If you’ve been following the blog, particularly the Magical Girl reviews, the idea may have gotten across that I have a great deal of respect for Cardcaptor Sakura. The original show may not have been quite as spectacular as some others, but it came together amazingly well given everything. As such, it was a topic that I was more than willing to revisit. While there is a sequel season, Clear Card, for now I’ll be addressing Sakura’s two feature-length outings, called simply Cardcaptor Sakura: the Movie and Cardcaptur Sakura Movie 2: The Sealed Card.
A small note here, but as of the movie subtitles, rather than those for the show, Xiaolang (as he was called in the first show’s subtitles) has his name romanized as Syaoran. I’ll be using this form throughout
The first movie takes place during the original show’s run, specifically during Spring Break. Syaoran and Meiling return home to Hong Kong for the break, and wonder of wonders, Sakura (who is also experiencing some weird and threatening dreams) wins a trip to Hong Kong, seemingly with the intervention of an unknown magic. She brings Tomoyo with her for the trip, as well as Toya and Yukito as the group’s chaperones. They get a little nice sightseeing in, but while they’re passing through a place called Bird Street, two very particular birds from one of Sakura’s dreams catch her attention. She chases them, using her cards to follow after (and get ahead of her friends in the process), and is ultimately drawn to an isolated old well, and almost hypnotized into its depths. Syaoran appears, driving off the birds and saving Sakura from any fate worse than getting wet.
This ultimately leads to Sakura (and the rest) being invited to the Li estate where we see that he has four overbearing older sisters and a kind but enigmatic mother. All involved seem to take something of a liking to Sakura, and mom is even a sensitive enough sort of mage to recognize some of the supernatural business that’s going on. She warns Sakura that the woman she’s been seeing in her dreams (who attacked her in the most recent version) is some sort of powerful spirit. She also sets Syaoran and Meiling to show Sakura around the next day, presumably since having more magical firepower around is better than having less.
Sure enough, something does happen, as the strange birds once again lead Sakura somewhere (an antiques store this time) and she falls for a magical trap due to reasons of hypnosis. This time it’s a little faster acting, and Sakura (as well as her friends, who were nearby) is pulled into some sort of watery netherworld where the woman from her dreams lurks. She seems to have a serious grudge against Clow Reed, and is not happy to see Sakura rather than her intended mark. She also seems disinclined to take “he’s dead” for an answer, and takes Sakura’s friends hostage. Syaoran helps Sakura get Tomoyo out, at the cost of his own freedom, but this still leaves most of the people she cares about in the clutches of an unknown watery nemesis insisting that a dead man be produced.
Once they’re on the outside, Kero realizes he knows who they’re dealing with, a fortune-teller and minor rival of Clow Reed, who challenged him to many contests when he lived in Hong Kong, and whose grudge against Clow must have been enough to bind her spirit to linger as a hateful ghost. She doesn’t realize she’s dead, or that a fair amount of time has passed, and thus isn’t going to be easy to deal with.
To break back into the ghost’s prison, Sakura intends to use the well, which seems to be an alternate entrance, and when she goes there she bumps into Syaoran’s mother, who is willing and able to help with the magic end of sending Sakura to the rescue. Sakura confronts the woman again and, in the process of Sakura getting her friends free, the spirit escapes into the real world. While nothing Sakura said seemed to get through to her in the prison, she gets a little bent out of shape when she sees how much Hong Kong has changed. She battles Sakura again in the outside world using some really impressive water powers all things considered, but eventually Sakura manages to get through to her, offering some understanding and confirming in a way and at a time when the Spirit is willing to listen that Clow Reed is gone and there’s really nothing for it. She fades away, dissolving into water, but not before giving us the impression that maybe her attachment to Clow Reed wasn’t as hostile as Kero led us to believe.
Of course, knowing how the rest of the show goes this is kind of funny, since Clow Reed is in fact reincarnated as Eriol, but that hadn’t been introduced by this point in the timeline, so best to let the ghost melt away without spoilers.
So, that’s the basis of Cardcaptor Sakura: the Movie and… honestly, while I often gloss over Slice of Life material in things that have a mix of Slice of Life and actual plot, in order to better summarize the story, I didn’t really leave much out here for the movie. While Cardcaptor Sakura often had a little light action, usually around catching the trouble-making card of the episode, it wasn’t all the time and it didn’t tend to be a whole lot. Exceptions occurred in a 70-episode show, but by in large the balance heavily favored other things. The movie goes bigger, more dramatic, and more action-focused than the show as a whole, perhaps not above its highest peaks but certainly above its average… which makes sense for a cinematic outing.
It’s nice to meet Syaoran’s family, and the story that’s told, while basically isolated from everything else Cardcaptor does (being only tangentially connected through Clow Reed), is strong enough. The film has a good structure, and the characters you liked from the show are essentially themselves. As a film on its own, it’s not special but it is good enough, basically earning a B rating in isolation. As an entry in the Cardcaptor Sakura franchise, it feels a bit tacked on. You could watch it, at the appropriate time during the original run or not, and I don’t think you’d really gain or lose anything. If you’d like to see Sakura go a little bigger and more dramatic, go right ahead and watch. If not, skip it.
The Sealed Card is a little different, functioning as a direct sequel to the original series. Apparently, in the ending of the show, when Sakura’s feelings for Syaoran coalesced into a brand new card, she didn’t actually give him a good answer before seeing him off. However, as the movie kicks into gear, Syaoran and Meiling are back visiting, giving her another chance to set the record straight and actually accept Syaoran’s confession with one of her own.
This time, the emotional side of things that was always the forefront in the show will also be the forefront in the movie. There is a plot as well, dealing with the titular Sealed Card, but we’re mostly concerned with Sakura’s attempts to confess and what she’s going to do with all her feelings, even as things ramp up. This is familiar to the bigger movements in the show, like Final Judgment or Eriol’s challenge, and results in The Sealed Card, unlike The Movie, feeling a lot like an extended or multi-part episode of the show. Frankly, I think that’s for the best, since it plays more to its strengths.
That main plot starts when Eriol’s old house is torn down to make way for an amusement park. Apparently he forgot to clean up before selling and moving out, though, and left a cursed artifact of doom behind in the form of another, otherwise unknown Clow Card. It awakens, like the ones in the main series did when Sakura disturbed the Book of Clow, and begins to haunt the absurdly quickly built amusement park, which is where Syaoran and Sakura end up meeting up.
Despite or perhaps because they both sensed weird magic at the Amusement Park, and that things across the town seem to be vanishing in strange ways, everybody ends up going back to the amusement park for what’s supposed to be a fun time. Sakura and Syaoran end up together on the Ferris Wheel, where Sakura at least tries to talk about her feelings… until one of her cards fly away and they end up chasing the weird magical card-stealing manifestation, eventually finding the incarnate form of the sealed card in the hall of mirrors.
Unlike most of them, this card actually talks, and seems to have something of a grudge against Sakura for holding the others. It steals more cards and escapes, which leaves everybody somewhat at a loss for what to do. Eriol, however, literally phones in his cameo in this movie in order to explain.
Apparently the sealed card is “The Nothing”, a single card meant to act as the spiritual counterbalance for the other Clow Cards, an equal negative to the positive of the other fifty-two combined. Its release was probably inevitable, even if the construction agitated it, because the other cards are now Sakura cards, not Clow Cards. As the Nothing gains control of the other cards, its powers flex and grow, and parts of the town begin to vanish, as was seen in small ways before. According to Eriol, it should be possible for Sakura to forcibly seal the Nothing, but doing so would have a cost, namely that Sakura’s strongest feeling (in her mind, her love for Syaoran) would be consumed in the process. This naturally leaves Sakura extremely distraught, facing what she’ll potentially have to lose in order to protect her town and master her magic.
While this is going on, there’s still a good deal of slice of life. Most of it is centered on the class’s school play, where Sakura is all set to play a fairy-tale princess. When her prince is injured during a rehearsal, the class is fairly quick to declare Syaoran (technically just visiting or no) the proper understudy, leading to a lot of adorable grade-school awkwardness around the fact that their characters are in love while the two of them haven’t talked through their own issues yet.
Everything comes to a head at the performance of the school play, when the Nothing attacks, vanishing most of the audience and even a lot of the secondary characters, making it necessary to chase her back to the amusement park and put a stop to the mayhem. Sakura’s friends end up disappeared (except for Syaoran, who fakes us out to come back for the last moment) and Sakura ends up out of cards as she confronts the Nothing in its lair in the park’s central clock tower. In typical Sakura fashion she hears it out, learning that it’s angry because it’s horribly lonely, having existed in isolation and then, when Sakura transformed them, lost its bond to the other Clow Cards. Sakura offers it a place with her if it will just be sealed, and that it won’t have to be alone, and the Nothing accepts. It even declares that the toll will come from Syaoran rather than Sakura. Though obviously hurt learning what’s coming, he’s sure he’ll fall for Sakura all over again if that’s what’s needed.
This is when Sakura’s own card, the one that manifested at the end of the show, comes into play, intercepting the Nothing’s action and merging with it to form a new proper card, The Hope. Sakura manages to confess her feelings and, to her surprise, Syaoran still feels the same way, as the formation of The Hope negated the need for that “most powerful feelings” toll. Personally, I think that’s because the blank card coalesced from Sakura’s most powerful feelings and was thus a proper substitute, which wasn’t made explicit but was pretty well set up when you compare that scene to this one.
Thus, this is how we end the movie: Sakura and Syaoran are on the stairs of the clock tower, a gulf created by the Nothing disappearing matter between them, having just confessed their feelings. Since everything the Nothing took away is coming back, Sakura could wait a minute… or she could shout out her love for Syaoran and make a flying leap into his arms. Sakura opts for the exuberant response and we exit on that joyful jump. The End.
There’s a “Leave it to Kero” short that goes with the movie as well, featuring Kero and Spinel chasing each other around town in pursuit of the last ball of takoyaki, but while that’s a good deal of fun, it’s not as though there’s really plot to analyze, it’s just a brief bout of roadrunner-cartoon-style insanity with the familiars. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention it, but there’s little to talk about regarding it.
If there was any way in which you felt that the ending of Cardcaptor, after the final confrontation with Eriol, was a little lacking, Sealed Card probably serves as the completion and capstone you wanted to see – mostly because the affection between Sakura and Syaoran was the big dangling thread at the end of the series, and that gets its proper arc-length resolution here. It really is just a big finale that they decided to put on the big screen instead of in episode format.
Because of that, there’s little that can be said about The Sealed Card that isn’t better or already said about the main show, and it also shares the main show’s A- grade, having similar strengths and weaknesses. The first movie tried to be more cinematic, and lost a bit of the charm because of it. The Sealed Card is 100% Sakura from beginning to end, and also manages to be cohesive and dramatic as a movie. True, you could put that “dramatic” in air quotes since suspending your disbelief about how everything is going to be fine in Cardcaptor Sakura might be a bit of an ask, but I wouldn’t hold that against either the show or the movie because they do manage what’s on screen pretty well and can’t really help the subtext of being a lighter and softer show probably meant for at least somewhat younger audiences. If you enjoyed the show, I’d strongly recommend following it up with The Sealed Card.