Just up front: trust me when I say that no one is madder than me that I hate Sailor Moon Crystal. This wasn't a case of hype killing an experience. I'm pretty forgiving. I can look past a lot to enjoy something that's pretty fundamentally flawed but still has some good ideas in it. The problem with Crystal is that it's dull. Nothing shines.
1. It Looks Persistently Awful.
Every anime that isn't a heavily-polished movie production has the occasional awkward shot, and this was a web anime, so it would have been unreasonable to expect perfection, but man, the proof is out there that it could have looked so much better. Seriously, LOOK at the Moon Pride music video. (Just close your eyes for the 3D models. Ignore that part for now.)
That's what we could have had! And this is what we got:
“But doodlemancy, they fixed it for the blu-ray!”
No they did not.
One major problem with the art is a fundamental misunderstanding of the shape of Usagi's head, which plagues nearly every scene, even in the later seasons with the "improved" art style. She has this giant, top-heavy cranium with a tiny face just sort of sliding toward the bottom. The "fix" above even isn't on-model. It looks like it's in a different anime's style.
Here's my favorite example of a "fix" that improves almost nothing. The problem: these sunglasses are sitting on Mamo's face like horse blinders. Observe this helpful stock photo man for a moment:
You can see they redrew a lot of this, added shadows and detail, they even changed the shape of the sunglasses... but the most glaring error remains. He's still wearing horse blinders.
Here's some more screenshots from the "fixed" blu-ray release. These are not just weird in-betweens that you can only catch on a frame-by-frame, they are frames you can see easily with your raw eyeballs while watching. It is roughly this ugly about 95% of the time.
That last one is the expression that the senshi wear for like, most of the runtime of every episode. I got so so sick of seeing that "O.O" face on everyone. It's like texting someone who responds to everything you say with the same emoji.
Here's a rare nice shot, as a treat. Sometimes it does look nice! I admit it! I wish that more than like, 5% of it looked nice!
Most of the problem, honestly, is the art style. It’s a real Bad Choice Salad. Everyone just looks stringy and unsettling, like a bunch of daddy longlegs with big anime eyes copy-pasted onto them, and if you look at the model sheets, you can see why it’s like this. It’s built on a foundation of sand.
This is not a person. These are not expressions. Those are not the eyes of a thing that has human thoughts. It looks like something out of a terrible how-to-draw-thing book your aunt buys you from Michael’s because she heard you really like japanimation or mango or whatever it was.
Relevant quote from the character designer:
“I just couldn’t achieve the balance of Ms. Takeuchi’s style. It was hard to notice it myself, but I kept drifting towards a more modern anime style so my aim was to figure out how to disrupt that. It took several months, but finally I arrived at ‘the best balance to turn Ms. Takeuchi’s drawings into anime.’“
It sounds like she was really struggling with these designs, which to me indicates that she's just... maybe not the right choice for the job. If you look up her other work, her wheelhouse is really Lanky Yaoi Boys, which is all well and good and probably explains why Mamoru and the Shitennou look a bit less terrible than the senshi do most of the time. Yukie Sato is not a bad artist, she's just terribly misused here, and even Crystal fans will admit that the anime started looking way better when they switched character designers a few arcs in.
Also, the CG henshin sequences use these weird, rubbery 3D models of the senshi that look like they belong in a shovelware Wii game. They’re clunky, they’re boring, they're creepy, I hate them. Sailor Moon's henshin sequences are an icon-- of the series, of the genre, and of anime in general. I'd wager almost anyone that saw Sailor Moon, even if it was ages ago and they haven't thought about it since they were a child, probably remembers the henshin sequences. If something's going to be in every episode, that's where you put the sakuga! But there is no sakuga in Crystal. There is only sadness.
In a previous version of this review, I said some stuff that was unfair. I said that “nobody cared” about how this anime looked. Having heard some stuff about the production, it sounds like a lot of SMC was outsourced to underpaid, exploited animators in the Phillipines (As opposed to, I guess, all the well paid and definitely not exploited animators everywhere else! Ha ha ha scream) and they were often asked to make tight turnarounds. So I guess I’m tapping the “fast/cheap/good” triangle sign and sighing again.
It's a shoddy production, but for pretty clear reasons. I don’t think the animators should be ashamed of their work. I think that decision-makers at Toei should be ashamed that for the 20th anniversary of an internationally-beloved franchise, they cheaped out.
2. I Do Think Everyone Should Be Ashamed Of The Writing And Direction, Though
People complained about the filler in the 90s anime, but that was where a lot of the fun character-building happened. Sailor Moon Crystal ran too far in the opposite direction, deciding to squeeze two story arcs into one 26-episode season. It's extremely condensed. The story itself is so excited to get to its next nostalgic plot destination and say, "Look how we did it THIS time!" that it forgets the journey, and the journey is the most important part.
While it's true that the manga is pretty fast-paced, it has a fairy-tale feel to it and still manages to be engaging and emotional though its much more expressive artwork. Meanwhile, most every character drawn in Crystal has the emotional depth and subtlety of an emoticon. The art’s not good enough to make up for the deficiencies in the story, and... frankly... as much as I love Naoko’s work, the manga story is pretty unpolished and there's a lot of dream logic nonsense in there that translates even worse to the screen; for example, there's a scene at the end of the Dark Kingdom arc where Usagi is gallivanting around the Moon Palace post-final-battle with Mamoru without seemingly a care in the world, and then SUDDENLY remembers that all her friends are still missing and maybe dead/dying. It makes her look like a real jerk (more on this later). It happens the same way in the manga, but because it's only across a couple of pages, there's not as much time for you to ponder on it and get frustrated with her.
The biggest writing problem is that Nobody Is People. Nobody is a believable human being in SMC. Everyone but Usagi is a cardboard stand-up, pared down to their most basic traits. The inner senshi, after their introductions, are flattened so badly their dialogue becomes interchangeable, and by the climax of the first arc, they are literally just finishing every sentence together. It's like the writers wrote dialogue for one person and cut it up into little pieces so the poor things would all have lines, like a grade school play for a class with too many children. They exist mostly to get thrown around in the background of fights, during which they are often made more incompetent than in the manga so that Usagi can look good by comparison. Some of their biggest achievements from the manga, like Venus and Jupiter being the ones to actually kill Queen Beryl, are still handed off to Usagi-- the narrative literally takes Venus' sword out of her hands and puts them in Usagi's. Are you a fan of literally any other senshi other than Usagi? Too bad and/or how dare you, eat dirt.
Anyone who holds this series up as "at least more accurate to the manga" has not read the manga; there are pointless diversions all over the place. They left out Usagi's Disguise Pen transformation into a handsome groom and changed that entire fight. Haruna-sensei is reduced to just a normal boring teacher background character instead of a human disaster. Naru gets sidelined even harder than usual, and they didn't even have the courage to draw Evil!Mamoru in his cow print vest. The absolute cowards.
Because Crystal makes its characters strangers to us, drama comes off as melodrama, and any moment meant to be meaningful or touching flops. It’s an emotional desert. It's so self-serious that even silly expressions from the manga have to be "made pretty" by un-curling silly eyebrows and plumping up lips and un-exaggerating expressions. Yes, I'm complaining about the visuals again, but like, this is the problem with the whole thing. The comedy was a huge part of Sailor Moon's appeal, and they strip most of it out.
It's SO concerned with being a pretty, mature, glitzed-up version of the story, but it doesn't have the chops to be that, either. It barely has the chops to be a story. When the comedy did eventually come back for a brief moment very late in Season 1, I felt like I was hallucinating.
3. Also, The Main Character Sucks
The Sailor Moon I knew was a ditzy, clumsy, silly kid with a heart of gold and the capacity for infinite love and bravery. She was childish and a little selfish, but she always came through when it mattered, and she grew a lot as a person over the 90s anime. Crystal!Usagi is, by comparison, a contemptible little brat who is constantly abandoning her friends in favor of chasing after a guy she hardly knows. She doesn’t struggle, she doesn’t fight, she doesn’t change, she doesn’t learn anything. During the Dark Kingdom finale, all she really does is cry and scream and try to give up until some sentient rocks (the Silver Crystal, the Moon, some other crystal that was also on the moon) step in and grant all her wishes. All she has to say about her supposed friends is that they’re beautiful. The senshi just worship her like a goddess. There's no friction, no banter, pretty much no fun character moments between them.
Even Rei and Usagi's relationship gets sanded down to nothing. In EVERY OTHER Sailor Moon incarnation, at the very least Rei is very critical of Usagi (for good reason!) and in Crystal, she's just another dead-eyed cult member singing Usagi's praises and finishing the rest of the senshi's sentences. The story and the characters treat Usagi as IF she is the character she is supposed to be-- a ditzy-but-charming presence in their lives, a point of light that brings them all together-- but she just isn't that. All she wants is Mamoru and that's mostly all the story cares about.
Incidentally: there is also a romance subplot involving all of the senshi, executed poorly of course because Crystal doesn't have the time or the dexterity to handle 8 not-Usagi characters' subplots. It takes up precious screen time that really should have been spent on something else, like, I don't know, having any character development whatsoever.
The main plot itself is ass pull after ass pull after deus ex machina. Admittedly, this is a staple of Sailor Moon, but with a rushed story, cardboard characters, downright ugly animation and basically nothing likable or exciting to hold on to, it's kind of the final nail in the coffin. There's no charm left to save it. The story itself hasn't aged perfectly-- it needed some updating that just didn't happen.
Imagine Crystal under a different name, and you get a shabby imitation of the classic anime and a weak contender in a genre that it revolutionized. It's just sad.
4. Conclusion: I’ll Probably Be Mad About This Forever
I spent a lot of time being extremely patient and forgiving with this series. I managed to convince myself I was enjoying it for about seven episodes (I was in a dark place in 2014, okay?). There are a select few good moments that have made me smile or laugh, but it's like picking chocolate chips out of a pile of gravel. It's not worth the effort. Mostly, I'm sad that this shallow, lifeless adaptation of the manga is how a lot of people are going to get introduced to Sailor Moon. The original manga story is a gem that could be easily polished, but instead, the director decided mostly to copy and paste and to make some baffling edits here and there.
This series was not given the respect or care that it deserved. Those two years of secrecy and delays were frustrating, but not nearly as frustrating as the result: a soulless, slapdash mess, a totally transparent cash grab. It's the anime equivalent of a cheap bath gift set-- presented like it's luxurious and classy, but it's just glorified hand soap full of cheap fragrance. It's the McMansion of animes. It's not even one you live in, it's like a model home. The Bluths live in this anime and it's falling apart around them.
As a long-time Sailor Moon fan, it's hard for me to evaluate Crystal without comparing it to other incarnations, but as a reboot for such a popular, long-lived franchise, it's a massive letdown. Toei churned out some garbage so they could sell us all $1000+ worth of special edition Blu-rays.
I gave up on Crystal for a while after the first arc. I just kind of ignored it until the third season. It does get better, but only marginally; nobody on the animation staff ever bothers to google "what do cats look like," Usagi and Chibiusa's heads are still misshapen all the time, and even the better-written scenes ring hollow, thanks to the shoddy foundation they're built on. The series has now been completed with two two-part movies for the last two arcs, and to be clear... I do think the movies at least look good (and I feel pretty smug that they eventually did go "jeez fine we'll just do the 90s anime style again"), but the breakneck movie pacing keeps them narratively shallow and unsatisfying.
At its worst, Sailor Moon Crystal is a crime against the concept of anime. At its best, it's something pretty to look at while you remember how much you liked the 90s anime. (Actually, at its best, it's a few short animated scenes about the outer senshi polycule taking care of their magic daughter. That's about the only thing in this series I would really bother to go back to.) The best I can hope for at this point is that it will lead people to other, better versions of Sailor Moon.
Sometimes the things you loved were fine the way they were. I didn't spend my days longing for a new Sailor Moon anime before I knew it was happening. And now that it exists, I mostly wish it didn't. Maybe it's ok for good things to be over. Maybe I'm wiser now. Maybe I just spent $15 on a gashapon Cutie Moon Rod. Don't judge me.