This article contains major spoilers for all entries in the Puella Magi Madoka Magica series. Please read with caution.

First Impressions of Walpurgis no Kaiten

Puella Magi Madoka Magica: The Witch’s Barrier — Walpurgis no Kaiten is a film built from an unrelenting barrage of striking visuals: screens packed with flat graphic objects, characters posed with theatrical flair, props and figures placed with deliberate disregard for shot continuity. It is a style far removed from straightforward realism, yet it drew large audiences who watched with rapt attention — something worth pausing to appreciate in itself.

The new characters are distinctive, and the casting choices create enjoyable contrasts. The event promised by the title — Walpurgis no Kaiten — is delivered in full, leaving viewers with a satisfying sense of “so that’s the angle they chose.” The film is inseparable from its predecessor, Rebellion, and thinking of it as [Shin-hen] Walpurgis no Kaiten makes the relationship click into place. Rewatching or at least refreshing one’s memory of Rebellion beforehand makes the details far easier to follow.

What Is a Sequel, Really?

To understand just how unusual Walpurgis no Kaiten is, it helps to survey how sequels have worked historically — setting aside planned trilogies and focusing instead on stories that restart a completed narrative.

Most classic sequels leaned heavily on repetition. Series like James Bond and Otoko wa Tsurai yo used a charismatic protagonist as a fixed frame, swapping in new incidents and supporting characters each time. This requires the hero’s psychological state to remain essentially unchanged; stories involving irreversible growth make sequels difficult. By contrast, the Toy Story series consistently invented new challenges organically tied to its characters, making difference more prominent than repetition.

Lessons from Yamato and Zeta Gundam

In anime, Space Battleship Yamato exemplified the repetition model, cycling through new threats to Earth’s peace with the iconic battleship at the center. Although in-universe time technically advanced, the production team of Final Chapter actually rolled the timeline back to preserve the “feel” of protagonist Susumu Kodai’s youth — revealing how easily the question of time gets pushed to the background in animation.

Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam took the opposite approach: advancing the in-universe timeline, replacing the protagonist, and establishing a new theme, laying the groundwork for Gundam as a generational chronicle saga. This strategy maximizes difference by letting time and the world genuinely change.

A bolder tactic still is genre-switching. Alien was horror; Aliens was war. Cars was a self-discovery story; Cars 2 became a comedic spy thriller.

The Madoka Magica Series’ Unique Approach

Viewed through these frameworks, the Madoka Magica series’ approach to sequels is genuinely singular.

The TV series concluded with Madoka becoming the “Law of Cycles” — a new cosmic principle that rescues magical girls across all places and times before they can despair and become witches.

Rebellion then depicts the world that follows. The story takes place inside a witch’s barrier born within Homura’s Soul Gem, sealed off from the outside world by Kyubey. There, a false ideal world shaped by Homura’s wishes takes form. When the magical girls see through the illusion and shatter the barrier, Madoka — as the Law of Cycles — arrives to take Homura. But Homura tears away “the part of Kaname Madoka that was human” from the Law of Cycles, declares herself a devil, and rewrites the universe under new rules. The film ends with Homura standing as the ruler of this rewritten world.

What makes Rebellion so remarkable is that while Homura’s emotional throughline — her obsessive attachment to Madoka — remains consistent with the TV series, the film casually discards the “base reality” the characters originally inhabited, presenting both a false world and a rewritten world, and demonstrating that whatever is shown as “real” within the story can be generated or overwritten at will by a transcendent being.

A World That “Expands Outward”

Because the world is depicted as malleable, time itself becomes ambiguous. Madoka and the others continue to exist — “exist” is more precise than “live” — perpetually as middle-school girls.

In Madoka Magica, the desire to “reshape the world into the happy form one wishes for” is the engine that drives each sequel. Each newly created world does not replace the previous one so much as expand outward around it, like an extension built onto a house.

Walpurgis no Kaiten is a further such extension built onto Rebellion. In it, forces seeking to return Madoka’s human element to the Law of Cycles clash with Homura, who reigns over the world as a devil. What this makes clear is that in this universe, who holds the position of world-rewriter is the central stakes.

Just as Zeta Gundam laid the foundation for Gundam as a generational chronicle, Rebellion established the foundation for a struggle over the right to rewrite reality, and Walpurgis no Kaiten is the second round of that struggle. This is precisely why seeing the two films close together would have been the more satisfying experience.

In Walpurgis no Kaiten, the world is rewritten once more. The film also introduces “Nazuka Sokone” — described as “the place where all witches began” — an exterior space unaffected by world-rewrites, hinting strongly at future developments. The ending leaves the door to a sequel wide open.

Where Could It Go Next?

If a sequel to Walpurgis no Kaiten does come, the axis will almost certainly remain “something or someone attempting to rewrite the current world.” Not simple repetition, not a chronicle-style advance through time, but the repeated struggle to reshape the world outward — that is the energy generating sequels in this series.

Doing so demands considerable imagination (which is part of why it takes so long), and carries the risk that each new layer drifts further from any grounded reality, inflating into a “anything goes” spiral that drains the story of urgency.

One intriguing possibility for keeping that from happening would be to introduce the element of time in a new way — bringing the concept of maturity to the magical girls, freeing them from their suspended moment. The question of maturity in the magical-girl genre has been a major topic since it was introduced in the 1980s, and it remains unresolved here.

Whether the Madoka Magica series’ audacious approach to sequels continues or not, the arc from the TV series through Walpurgis no Kaiten already stands as a uniquely singular body of work.

Ryota Fujitsu (born 1968, Shizuoka Prefecture) is an anime critic and author of several books on anime, including Bokura ga Anime wo Miru Riyuu: 2010-nendai Anime Jihyou. He lectures at cultural centers and hosts a monthly live-stream on the “Anime no Mon Channel.”