Magical Girl: The Complete Guide to Mahou Shoujo

Gen Urobuchi and Studio Shaft took the sweetest genre in anime and asked what it would actually cost a fourteen-year-old to sign a contract for magical powers. The answer, delivered through Kunihiko Inu Curry's nightmarish collage witches, is a tragedy about hope, despair and the cruelty of wishes. It is not an attack on magical girls; it is the genre taking its own premises seriously enough to break your heart, and it changed what the form could do.

Naoko Takeuchi's masterstroke was to fuse the older transforming-girl tradition with the superhero team, giving us a squad of friends who each transform, each fight, and each carry the story. The result defined every convention that followed: the transformation sequence, the magical item, the talking mascot, the monster of the week, and above all the idea that friendship is a genuine weapon. It also carried anime to a generation of children around the world.

Studio Trigger's story of an ordinary girl who believes in magic more than she is any good at it is a love letter to every kid who ever wanted to be a witch. It is gorgeously animated, endlessly warm, and built on a single unfashionable idea: that believing in yourself is worth animating with the full force of a great studio. When the genre gets too dark, this is the antidote.

Kunihiko Ikuhara took the magical-girl and shoujo playbook and ran it through surrealist theatre, endless rose imagery and a story about growing up, gender and the danger of fairy tales. It is dense, strange, and decades ahead of its time, hiding one of anime's most radical coming-of-age stories inside duels on a spiral staircase. Nothing else in the genre is quite this bold.