I have not previously discussed Magical Girl Friendship Squad, a cartoon with a woefully generic title, because, although I was vaguely aware of its existence, it looked horribly uninteresting.
Magical Girl Friendship Squad is drawn more-or-less in the “Cal Arts style,” which originally referred to a specific school of art and animation but which has become a shorthand for the flat, slovenly-looking designs now typical of “adult” American cartoons. The few previews that I came across featured excrutiatingly bad Millennial jokes about sex and lattes, and there was a villain who (already dated at the time the show aired) resembled a cross between Donald Trump and Pepe the frog.
Anyway, I ignored it. Most American attempts at the magical-girl genre stem from a belligerent unwillingness to understand what the genre is about: It’s about girls growing up, about the uncertainty but limitless potential of adolescence. In Japan, that means sparkles and elaborate transformation sequences and enormous powers, but to American feminists, that means undirected anger, broken homes, and lots and lots of sex, preferably perverted. Naturally, when combined with the degenerate state of American animation, this translates into an inability to make magical-girl shows worth watching.
Magical Girl Friendship Squad, which aired in , is about some aimless Millennials who live in the city and hover around coffee shops and end up with a talking cat that gives them powers. The show consists of six eleven-minute episodes, which aired late at night on SyFy; in other words, almost nobody was watching it anyway. I am bringing it up, however, first because it is (like it or not) a magical-girl show of sorts but also because it highlights the striking difference between audiences and critics, something we’ve seen repeatedly at the movies, where some big-budget, mega-corp film will often get slobbered over by “official” reviewers while audiences call it dreck.
According to Wikipedia, Magical Girl Friendship Squad received “mostly positive critical reception.” Those of us who are cynical about professional critics can easily see why: In the same Wikipedia article, the series has an entire section on “LGBTQ representation,” which points out glowingly that, and I quote, “Daisy is unambiguously queer as she has slept with ‘every barista’ at the local coffee shop”—because being a lesbian apparently means being a whore, at least in the minds of Wikipedia editors.
We already know that putting gayness in a cartoon is a sure way to make the tastemakers prostrate themselves in front of it: Simply witness Legend of Korra, which critics roundly mocked right up until its ambiguously lesbian ending—at which point they suddenly reversed course and heaped praise on it. For anyone paying attention, that was the moment when professional reviews ceased to have any worth.
I’m bringing this up because we can see the same thing here, a stark constrast between the critical reception and the audience reaction in the case of Magical Girl Friendship Squad. The reviews on IMDB are almost universally negative, and I think it worthwhile to quote a few:
Overall I tried watching it twice and its easy to say It’s very vague and it exagerates the humor which honestly comes out as just bland and unfunny and it tries to be random just for the sake of random. This show tries to make these characters be “spontaneous” but honestly it comes out more of just irritating.
After watching this show I’m not sure what confuses me more, the fact that someone thought that this story worked the way it is written, or the story having been written by anybody to begin with. Nothing flows into the next scene and the art style is incredibly lazy.
Seriously, by this point, the attempt of making another “deconstruction” (Curse you, Derrida. And curse you, Gen Urobuchi. And also curse all the people who keeps misusing this term) of magical girl cartoons is just as dull, unoriginal, lazy and stale as making “gritty” superhero deconstructions or “subversive” fairy tales where the prince charming is a jerk and the princess is a badass action hero.
Not funny or clever. More than anything it’s preachy and unappealing to anyone that’s not “woke”
Badly written, terribly animated, unimaginative, and so irritatingly dull that despite its short length it feels like nearly a whole hour has gone by once its finished. The people behind this series clearly happened to know the right people to get this greenlit and hot in development, because I am sorry but I cannot imagine a reality where somebody worked that hard to create this kind of concept and spent weeks preparing to create an effective pitch to an executive.
To be honest, this is so bad it makes the German invasion of Poland in September 1939 look like a good idea for a peaceful picnic.
I really tried… but what… what are we doing here? Phoning in pop culture jokes that will age like 3 day old yak milk? Making characters that are supposed to appeal to a specific demographic while also making them as bland as possible? This is a shining example of ‘edgy cartoon by boardroom’. There are better ways to waste your time, trust me.
I should add that there is a handful of positive reviews on IMDB; what is striking, however, is that the reviews, with few exceptions, rate the show with only one star or with a full ten stars—this strongly indicates that its defenders are defending it on purely ideological rather than artistic grounds. Indeed, just the screenshot at the top of this post is enough to deride it on artistic grounds.