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.