Sailor Moon Crystal: Mid-Season Review

It’s been a while since my initial review of Sailor Moon Crystal, but yesterday was the 13th episode of the series, meaning we’re officially halfway through, and we need to take another look at this revamped series. This is a tough one, because there’s so much nostalgia here. Sailor Moon defined the magical girl genre and was—and still is, as evidenced by all the hype surrounding Crystal’s release—wildly popular. But I’m sorry to say Crystal just isn’t doing it for me. Here’s the thing about Sailor Moon—it’s ridiculously campy. The magical make-up transformations, the Tyra Banks poses during fight sequences, the unbeatable power of love—c’mon, you can’t really take that seriously. Still, it’s like the original Batman—one of a kind. It’s meant to be campy, and it has a sense of humor about it. That’s what we had in the original. A sense of humor. Crystal keeps the ridiculousness of the original but forgets all about the laughs, so all we’re left with is the shallow glitz of the 3D, CGI animation that makes everyone look overly glossed and a bit too skinny. I recently watched an episode of the original from about the same part we’re in now, near the end of the Dark Kingdom arc. The first time Usagi encounters Princess Serenity, she says, “someone needs to call the fashion police because this chick walks around in public in a nightgown”. That Usagi was so much funnier—and not just in terms of her wit, because there was a lot more slapstick in the original as well.  

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