Review: Sailor Moon

With the aid of the other Sailor Scouts (and the dark and mysterious Tuxedo Mask), Serena, as Sailor Moon, fights the forces of evil in repeated battles against the forces of the Negaverse.

Serena being the terribly airheaded crybaby that she is, Luna's job isn't exactly cut out for her...

The show mostly follows a monster-of-the-week formula. Master villain X (under queen Beryl; X varies through the series) discovers a new source of "energy" to be tapped. They tap that source, training people of energy, and when discovered by Sailor Moon and the Sailor Scouts, the energy is used to form an appropriately themed minor villain. For example, in the "anime studio" episode the villain is the "Gemini twins" - based on the spiral design of an animator's pencil. (I didn't say that the theme was always sensible.) The minor villain is defeated and master-villain-of-the-week X returns to Queen Beryl in shame.

The different Sailor Scouts have their own themed attacks (Mars has fire, of course, and Mercury has the extravagantly silly "Mercury Bubbles"). There's a certain amount of bickering within the team, which is frequently used as the basis of the extremely cheesy moral-of-the-week segment at the tail end of each episode.

It's extremely formulaic, and in various ways has been repeated by other "magical girl" anime, but a fair bit of imagination has been used in generating variants on the formula. Don't expect anything resembling depth here, but it's fun in its own way.

Characters vary from likeable to extremely annoying. Serena (Sailor Moon) herself is a terrible crybaby, and is frequently very selfish and scatterbrained. However, she does have the grit needed where it matters. Her friend Molly is mainly annoying due to her dubbed valley-girl accent.

Fortunately as the series progresses Serena matures and the extremely annoying, whiney crybaby found at the beginning of the series disappears in favour of a much more stable, determined and courageous Serena. (But she does remain a bit of a crybaby.)

Animation quality is somewhat mixed. The transformation scenes are well done, but are repeated every episode. In fact the recycling of animation footage can get quite obtrusive at times. This is common in the Magical Girl genre, but no less annoying. Other animation in the series is usually low-to-mid level quality. The second season (included in this release) revamps the animations to some extent.

If Sailor Moon S is any indication, it's a great pity that this release contains only the English dub. The dubbed version is watchable, however. The voice for Molly is incredibly annoying; other voice actors vary from poor to average.

Packaging is fairly simple - striking designs featuring the various sailor scouts and Tuxedo Mask, with the DVD hub clip being the fairly usable "butterfly" clip design. It's all very cute, although not to the extent of the Saint Tail menus. It's pretty obviously aimed at young girls.