a tonally and thematically different story from Puella Magi Madoka Magica. A sizeable chunk of Madoka’s central conflict is one between the mundane and magical parts of its setting, and Madoka’s struggle to determine her place within it.
Madoka’s entirely non-magical mother, Junko Kaname, is a major influence in her life, and Madoka is hesitant to make any sort of contract with Kyubey due to her own indecisiveness (as well as Homura’s urging her not to, and the gruesome deaths of Mami Tomoe and Sayaka Miki), but still finds herself ultimately driven to engage with the world of magical girls and witches, if only out of concern for the people around her. For the majority of the show’s run, Madoka is not a magical girl.
Similarly, most characters’ arcs involve some interaction between the mundane and magical world. Sayaka Miki and Kyouko Sakura use magic to try and improve the world around them, to disastrous or unsatisfactory ends, while Mami Tomoe and Homura Akemi find themselves isolated from the mundane world and its people by the pressures of their roles as magical girls, and that isolation ultimately gets them killed and trapped in a loop of tragedy, respectively.
The anime adaptation of Magia Record has no equivalent character to Junko Kaname, and its central conflict is ultimately a struggle between magical girls, rather than something that involves the mundane world to any particular extent. While the anime incarnation of Alina Gray’s ultimate goal is to turn all humans into witches because ????, this is revealed very late into the series and frankly seems to have been made up on the spot by the writers. All of the show’s major characters have already contracted with Kyubey before the plot begins, and while the precise circumstances of the contracts made by the three members of the Magius are important to the plot, it is the nature of their wishes (rather than the circumstances in which they were made) that make them important.
As such, my conclusion is this: the Magia Record anime adaptation makes use of surreal backgrounds and aesthetics in such a way that (intentionally or not) it reinforces that this story is one about magical girls and only magical girls. Just as there is no thematic room for mundane humans in this story, mundane architecture and urban design are similarly excluded.
I still think the main reason for the aesthetic change is flanderization though. The new film will be an interesting data point.
