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Simply the best
Netflix still only has seasons 1-3 of Miraculous Ladybug, but I finally clued in to the fact that Disney+ is caught up! Been working through it ever since, so now I’m only half a season behind, instead of two.
Marinette handing out powers to her friends right and left is cute. It strains credulity when she starts having 5-10 of them transformed at a time, and somehow none of them catch on that they’re all from the same friend group, but eh. The all-superhero soccer game was fun, I can cut them some slack on fudging the setup.
Zoe is also cute! (And the internet says her baby-gay vibes are not just me reading into things.) Not sure the tradeoff of “dialing Chloe’s character arc backward so Zoe has stuff to do” is worth it, though.
The stakes-raising at the end of s4 is super effective. The writers were having a ton of fun mixing up the formula already, and this puts it on a whole new level.
It’s a delight to watch Hawkmoth Shadowmoth Monarch figure out effective combinations of his new abilities to create complicated plans. (All while losing grip on everything else in his life — so hard that he tanks the support of the Nathalie lobby.) A parallel delight that Marinette had her own complicated “what if Hawkmoth links my secret identities?” contingency plan, which she pulls off flawlessly.
Also? The new angle they’ve put in the love square is extremely funny.
…I’m still only halfway through s5, no spoilers in the comments please.
Netflix did manage to get Miraculous The Movie, which I thought was an origin story, but it’s more like a speedrun AU of the series — starts with Marinette, Adrian, and Gabriel all getting their powers, ends with Gabriel’s defeat + identity reveals all around. (Also, it’s a musical. Guys, you’re trying way too hard to be Disney here, stop it.)
To get through the plot that fast, the movie sands down a lot of the quirkier and more unusual features of the show. Which leaves…a cookie-cutter superhero story that’s disappointingly generic. If Ladybug isn’t using her Lucky Charm to inspire weird elaborate plans to deal with akumatized people, then all you’re left with is a cookie-cutter monster fight. In which case, what even is the point?
On the plus side, the animators had a much higher budget to render it all with, so everyone has these upgraded high-detail character models. You can see some of that in the trailer — or, in stills it’s not as obvious with Marinette, but look at TV Chloe (top) vs Movie Chloe (bottom):
Look at all those realistic locks of hair! They’re not like hair-shaped chunks of plastic, they have texture and body! If someone does a flip, you get to see the individual strands fan out behind them!
And in motion you can see how much more rigging the models have. The faces alone — their new ranges of expression, the smoothness and subtlety they get to show — it’s great.
I just wish all that detail and all that budget had gone to a better plot. It’s the 2020s, the moviegoing audience knows what superheroes are, you don’t need to handhold us through the general outline of an origin story! Drop us right in the middle of things, trust us to figure out the backstory — the way season 1 did. Then fill up your runtime with the parts that make Miraculous Ladybug weird and memorable and fun in the first place.
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This is one of those shows that I know primarily from people complaining about it, so it's great to hear from someone who genuinely likes it! (The same thing happened with Steven Universe, which I loved when I finally watched it.) Definitely on my to-watch list when I can.
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And I get why SU had a big hatedom, it tackled a bunch of serious social-justice themes -- racism, homophobia, PTSD, imperialism, abusive relationships. No matter how thoughtfully you handle those, it's catnip for a certain kind of wanker in general, and it gave viewers excuses to say "any criticism I have, no matter how minor or subjective, means it's Doing Material Harm To An Oppressed And Marginalized Community."
ML is just...so much less ambitious on that front? I don't want that to sound like a dig at the show -- it knows what it's trying to do, overall does it well, and the result is fun and engaging to watch. But it is trying to do *less*, to the point where I don't know what the haters would latch onto.
(...do I even want to know? It's going to be something monumentally stupid, isn't it.)
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I don't remember much of the specifics (no context + I start skimming whenever that sort of rant turns up) but there are a staggering number of people on Discord who seem to enjoy ripping it apart, in part because it's fun and lighthearted (and it's not Madoka Magica). I tend to philosophically disagree with these folks about a lot of other things, so I take their criticism of the show with a huge grain of salt, but wow, was that unexpected, especially when I'm not even in a space devoted to that show in the first place!
IIRC, this came up in a discussion of a Madoka/ML crossover, which people had very strong opinions about how to do it "right"...
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The shows do have some parallel themes -- I mean, some of them are broader magical-girl tropes too, but the potential to reshape the world with a wish, the cost you pay for that, the villains exploiting the negative emotions of average people, the long-term relationship between humanity and a set of cute immortal power-granting critters, the idea that you get a specific limited power set and then figure out how to use it in creative ways...
But that means there's a *lot* of fruitful approaches you could take with a crossover, depending on how you make all those bits of worldbuilding interact! The idea that there's only One Right Way to explore that is just people looking for a fight.