Mahou Josei Diana Prince

There is a hypothetical Wonder Woman movie that can be described that way, but it still doesn't exist yet.

Wonder Woman 1984 was a good movie, probably the best Wonder Woman movie so far, definitely best Live Action one.  Judging it by the general standards I do Comic Book Superhero movies it's great.

But I had gotten my hopes up from some initial reactions I'd seen that it would be like a Live Action Magical Girl Anime, a genre that has always been somewhat Wonder Woman inspired from the beginning.  And so had decided what I would title my blogpost about it before I watched it.

WW84 is close in a lot of ways, is it the closest Wonder Woman movie to almsot achieve this so far?  Aesthetically speaking it's closer then Bloodlines which has that New 52 inspired look I never want to see an Anime try to emulate.

People praise how she doesn't win by fighting, and that's true in terms of Max Lord, but she still has to beat Barbara, I would have greatly preferred she resolved that conflict by reasoning with her.

But even without that, there is more to what makes a Magical Girl then just not being as explicitly violent as western Superheroes.  There is also the rejecting the notion of Sacrifice, of refusing to play along with the difficult choice.

As I said on Twitter when I watched the first three episodes of W.I.T.C.H.  Sailor Moon as the prototype of the genre does a lot of things different from the genre standard that I kind of only tolerate in Sailor Moon.  And so my greatest fear regarding attempts to create a Western Magical Girl show is that they will learn the wrong lessons from Sailor Moon.

But going back to the subject of Violence, the scene with her fighting the security detail in Egypt reminds me of when I would discus the hypocrisy of how people reacted to Dawn of Justice and the Nolan Batman films.  Diana is equally doing things that should have killed all those people (this also applies to how she beat Barbara) but people react to it differently because the Tone in BvS is emphasizing Bruce's Rage while the Tone here wants us to think of her as being Heroic.

This is also no where near the first time I've seen a Comic Book Superhero story set during the Cold War use the brink of Nuclear War as a plot point.  But I do feel like this is the only one to not say anything about that.  It's just throwing it in there with all the other madness because that's what 80s Superhero stories do.  Honestly for that element The Quest For Peace is still the best.

In 2017 I was restraining myself from expressing my issues with that Wonder Woman film because I wanted the first WW movie to be a success.  Now I feel the need to express my issues more even though I actually liked this movie far more.  I also like it more then Captain Marvel which I've spoken positively of in the past even though it's almost the antithesis of a Magical Girl.