After watching “Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica: Walpurgis no Kaiten,” I found myself thinking about what makes a sequel work. The series has taken a strikingly bold approach to sequel-building: not simple repetition, but a constant process of “expansion” that reaches beyond the world viewers already know.
Spoiler warning: The following discusses key plot elements of the film and the series, so proceed with caution if you haven’t seen them.
The film itself is a relentless stream of sensory stimulation. The screen is filled with flat, graphic objects; characters strike theatrical poses; continuity between cuts is deliberately ignored. Even though the characters provide a strong hook, it’s remarkable how such a dense, non-realist visual style can hold a packed audience in focused attention.
New characters with distinctive personalities are a highlight, and the contrast in voice casting is a pleasure. The film delivers exactly the kind of event promised by its title, “Walpurgis no Kaiten,” and the twist feels inevitable once you see it.
The movie is best understood as a counterpart to the previous film, “Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica: Hangyaku no Monogatari.” If they had been released only a few years apart—say, around 2023 and then now—they might have been received as a cleaner two-part story, with audiences easily connecting the dots. But the long gap between them was no accident; production interviews in the pamphlet make clear that there were fundamental creative difficulties to overcome.
To consider how “Walpurgis no Kaiten” functions as a sequel, it helps to look at how sequels have historically worked. Many film series—007 and “Otoko wa Tsurai yo,” for example—relied on repetition, keeping an immensely charismatic protagonist as the framework while swapping out new incidents and heroines. This requires the protagonist’s psychological state to remain stable; irreversible changes like solving a core conflict or aging characters make continuing a story difficult. “Toy Story” is a model of how to create new challenges tied to characters while emphasizing difference over repetition.
In anime, “Space Battleship Yamato” used repetition with a powerful hero ship, but even that series advanced its timeline. By the “Final Chapter,” the protagonist Kodai had become older, and the production side even adjusted the chronology to keep him young. Meanwhile, “Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam” explicitly advanced time, changed protagonist and theme, and became the foundation for the Gundam saga as a chronicle. Another approach is genre-shifting: “Alien” was horror, “Aliens” was a war film; “Cars” was a personal redemption story, while “Cars 2” was spy action.
Against that backdrop, “Madoka Magica” stands apart. The TV series ended with Madoka becoming the “Law of Cycles,” a new principle of the universe that rescues magical girls moments before they despair and become witches. “Hangyaku no Monogatari” follows afterward: inside a witch labyrinth created within Homura’s soul gem, a false ideal world appears. The magical girls break the barrier, Madoka appears to take Homura, but Homura tears away Madoka’s human side from the Law of Cycles, declares herself a demon, and recreates the universe on new rules. She ends as the ruler of a reorganized world.
What makes that film so audacious is that, while Homura’s obsession with Madoka remains emotionally continuous from the TV series, the “baseline reality” the characters once lived in is completely discarded. The world is treated as something that can be generated or rewritten at will by a transcendent being. Naturally, time becomes ambiguous, and the girls continue to exist—more than merely continue to live—as middle schoolers forever.
In “Madoka Magica,” the desire to shape the world into one’s own ideal happy form is the engine that starts a sequel. Each new world is constructed as an “addition” to the previous one, wrapped around it from outside. “Walpurgis no Kaiten” is another such expansion. It shows a conflict between forces trying to return Madoka’s human part to the Law of Cycles and Homura, who now rules as a demon. The key question becomes who has the position to rewrite the world.
Just as “Z Gundam” laid the groundwork for the Gundam chronicle, “Hangyaku no Monogatari” establishes a struggle for the right to rewrite the world, and “Walpurgis no Kaiten” is the second turn. That is why the two films would have felt more rewarding if watched close together.
By the end of “Walpurgis no Kaiten,” the world has been rewritten again. The film also introduces “Nazuka Sokone,” a place described as the origin of all witches and located outside the influence of world rewriting. The final scenes hint at future developments, and a sequel seems entirely possible.
If the series continues, it would likely center once again on someone attempting to rewrite the world. But the more it expands, the further it moves from any baseline reality, risking a kind of inflation that could weaken the story’s urgency. One possible addition would be to bring in “time” and allow the magical girls to mature—a theme that has been a major topic in magical girl fiction since the 1980s. Whether or not that challenge is taken up, the journey from the TV series to “Walpurgis no Kaiten” is already a uniquely compelling one.
Fujitsu Ryota is an anime critic born in 1968 in Shizuoka Prefecture. He also hosts a live stream on the first Friday of every month on the “Anime no Mon Channel.”
