Recap

Tuxedo Mask stirs up trouble all over town, causing the Sailor Guardians to become suspicious of him.

Zigg’s Thoughts

It seemed like Sailor Moon Crystal was on the upswing last week, but we came crashing right back down to earth with this episode. It’s poorly written, badly animated, and worst of all it’s just sort of dull. Regardless of whether it’s the fault of the original manga or the way it’s been adapted, the exposition here was clumsy and the character affection limited. Combined with another weak artistic effort the result is an episode that’s a slog rather than enjoyable.

It’s a shame, because with four girls in the ensemble we’re beginning to see sparks of chemistry and banter between them. Makoto teasing Usagi about her blushing is an adorable bit of characterisation that we’ve seen way too little of, and sadly that’s about as good as it gets here. There’s so little time spent getting to know the four girls as characters – they’re basically only together to fight or have expositions spewed at them by Luna, and as a result there’s a palpable lack of personality to everything that happens. The show is clearly trying to offset this by focusing on the Mamoru/Usagi relationship, but that doesn’t work either. Firstly because they have the chemistry of a wet blanket, and secondly because so much of their relationship plays into the shoujo ‘tall dark stranger’ fantasy which I find inherently sort of creepy. The scene which is meant to be their big heart to heart is just them spewing generic ‘anime epiphany’ dialogue at each other. There’s no real emotion here and it all sounds so painfully stiff it’s hard to get behind it.

It doesn’t help either that the show reverts back to painfully limited animation this week. In this case it’s the direction which suffers. Even as we were watching first  time round  Iro and I noticed the abundance of tight crops to the face and in particular the ludicrous number of slow pans up from the waist to the face. It’s painfully obvious the show is doing  everything possible to cut back on actual animation, and that’s impossibly frustrating. This isn’t some sort of bargain basement fanservice show. This is Sailor Moon for god’s sake, and a show on a fortnightly production schedule to boot. Yet all we can get is this sub-par effort. The show feels like a little-effort-as-possible affair and it’s not just the visuals either. The obvious lack of care taken in adapting the written story to an onscreen format is obvious at every turn, and hurts the narrative. Slavish devotion to your source material is rarely a good thing – a different medium requires a different style of storytelling and the best shows take enough liberties with the original story to make it work. What we’ve got here sadly is an adaptation which seems to have no interest in anything other than getting the most bare-bones product on the screen possible.

Random Observations

• On thing I will give the show credit for is the fight sequence, which was relatively dynamic and showed off the Sailor Guardians actually using their powers extensively for the first time, along with some actual leaping and moving. It’s too bad Zoisite is clearly just a still drawing being moved around.
• What’s with the world’s shortest cold open?
• Tuxedo Mask claims he has doesn’t have ‘special abilities’. Er, what?
• Usagi claims to Tuxedo Mask that she’s ‘the leader’ but at that point she’s still ostensibly trying to hide her secret identity, so the statement makes no sense.
• How sad/ridiculous is it that Usagi draws inspiration from her delusion of an arcade game instead of her friends and comrades?
• One good thing about this episode – Sailor V! Let’s hope Minako shows up again sooner rather than later.