An American Writer's Thoughts on Japanese Animation

“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.

Despite running an extremely impressive 70 episodes for the “original” series (this review will not be covering the movies or Clear Card), Cardcaptor Sakura has a fairly simple story with only a couple of arcs. It starts when Sakura Kinomoto, a grade-schooler, is investigating her father’s study and finds a mysterious book full of cards. When she reads off the name of one of those cards, Windy, a gust of wind scatters the others far and wide.

Shortly after, the show’s mascot critter arrives: Kerberos (“Kero”), the Beast of the Seal and guardian of the Book of Clow that contained the Clow Cards… currently stuck as a mouse-sized little winged cat. He was sleeping when this disaster struck, but now that he’s up he instructs Sakura that she must gather the scattered Clow Cards to avert a terrible disaster. Helping her complete this mission is the fact that the little key that came with the book can transform into a magic staff and allow her to utilize the cards she has to invoke magic (starting with Windy, but naturally gaining more over time). We also meet some other important characters: Sakura’s annoying high-schooler big brother Toya, Toya’s classmate and Sakura’s crush Yukito, and Sakura’s slightly weird and obsessive friend/fangirl, Tomoyo. Please don’t think I’m being hard on these characters; they’re all very likeable.

The basic loop of the show for the first arc is this: Most of a given episode will probably be focused on Sakura’s life, her normal struggles, and her interactions with her friends. A card will appear (incarnated in the form of some creature or magical being) and cause trouble, and Sakura will have to figure out how to use her arsenal to seal it away. Some episodes, especially the earlier ones, are more focused on the cards while others are more heavily focused on Sakura, but the general idea remains the same.

Fairly shortly, Sakura gains a new friend/rival in Xiaolang (also romanized as Syaoran) Li, a sorcerer her age from Hong Kong, who wants to capture the Clow Cards for himself as a descendant of their creator, Clow Reed. As tensions with Xiaolang fade, his cousin, Meiling, appears on scene to help him out, but Sakura’s kindness eventually leads to befriending her too. Later on, another mysterious figure appears: Miss Mizuki, a new teacher at Sakura’s school who used to have a thing with her brother and absolutely has an awful lot of magical knowledge and power.

Eventually, by way of one magical slice of mayhem after another, Tomoyo making Sakura way too many special costumes to go out doing Cardcaptor things in, and so on, and so forth, all the cards are captured, triggering the heavily foreshadowed yet poorly presaged Final Judgment. In order to be confirmed as the new master of the Clow Cards, Sakura must do battle with and defeat Yue, Kero’s counterpart… and the true identity of none other than Yukito. Naturally, Sakura has a hard time raising a hand against someone she cares about, but since failing the Final Judgment would have some very nasty consequences, she manages to pull through. Now Sakura has all the cards and disaster has been averted, so all’s well that ends well… with the first arc, at any rate.

The second arc is even more character-driven than the first was. Because it’s still astoundingly long and would thus be both difficult and pretty much useless to go beat by beat, I’ll cover the major threads that are being juggled: Strange magical incidents start occurring again, but as they do Sakura loses the ability to use the Clow Cards – she has to transform them into Sakura cards, based in her own magical power, to wield them again, and if she doesn’t they could slip into a torpor and cease to be thinking, feeling magic cards rather than inert slips of paper. Meanwhile, Sakura still has to work out her feelings for Yukito, especially since he’s a shell concealing Yue and not a natural human at all. The audience also learns that Yukito/Yue’s power is fading fast since Sakura, as a novice, can’t support him. Though this fact is kept from her, his very existence is in danger. This doesn’t please Toya, who learned about all this magical nonsense, at all, because he and Yukito are the real Yukito-including item and he quite naturally doesn’t want Yukito to fade away. Meanwhile, on the topic of love lives, we have Xiaolang and his cute little tsundere crush on Sakura, which is supported or possibly challenged by the arrival of Eriol, a new transfer student and also secretly the reincarnation of Clow Reed and source of the latest round of magical threats, along with his henchmen, dark versions of Yue and Kero.

Each episode will deal with some or, more likely, all of the emotional threads while also giving Sakura a challenge that requires her to transform one or more Clow Cards into Sakura Cards, once again giving us the progression of Sakura gaining new powers. Even moreso than in the Clow Card arc, the cards often feel like an afterthought in the Sakura Card arc. However, there’s nothing really wrong with that, because the relationship stuff has weight and power in its own right.

The structure of the finale, I feel, says a lot about what Cardcaptor Sakura is doing in the Sakura Card arc. The last few episodes work on concluding everything. By this point, Yue has been stabilized at the cost of Toya’s magical potential (which was vast) meaning that Yukito will live on. Sakura, meanwhile, has given up on Yukito as a romantic lead, recognizing with his help that she loves him more like she loves her father than she would a partner. Xiaolang has, at great length, recognized the feelings he has for Sakura for the romantic love they’ve become and at even greater length has resolved to actually talk to Sakura and confess said feelings.

All of this is interrupted by Eriol finally revealing himself and issuing a last, dangerous challenge to Sakura, magic against magic. In the penultimate episode, Sakura has to risk everything to transform the final Clow Cards and undo Eriol’s spell work, her entire home town placed in jeopardy over the conflict along with, emphatically, everyone she cares about. All this is resolved, however, in that episode: the real finale is reserved for Sakura’s response to Xiaolang’s feelings, not her struggle against Clow Reed. Both are important, but matters of the heart are more important. In the end, after a lot of drama and questioning, her answer is an emphatic ‘yes’ (the powerful realization of her feelings in the face of learning that Xiaolang will soon be taken away from her, back to Hong Kong by circumstance, even going so far as to form a new card), but seeing what they do with that is for later Cardcaptor material.

So, the plot of Cardcaptor Sakura is good, but perhaps a little light for its running time, relying significantly on repeated beats even if the struggle to overcome each Clow Card or magical occurrence is typically unique and decently thought out. However, where the show really wins out is, as cheesy as this might be to say, in heart. The characters could be called simple, but they play their notes exactly right and mostly get enough time to show some dimensions. Sakura is an excellent protagonist; she’s kind and gentle, but she does have a personality as well. Sakura gets mad when her brother needles her, she can space out when she shouldn’t or be a crybaby or a scardey-cat. A lot about her stays the same, but she has to learn and grow as well. Xiaolang might spend a lot of time as just a male tsundere (not acknowledging his feelings, helping Sakura and then insisting it’s for selfish reasons, fleeing at high speed when confronted by someone he likes…) but he also gets depth and complexity. His feelings grow and change slowly, and we’re allowed to understand him, and why he acts the way he does fairly often. Tomoyo may spend a lot of time as just Sakura’s #1 fan, but even she can interact with other people in ways that give her a distinctive character that’s not just one note, like when she comforts Meiling over Meiling learning that Xiaolang (who she’s in love with) loves Sakura. Kero… well, Kero is kind of one-noted, but as the magical mascot his place is to provide comic relief and the occasional tutorial material for Sakura, and in that much he fills his role as well as you could expect any character to.

One thing I notice, really trying to look over Cardcaptor Sakura, is that it’s hard to find any real fault in it. It’s mostly harmless, but it’s also clearly intended to be watched at least in part by younger children, girls about Sakura’s age, and there is enough emotional weight and drama to still hold the interest of an adult. It never loses focus on what it’s about. The pace, while somewhat meandering, is consistent and I can’t really blame it for taking and using 70 episodes. None of the characters are excessively annoying or poorly written, they all at least earn a passing grade and sometimes much more. The heights of the show aren’t always the highest, though there are a few really good scenes… but the lows, from a viewer’s perspective rather than Sakura’s, are practically non-existent.

Before passing Final Judgment, though, a few words about Cardcaptor Sakura specifically as a Magical Girl show. In a way, I’m glad I’m using Sakura and not one of the founders as my baseline example of the genre, because Cardcaptor Sakura came out at a time when the expectations for Magical Girls had already largely crystallized. Sakura has a little mascot creature telling her what to do, there’s a lot of concern about the heroine’s true feelings, and while she doesn’t actually transform the combination of her ritual for calling on the Staff and Cards combined with Tomoyo’s battle costumes create something of the impression of a transformation scene (the one element that could possibly be owed to coming after Sailor Moon). By the time Sakura came out, the tropes were known, and the show does largely color inside the lines, so to speak, rather than trying to do anything revolutionary.

The heart of the Magical Girl genre, in this form, is the progression of the main Girl, and how her interaction with magic causes her to change and grow. Sakura forms deep bonds and priceless friendships because of how she becomes a Magical Girl, and those bonds are more relevant and valuable than the magic itself. Sakura is challenged first and foremost in her own heart, and on any sort of “battlefield” a distant second. Her journey is also, very much, one about growing up. She’s not done yet, and she still has some of her core childishness, but she does have to rise to an awful lot of responsibility, a hallmark of the coming-of-age narrative more than putting away childish things would be.

Cardcaptor Sakura is, like its heroine, largely pleasant, and liable to make a friend of you through an abiding niceness rather than some deed of Derring-do. I rate it at an A-, respecting very much how it manages a consistent level of quality over its long run, but acknowledging how it only infrequently rises above the call of duty. I considered a lower grade, perhaps something like a B+, but how well the show comes together as a production of scale really does earn it quite a few points. Unlike some A-rank shows, I don’t think Cardcaptor will really have a lot of “wow” factor, but it will have a great and abiding sum of good will.