I was first introduced to this series while I was browsing the internet for anime to watch, I watched a video of anime openings over the years and there it was, the first opening for Cardcaptor Sakura. Something about it immediately clicked with me the moment I saw that opening, it looked absolutely fantastic. So I opened up my totally legal streaming app, and started watching the first episode. Needless to say, I was blown away by how truly amazing it was. Here are my reasons as to why Cardcaptor Sakura is not only one of the best magical girl and shoujo anime, but also one of the best anime of it's decade which was just wrapping up.

Sakura is a cute character, sure. Her design with the iconic CLAMP eyes, her costumes, her million dollar smile, the adorable "hoe" sound she makes, she's very adorable and I like that side of her a lot for that, but also think she's somewhat... cool? The moment I saw Sakura in roller-skates, I knew that she was going to be a really awesome character. She's shown to be a very athletic girl, absolutely killing it whenever she's playing, even though she messes it up in the end. But I felt some sort of female empowerment watching her, and I'm a guy! But absolutely nothing beats Tomoyo, the pack of kindness, the lover of Sakura, she's an amazing friend to Sakura and I love her so much, probably my favorite character in the series. And on the side of main characters, we have Cereberus, or Kero-chan as they like to call him. He's certainly an interesting character, he's one of the funniest additions to the show, seriously, this guy's way of thinking really makes me laugh out loud. And these are just the main characters initially introduced in the series, later on new characters like Syaoran, being a rival to Sakura at first but suddenly getting affectionate of her

Spoiler, click to view

which gets to a boiling point in the final stretch of episodes where he confesses to her his love

and Meiling, his cousin who... likes him a lot, yeah... but she gets less insufferable in the last stretch of episodes, trust me, and as the lore behind the Clow Cards opens up,

Spoiler, click to view

new characters like Yu, Eriol, etc. start appearing in the final stretch of episodes.

Another thing about Cardcaptor Sakura that I think is special is how amazing the worldbuilding is in this show, CLAMP built a world that feels actually real with all the connections the people that Sakura meets along the way have with eachother, sure, some of the relationships with adults and minors are very questionable, but they do not detract from the worldbuilding in any way. This actually feels like a connected and coherent world, which I think is an issue even manga and anime nowadays heavily face. But not here, this is a world where the characters feel alive. And where it's past and present feel genuine
This section has a lot of spoilers, so I highly recommend not to click it if you're still watching the show, but if you're not, well...

Spoiler, click to view

The Clow Cards are made by a mage called Clow Reed, they're the main source of the magic that Sakura can use, her mission is to collect all of the cards, which we later learn is 51 (53 counting the movies). But as she collects more and more of the cards she meets more and more people along the way, with the final card being the most destructive card. After she collects every card, Kero turns into his actual form, and Yukito, whom Sakura has a crush on, also enters his real form, Yu. And Yu challenges Sakura to a trial, or, a battle, that Sakura doesn't want to fight because she doesn't want to hurt Yukito, the temporary form of Yu. She gets into a situation where she can't fight back, she has held back her magic and is about to lose, but then she remembers that if she loses, the memory of her most loved will disappear with it, and she absolutely does not want that to happen, so she manages to fight back and finally take ownership of all the cards. One issue, she has to transform the cards from Clow Cards to Sakura Cards, considering Clow Reed is no longer there. And at the final episode of the series, we learn that all of this wasn't a coincidence, but an intentional event which was all set up by Clow Reed himself. Fantastic ending.

Now, how does the episode structure of this series fare? See, the Cardcaptor Sakura anime deviates quite a lot from the original manga, out of the 70 episodes, 35 of them are filler. And some characters like Meiling are not even in the manga at all. These filler episodes can be pretty interesting, for the most part, they don't follow the main plot aside from the card capturing, one of these episode that stood out to me is episode 15, the chain of events that it followed is absolutely insane, and it's one of the only episodes to have 2 cards caught in the same episode, absolutely insane. But the filler here adds a lot to the series, and a lot of what makes it special does come from filler. So no, the filler is not inherently bad at all.

Now the animation style and music, being made in the late 90's, an era of anime known for detailed cels, Cardcaptor Sakura was no exception to this rule. The animation, done by the studio Madhouse, the same studio behind hits as Death Note, the 2011 Hunter X Hunter and Trigun (which released the same year as Cardcaptor Sakura), is absolutely phenomenal for it's time. When I first saw that opening, I genuinely thought the series was not made on cels. I think cel animation has this stigma of not being super colorful when it comes to the west, but this series still manages to look so pretty and colorful and with very detailed lighting at the final stretch of episodes, all done using traditional cels, which is insane. Discounting the amazing sakuga itself, the maybe like 2 fight scenes in this show are so well animated, it's almost eye candy with the backgrounds and visual effects. And the music, oh the music, all three opening themes are delights to hear, but I have to say that the third opening didn't leave a strong impression on me the same way the first two did, but it's still amazing nonetheless. And the background music? There are some absolutely iconic tracks here, the moment you hear them you know where they came from, even the revival of the series, Clear Card still used them after all these years. This goes to show how timeless the music here is.

So this is my complete review of Cardcaptor Sakura. It's simply a fantastic series and I urge you to give it a watch, if you like magical girl anime or not. Because this anime has the widest appeal of all, discounting Madoka which I haven't really seen. But anyways, this is all that I have to say, goodbye.