An American Writer's Thoughts on Japanese Animation

Category: Magical Girl May

Your Mileage May Vary – Vividred Operation Spoiler Review

Vividred Operation is a weird one for me. The first time I tried to watch it, I quit part-way through Episode 2. The reason for this is probably the reason it’s got a fairly poor aggregate, and why a lot of viewers will also be dissuaded from getting through the show: The fanservice is intense, and if that doesn’t bug you on its own it’s worth noting that it’s mostly loli fanservice. Like most Magical Girls, the leads in Vividred Operation are in middle school, and unlike a lot of Magical Girls (especially ones that get fanservice-heavy treatments) at least some of them, notably the main character Akane, are drawn to look on the younger end of that and still get a lot of shots focused on their rear ends.

To be fair, the show lets you know this pretty much from frame one, when one of the first shots of the show does the James Bond style “Scene between the legs” shot with one of the girls. The show does, frankly, tone it down a little over time (I guess they assume they’d hooked the audience they wanted to hook) but it never goes away, with even that particular shot coming back a couple times.

If that’s going to filter you, you can stop now. If not, what do you actually get for going through the whole show? Honestly, a very heartfelt, legitimate, and well-constructed Magical Girl show.

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What Comes After – Magical Girl Spec-Ops Asuka Spoiler Review

Here we are, technically one week into June, and I’m doing one last Magical Girl review to put something of a capstone on the month. The show in question is not a great classic, nor is it a landmark in the evolution of the genre. Rather, it is by its very existence a fascinating look at what has developed and how in terms of the Magical Girl genre. The show is, if the title was not a sufficient hint, Magical Girl Spec-Ops Asuka.

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Sacrifice, Despair, and Slice of Life – Yuki Yuna is a Hero Spoiler Review

The modern era of Magical Girl is still, essentially, “Post-Madoka” – there hasn’t been another game changer like Madoka Magica or Sailor Moon since, and so what remains is to analyze the themes and tropes of the genre as they exist. After Madoka hit, what did the Magical Girl genre do with it?

Some shows didn’t change a whole lot. It’s possible to get Magical Girl shows that reach to one side or the other of Madoka in terms of what influences they express. There are some harder to escape traits. Since Sailor Moon, the Magical Girl character herself has been more defined as a type of warrior, and since Madoka the image of what a Magical Girl is has more often included the idea that her powers are a burden, not a gift. Some shows play less with these aspects and some more, but when you think about a Magical Girl nowadays, chances are she wields weapons and has a heavy purpose. When speaking of shows that take more, especially from Madoka, though, you’ve got Yuki Yuna is a Hero.

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Kyuubey, I’ve Come to Bargain – Madoka Magica Spoiler Review

Last time when talking about Sailor Moon, I mentioned that there was another show that had to be addressed when it came to studying the growth and evolution of the Magical Girl genre. There are plenty of other big, famous landmarks in the genre, like Lyrical Nanoha or Pretty Cure, but the game-changing elephant in the room is Madoka Magica.

In some senses, it feels almost perfunctory to talk about Madoka, the same way it did to discuss Neon Genesis Evangelion. But as with Neon Genesis Evangelion, I need to establish a baseline to talk about other works, both the two remaining in the Magical Girl May series this year (yes, I’m actually going one week into June) and any other post-Madoka Magical Girl show I may choose to review in the future. So, let’s dig right in.

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Magical Girl Goes Action – Sailor Moon Crystal Spoiler Review

It’s impossible to talk about the history of the Magical Girl genre without talking about two shows in particular. One of those two (we’ll get to the other later) is Sailor Moon. The original series is notorious for two things. One is, allegedly, having a truly awe-inspiring sum of filler, both in terms of filler episodes and repeated battle and of course Transformation animations. The other is for transforming the nature of the Magical Girl genre by taking it from a branch of Adventure or even Slice of Life to one of action, blending the preexisting magical girl themes with those of transforming heroes and fighting hero teams. While Cardcaptor Sakura doesn’t show those influences, at least too much, every other Magical Girl show I’ll be reviewing this month has clearly felt, however distantly, the impact that Sailor Moon had.

The astute reader may note, though, that the title of this review does not simply say “Sailor Moon”. There’s a reason for that. I didn’t watch Sailor Moon when it was first coming out in the states, and hadn’t sought it out as part of my early years as an invested anime viewer. Rather, I knew it by reputation and knew that I had to look into it to really understand the Magical Girl genre. The thing is, the classic Sailor Moon had a five-year run and a grand total of two hundred episodes. I could have tried to cover the first season or arc, I suppose, but instead my research into the genre directed me towards a remake called Sailor Moon Crystal.

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“Release!” – Cardcaptor Sakura Spoiler Review


Welcome to another theme month – it’s May, so it’s time to take a look at Magical Girl anime! Specifically, I’d like to examine a few shows with an eye towards the history or evolution of the genre, including game-changers and reactions to them. To start that, though, I was put into a fairly awkward place: It’s quite hard to find a way to view most of the Magical Girl anime that were legitimately big before the debut of the original Sailor Moon, limiting my knowledge of what the early days of the genre were like to secondary sources. However, those secondary sources led me to one anime that, while it was technically a later release, is very much emblematic of what an entry in the genre would have looked like before Sailor Moon. That show is Cardcaptor Sakura.

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