Miraculous Ladybug (a.k.a. Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug and Cat Noir). Season 2. Directed by Thomas Astruc. Written by Thomas Astruc, Fred Lenoir, et al. Zagtoon, Method Animation, and Toei Animation, 2017-2018. 26 episodes of 22 minutes (approx. 9.5 hours). Rated TV-Y7.
Available on Netflix.
See my review of the first season.
Although this is a blog about magical girls, I have always made an effort to write it for people who are not magical girl fans. To that end, I have often pondered what would make a good entry-level magical girl title—something funny, fast-paced, action-oriented, and without the saccharine quality that audiences in the West might find off-putting. I have decided that the best entry-level title I know is Miraculous Ladybug, the family-friendly CGI magical girl show out of France, made by Zagtoon in association with Toei Animation, the Japanese company that has historically dominated the magical girl genre.
Also, the show’s director once insulted me on social media, so I have a certain personal affection for his work. I took it in stride, of course: He’s French, so I expected him to be rude.
(Rimshot.)
Anyway, Miraculous Ladybug is lightning in a bottle. I can’t really describe for you how good it is, because it’s one of those shows that seems to be made on a secret formula. It gathers together various shopworn motifs from children’s cartoons, YA fiction, superheroes, and magical girls, puts them together in a blender, and renders the result into mediocre CGI. Yet somehow, it is pure magic. It works on the Casablanca principle: It is good not because it avoids clichés, but because it uses all of them.
And Rose is still best girl.
The first season was so remarkable, I wondered if the show’s creators would be able to pull it off a second time. Not only have they pulled it off, but they’ve stepped up their game. This second season is better than the first and has eliminated some of the first’s biggest problems, both technical and story-related.
Summary
To quickly recap for anyone who didn’t read my previous review, the story of Miraculous Ladybug takes place in a small-town version of Paris, where the scatterbrained yet big-hearted tweenager Marinette Dupain-Cheng lives in an atic above her parents’ bakery. She is extremely clumsy, but only when it’s funny and not inconvenient to the plot. She has received a “miraculous,” a pair of magic earrings with their attendant “kwami,” a little sprite name Tikki. The miraculous can transform Marinette into the Spider-Man-like heroine Ladybug, who zips around Paris with her magic yo-yo and battles evil wherever she finds it.
Teamed up with the superhero Cat Noir, who unbeknownst to her is actually her crush Adrien Agreste, she fights super-villains created by the nefarious Hawk Moth, who can “evilize” people whenever they develop negative emotions.
The show uses what we might call the Pretty Cure formula, combining girlish, child-oriented storytelling with high-energy martial arts battles. On a regular basis, Ladybug, Cat Noir, and their latest villain demolish multiple famous Parisian landmarks as they pummel one another.
The show is a lot of fun, with a lot of clever writing. As a rule, I prefer subs over dubs, but I have been watching this one in the English dub and have been thoroughly enjoying it: The English voice cast is superb, and the translation is consistently witty. I know some fans prefer the original French, and that is a matter about which I refuse to argue, but I will say that, whatever version you prefer, the English is really good.
New Story Arc
Most of the episodes of the first season were designed to stand alone, and the series had been broadcast in several different orders in several different countries. That this was deliberate (possibly the result of executive meddling) is evident in that some minor characters got introduced for the first time more than once. This was one of the first season’s biggest drawbacks. Before the second season aired, director Thomas Astruc had promised that it would feature a more linear story line, and he has delivered on that promise while maintaining the show’s basic formula: There is still a new villain and a new scenario each week, but there is also a discernible plot arc. The second season has apparently come to us in a (mostly) correct episode order: Aside from one curious case in which a stand-alone episode got wedged into the middle of a two-parter, the procession from one episode to the next is generally logical.
The season opens boldly, though it also stumbles a bit, by revealing the identity of the villain Hawk Moth. Hawk Moth’s identity was strongly hinted in the first season—so strongly that I had assumed it was a red herring. Because it was already obvious, the reveal is unfortunately anticlimactic. Nonetheless, the season successfully builds on this; by letting us know who Hawk Moth is, it is able to develop his character and explain his motives. He is after the miraculous of Ladybug and Cat Noir not simply because he lusts for power, but because he believes he can use those powers to resurrect his dead wife. He also has an assistant who becomes an intriguing character in her own right—she is secretly in love with Hawk Moth and works to help him achieve his goals, even though his success would mean her losing him.
This echoes a constant theme: Unrequited love is a preoccupation of the show, and it appears throughout this season. As I discussed previously, the major driver for the series is the unique relationship of its protagonists, created by combining the Superman-Lois dynamic with the tension that typically accompanies boy-girl buddy-cop dramas. Adrien is in love with Ladybug but considers Marinette to be merely a good friend, and Marinette is madly in love with Adrien, but finds Cat Noir’s flirtations off-putting. In this season, their relationship develops while maintaining this basic formula.
If I could make any serious complaint about the second season’s arc, it would be about the new love interests for the protagonists. There is a half-hearted attempt to turn the love-quandrangle into a love hexagon by introducing two new characters. The first is Kagami Tsurugi, a hotblooded fencer who is Adrien’s match with a sword and who takes a personal interest in him after they duel.
The second is Luka Couffaine, the brother of Juleka, the mumbling Goth girl we met in the first season. He’s a softhearted guitarist who grows close to Marinette.
Both these characters are likable, but the writers apparently didn’t have the guts to go full-bore with these new love interests. Kagami and Luka get friendzoned very hard and very quickly, making their subplots feel pointless. It’s possible, however, that the show’s creators are keeping them in reserve for later.
New Superheroes
I was nervous when I heard the show’s creators announcing new superhero characters for this season. The central duo worked so well in the first season, I was afraid that the addition of new heroes might do damage to the show’s winning formula, but they found a clever method of introducing these new characters without hurting anything. Throughout the season, Marinette repeatedly goes to Master Fu, the keeper of the miraculous, to borrow magic jewelry and temporarily create new allies, but then take the miraculous back to Fu for safekeeping once the battle is over.
She transforms a few of her friends from school, but the most interesting of the new heroes is Queen Bee, created when Marinette loses the bee miraculous at the Eiffel Tower and Chloè Bourgeois, the resident mean rich girl, finds it.
Chloè and Marinette are consistently at loggerheads throughout the show, being rivals for Adrien’s affection and overall enemies. Chloè is nonetheless Ladybug’s biggest fan and also jumps at the chance to acquire powers of her own. While keeping her over-the-top personality, she gets a lot of development this season.
Improvements
I mentioned before that the first season was plagued with technical issues. Whole episodes, or sometimes second halves of episodes, would lose their shading or become very jerky, apparently because the animators had run out of time or other resources. Either they increased their manpower or husbanded their resources more effectively in this second season, because most of those issues have disappeared. The animation is still not top-notch, and a watchful viewer will notice some bad shots here and there, but the season overall maintains a consistency that the first didn’t have.
The first season ended poorly with a badly animated, lackluster episode. This second season, however, ends with an eye-popping finale that brings together the whole roster of superheroes and pits them against several previously introduced villains. It’s two whole episodes of almost constant action, making an effective cap to the season’s plot arc.
Conclusion
Miraculous Ladybug is great. I wondered after the first season if they could possibly pull it off twice, but now I can say that they not only pulled it off, but improved on it. The third season is currently underway, but has not yet made it to the States, so we will find out later if they can keep it going.
In spite of my praise, just to be a Debbie Downer, I will end by making a dire prediction. This show, as previously noted, works on a variation of the buddy-cop formula where you have male and female protagonists who can’t bring themselves to confess their true feelings for each other. This tension keeps viewers tuning in each week, but even though this unresolved relationship is vital to the show, screenwriters have historically been unable to resist the urge to move things forward and thus jump the shark: Every version of this from Get Smart to Kim Possible to Lois and Clark to Castle has made the colossal goof of having the characters enter an official courtship and then keep going for a season or more even though the main plot arc is over. So far, I have been amazed at how savvy the creators of Miraculous Ladybug have been, so we’ll see if they can, in the end, avoid this basic blunder.
Miraculous Ladybug, Season 2
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