Finished watching Sailor Moon (1992, Toei Animation, 46 epi) on 6/12/2018.
Tsukino Usagi is your average middle school girl. Or she would be if she wasn't late to school so much and her grades a little better. Not only that but now her life is even further from being average after meeting a talking, black cat named Luna who grants Usagi powers that turn her into Sailor Moon, a magical warrior of love. And with these powers she must fight the evil monsters of the Dark Kingdom, as she gathers together the remaining Sailor Soldiers to help her find the fabled Moon Princess!
Sailor Moon has been a crazy ride of ups and downs for me. I've started reading the manga last year and I found it to be abysmal... but I'll leave that for the manga review. The anime however... blew my mind. It was so much better, I dare use the word superior even. And the funny thing is, I feel like it's only half based on the manga as most of the episodes stories didn't happen in the manga, and even the events that do take place tend to be very different. So a lot of it ends up being original stories that just happen to follow the base plot of the manga. Usually I'd scoff at that amount of filler content but this ended up working beautifully for something based on an original work where the only good thing it had for it was its basic concept. So the animated series ends up being what the manga should've been from the start. Heck, even the main character, who I despised the most in the manga, was pretty entertaining in the show. But that's why all the filler content is good. Because in this case it's used to flesh out characters and develop them in ways that the manga lacked.
Okay, enough about the manga though. I want to talk about the background art and the music. As they are both amazing! I don't know whose idea was to create such magical backgrounds with colorful gradients and tones, but I'm in love with the style. And then there's the music. It was the 90's so it certainly has that city pop hint on some of the tracks, but I also think everything was recorded organically, or at least it sounds like it might've been. Not sure what the sampling technology was like back then. For anime productions, at least. The tracks used really convey the emotions they were intended for, and these range quite widely with a great variety in instruments.
8/10 - It's a really great show overall, and now I understand where the legacy of the franchise comes from, but for the time it was released storytelling techniques in anime were still developing and so there are some hiccups here and there.
