Anime Alphabet - B is for Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon
Sailor Moon is possibly the most influential manga franchise aimed at young girls ever; here, I analyze why.
(This post was written as a script for the edited video above, which provides a more complete experience of the post’s subject. The text version below is just for easier reference and comprehension for anyone in need.)
Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon is unquestionably one of the most influential manga franchises of all time. Right from its inception in 1991 and long past the original manga’s end in ‘97 it has remained a cultural force, not only continuing to reincarnate in an ever-expanding multimedia empire, but also to have inspired countless artists and creative works. In this video I’ll unpack what made this classic series so instantly impactful that it’s still discussed and merchandised today around the world. My name is Trixie the Golden Witch, you can find my writing on goldenwitch.substack.com, and this is Anime Alphabet.
--B IS FOR BISHOUJO SENSHI SAILOR MOON--
To best understand what made Sailor Moon special as a manga and as an anime series--and we’ll be talking a lot about the differences between them in the course of this video--we first have to understand the way that popular anime and manga were being released way back in the year that I was born, 1991.
A lot of manga discussion revolves around the marketing demographics that different stories are targeted toward. This is because the vast majority of popular manga are first serialized inside of different magazines, which are usually targeted at specific audience demographics. This doesn’t so much imply that each magazine contains just a certain genre of story, so much as that it tries to present a sort of consistent attitude and atmosphere.
For instance, the magazine which Sailor Moon originated from, Nakayoshi, is one of the oldest and best-selling shoujo (or ‘young girls’) manga magazines, having run manga god Osamu Tezuka’s shoujo stories Princess Knight and Angel’s Hill as far back as 1958, the 1975 soap drama Candy Candy (which is a favorite of Sailor Moon mangaka Takeuchi Naoko-sensei), and, for those of you who didn’t miss the first episode of Anime Alphabet, 1984’s very Attack no. 1-inspired volleyball drama, Attacker You!, among many other things. Towards the tail-end of the 1980s, the magazine had been focused primarily on first-love romance stories; including the short stories of a very young Takeuchi Naoko-sensei, who started submitting one-shots to the magazine’s publisher Kodansha after finishing her two-year university degree in 1987.
In 1991, Takeuchi-sensei decided to write a one-shot story about a costumed fighting girl in present-day Tokyo themed around outer space. Her editor requested that she put the character in a sailor uniform--a riff on customary uniform dress for girls in many Japanese high schools of the era--and thus, Sailor V was born. There wasn’t a whole lot more to Sailor V than what I just described, but there didn’t necessarily have to be--at the time, the concept was a hell of a lot more novel than it probably sounds today.
Sailor V--and by extension, Sailor Moon--is most fundamentally a superhero story, with plenty of similarity to the likes of Spiderman or Static Shock; a totally average teenager deals with the events of their personal domestic life while alternately taking on evildoers under the cover of night and an identity-concealing suit.
These kinds of basic hero stories are nothing new to manga--in fact, I’d argue Astro Boy is pretty similar to an average American superhero comic in how its powerful hero is inserted into a huge variety of different story types; and in the early days of the magical girl/magical witch genre, you could kind of say the same about a lot of the young girl protagonists. Some of them were using their powers to do some pretty wild and important stuff along with their slice-of-life adventures--but notably, and what sets Sailor V apart, is that most of them didn’t really fight.
Up until Sailor V, magical girls usually solved their problems with some combination of ingenuity and magic--not so much by vanquishing an opponent. Most of these had elements of fantasy, adventure, and even science fiction, but almost none of them involved any action.
Now this is far, far from saying that anime girls weren’t kicking ass before Sailor V--in fact, kicking ass was basically all that anime girls were doing in 1991. Maybe it was the tremendous popularity of free-spirited and supernaturally powerful girl characters in boys manga such as Lum from Urusei Yatsura which got the trend started, or the explosively popular fighting girls of 1986 OVA Project A-ko; but by the end of the 80s, cute girls were becoming the go-to protagonists of countless sci-fi, fantasy, action and comedy shows and OVAs aimed at anime fans and older men. As cool and strong-willed and beautiful as the girls in these stories might have been, though, very few of them were made with a feminine audience in mind, and come off as encouraging a nebulous idea of “girl power” without actually embracing femininity itself.
The strength of Sailor V lies in the very basic assumption that even girly girls who spend most of their time on fashion and boys fantasize about having a secret life as a cool hero, that saves the world and all of their loved ones from the evils lurking in the shadows; they just have a very different mental image of how they should look when doing it. Aside from happening to have magical powers, there is practically nothing separating Sailor V from the average eighth-grade Japanese girl; and the average eighth-grade Japanese girl absolutely ate it up.
Sailor V became a series in Kodansha’s RunRun magazine not long after the initial one-shot was published--and soon Toei animation was planning an OVA adaptation; but somewhere in the midst of the production planning for that OVA, Toei animation studio, TV Asahi network, Kodansha publishing, and Takeuchi Naoko-sensei devised a substantially more ambitious plan which was going to pay off beyond their wildest imaginations. That plan was Sailor Moon.
Before we get into talking about Sailor Moon, we have to talk a little about the history of Japanese hero shows. In the 1960s and 70s, special effects-driven TV shows, called tokusatsu, usually centered around transforming superheroes (such as Ultraman and Kamen Rider), became massively popular. These shows had a consistent episodic format of following the characters in some kind of daily-life scenario at the start of each episode, before a monster begins affecting the world around them, necessitating the appearance of a transforming hero to deal with them. The most popular shows in the genre also tend to reboot every year or so, replacing the characters and thematic window-dressing, but keeping the basic episodic formula and overall plot structure every time.
The operating theory behind franchises like this is that they will always be fresh for children of each new generation to form a personal attachment to, while also remaining true enough to the working formula that fans who never grow out of the franchise can continue appreciating it for decades. No tokusatsu series represents this exactingly cyclical formula of yearly reinvention more than the Super Sentai series, or Power Rangers as it’s known in English-speaking countries. Focusing on five heroes in single-colored suits, the Sentai series was Takeuchi’s primary inspiration in deciding to launch another Sailor-based fighting girls’ manga just four months after Sailor V had started publication.
It is absolutely crucial to understand that Sailor V, Sailor Moon, and the anime adaptation of the latter, were all developed and released concurrently. Sailor V started in August 1991, and its scant 15 chapters were published sporadically over the course of the next 6 years as Takeuchi-sensei simultaneously completed the much longer and faster-publishing Sailor Moon. If anything, going by interviews with the editor, it seems like Sailor V existed as a release valve for Takeuchi-sensei to draw whatever she felt like when she wasn’t working on the painstakingly-planned-through Sailor Moon; and to really appreciate what made Sailor Moon such a tense and exacting experience for its author, we need to also understand the way that Japanese TV shows come to be.
By the end of the 1980s, the most-experienced anime studios had been going on more than twenty years strong and were starting to have a pretty good sense of what they were doing. Whereas the magical girl genre, for instance, had its roots in manga adaptations like Sally the Witch, by 1980 Toei animation was codifying the phrase magical girl with their original series, Lalabel the Magical Girl. When Ashi Productions aired Mahou no Angel Sweet Mint in 1990, I think it’s fair to say that the genre had gotten fairly genericized--even if there wasn’t yet a deliberately consistent mega-franchise like tokusatsu had in Kamen Rider or Super Sentai.
The senior editor of Nakayoshi magazine at the time was interested in pushing more emphasis on fantasy and less on romance; and so it was decided that Sailor Moon should run in Nakayoshi--but Nakayoshi was also in the midst of a deal with Toei at the time to help them create multimedia franchises out of their popular manga. As such, it was planned right from the start that Sailor Moon would run simultaneously as an anime and manga series--and so there was immense pressure from the editing staff and on Takeuchi-sensei not to mess up the story in any small way which might topple this entire franchise they were trying to build. All of the iconography, catchphrases, and foundational character design was built from the ground up with the expectation that it would have to carry at least a year-long mainstream TV anime.
Before we can finally dive in and actually start talking about the content of Sailor Moon, though, we have to talk about this cute little comedy series called Goldfish Warning.
You see, just as important as demographics are to manga publishers, they also matter a whole lot to TV programmers--and the logic they follow isn’t as concrete or consistent as it might be for manga magazines. TV channels all have a limited number of time slots, after all, and so their programmers have to ask themselves who is watching what at which times, and what stories are going to keep them coming back to that channel at that time, week after week. One of the best ways to do this after a popular show ends is to try and fit something in that slot which will attract the same audience that was there before. As such, you will sometimes see time slots filled with adaptations of manga from the same magazine, works from the same animation studio, or at least stuff in the same genre filling the same slots one-after-another until the station shakes up their strategy.
From January 1991 until the start of Sailor Moon in ‘92, its time slot was occupied by a fifty-four episode adaptation of another manga from Nakayoshi magazine, also animated by Toei, called Goldfish Warning. Its director, Junichi Satou, had been handling a number of slice-of-life comedy shows aimed at young children throughout the 80s, and in the wake of Sailor Moon would go on to direct a bunch of the cutest and comfiest magical girl shows of the coming decades; as well as practically defining the iyashikei or “healing” genre with his work on shows like Aria, Tamayura, and anything else that I managed to fit on-screen by the end of this sentence. Suffice it to say, Junichi Sato’s style has been definitional to the pacing and feel of the whole modern slice-of-life genre.
Much of the staff working under Junichi Sato on Goldfish Warning would roll directly from working on that show’s production straight into Sailor Moon; including episode director Kunihiko Ikuhara, who took over directing the next few Sailor Moon seasons before going on to create Revolutionary Girl Utena, Mawaru Penguindrum, Yuri Kuma Arashi, and Sarazanmai; and episode director Takuya Igarashi, who would go on to direct Ouran HighSchool Host Club, Soul Eater, Star Driver, and all kinds of other interesting stuff that I’m now extending this sentence to be able to show you more of.
I consider all of this important to know because what interests me the most about Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon, after having watched the first 46-episode anime series and read the corresponding fourteen-chapter arc of the manga which it adapted, is how much the differences between them are defined by meeting the needs of a popular manga magazine, versus the needs of an anime studio and TV network.
Just to give you an idea from the start how different the anime is from the manga: either one opens by introducing us to a cute crybaby middle-schooler named Tsukino Usagi, who saves a mysterious talking cat that tells her she needs to use her secret superpowers to stop the evil plots of the Empire of Darkness. However, in the second chapter of the manga, we are then introduced to Sailor Mercury, whereas in the anime this chapter is not adapted until episode thirteen; so let’s hone in first on the Usagi introductory arc.
If I can boil down the fundamental difference in how Usagi is presented at the start of the manga versus the start of the anime, it is the moment right after she first transforms into Sailor Moon, and finds out that her best friend, Naru, is being strangled by some kind of monster version of her own mother at the jewelry store that they live in. In the manga, the moment Usagi sees what’s happening, she implores with Luna that even though she’s not sure what’s going on, she needs to go and save her friend. In the anime, Luna implores with Sailor Moon that she needs to go and rescue her friend, and Sailor Moon reacts like this:
Twenty-two episodes later, in what I would consider the anime’s first real ‘story arc,’ when Naru is seduced by one of the bad guys in a plot to lure Sailor Moon out, Usagi finally says almost the exact same dialog about having to save her friend that she did in the first chapter before running into battle--and aside from the episodes which introduce each of the other Sailor Scouts, it’s about that long before the anime really starts following the manga again.
To understand why the anime story was changed so drastically, we need to understand the needs of a TV network in 1991. TV Asahi is one of the biggest, oldest, and most mainstream TV channels in Japan--the equivalent of something like FOX in the USA, or what the WB was like back in the 1990s. It had the primetime news, original shows, imported stuff from other countries, and Sunday morning kids’ fare like Kamen Rider and Super Sentai, along with plenty of classic anime shows that were widely known throughout Japan at the time of their airing.
Whereas TV shows in the 60s and 70s had very little competition from other networks, and therefore it was more reasonable to expect that an audience might be able to catch every episode of a show and keep up with its storyline, by the 90s there was a lot more going on not just on TV, but in pop culture generally, which had exploded in 1980s Japan. It also may have been the most-hyped period for TV anime ever, with the titanic run of Dragon Ball Z just hitting its stride at the start of the 90s before setting the stage for every super-hyped shounen manga since, Ranma ½ pretty much defining what shounen romantic comedy was going to be like for the next twenty years, and the still-running family-focused comedy behemoth Shin-chan launching in a similar time slot to Sailor Moon about a month after its start. It was a pretty healthy time for anime aimed at girls as well, with 70s Ryoko Ikeda classic Oniisama e finishing its adaptation around when Sailor Moon went to air, popular kids’ shows Chibi Maruko-san still on the air, Mama wa Shougaku 4-nensei, which I guess is about a fourth-grader taking care of a baby which sounds adorable, magical girl shows in the form of a Minky Momo rebootquel and Hana no Mahoutsukai Mary Bell, and, starting alongside Sailor Moon, a Thumbelina anime.
The vast majority of anime that went to TV before the mid-90s were upwards of 39 or 50 episodes, with popular shows sometimes getting into the hundreds. The expectation of a TV show wasn’t so much that it tells a compelling or complete story, but more so that it allowed the viewer to experience a certain atmosphere. In the same way that Attack no. 1 constantly had the energy of angry bitches ready to tear each-other’s hair out, but instead pouring that anger into self-harm by way of volleyball, Sailor Moon has a comfy, dreamlike, and almost sleepy atmosphere that kinds of puts you under a spell--but we’ll talk about that later.
It is for this reason that anime adaptations were probably the most discordant they would ever be from their manga counterparts in the 90s and 2000s. While there was a strong video rental market in Japan in the 90s, and Original Video Animations or OVAs being sold to hardcore animation and genre enthusiasts, there was no expectation on the part of networks that a mainstream audience was going to be able to catch up with a show that’s already gotten started in the way that streaming would eventually make so effortless that Netflix just started dropping entire shows all at once in the 2010s.
Manga magazines have never quite had to deal with the same problem, because most of them have dedicated readerships which only really change when a new series becomes popular. It’s reasonable to expect that if you put the main character of a new series on the cover of a monthly manga magazine like Nakayoshi, nearly everyone who cares about that magazine will have had the chance to read the first chapter by the time the next one arrives; and if one becomes interested in the series and the magazine containing it a few months down the line, the graphic novels are close behind, with the first six chapters having been collected and released in July 1992, a couple of months after the anime had also gone to air. In other words, for anyone who wasn’t already a reader of Nakayoshi magazine that took interest in Sailor Moon in the time before the first volume was released and didn’t want to jump into the story midway, they could investigate the anime--and for those first three months of the show’s airing, comprising the first twelve episodes of the show, you could’ve caught basically any of them and felt like you’d just watched the first episode of Sailor Moon.
Never having really watched it when it was on Cartoon Network in my childhood, I was infuriated as a first-time viewer in 2021 that the show whose entire concept is starring a five-girl fighting squad doesn’t even introduce the second girl until a fourth of the way in; especially because Usagi is a… challenging character to watch sometimes. I know plenty of viewers will just think she’s cute and funny, but personally it was hard to think of her as much more than an obnoxious brat for the first stretch of the show. This really isn’t helped by Mitsuishi Kotono’s over-the-top voice performance, which at first almost feels like tongue-in-cheek self-parody, if just because I can’t hear her without thinking about Katsuragi Misato from Evangelion, or Excel from Excel Saga, or Ebichu from Oruchuban Ebichu, all of which feel like they flows from this first performance in some way, but only by deliberately turning up the irony factor of having played this character. This probably didn’t affect a lot of other people’s viewing of Sailor Moon the way it did mine, but I’m sure we can all agree that listening to this cry episode after episode is a lot.
But of course, the anime series wasn’t made with the expectation of someone sitting down and binge-watching it thirty years later--it was made under the assumption that new viewers might hear about and take interest in the show week after week until a saturation point at which anyone who was going to be interested in it within the reach of TV Asahi would have decided whether or not they cared about keeping up with it by the time Tsukino Usagi completed the emotional arc which she had undergone within the first chapter of the manga.
So how did they pad this thing out, anyways? What actually happens in these first twelve episodes? Well, usually, Usagi is just going about her everyday life, when she hears about some cool hip new thing going on, like a new salon opened up, or there’s a perfume showcase, or any other sort of contemporary feminine after-school consumer interest. It turns out, then, that Jadeite, one of the four generals of the Darkness kingdom working under Queen Beryl, has actually used evil magic to reap the energy from their souls and use it to power demon monsters. Luna catches on to what’s happening, but Usagi remains oblivious, running into the heart of the situation before realizing that she has to transform into Sailor Moon and fight the bad guy. We then sit through a minute-long transformation sequence set to repetitive music that also plays in the eyecatch and a lot of the fights and in my nightmares for the last three days, and Sailor Moon very easily dispatches the enemy in one hit with her Moon Tiara Action; resolution, end. It’s a familiar format and one that works, but in my opinion becomes extremely stale after just a few episodes when Sailor Moon still hasn’t changed at all as a character, and no other major characters have really been introduced besides the mysterious Tuxedo Mask.
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that in every episode, Usagi runs into and bickers with this college guy, and then is later saved in the midst of battle by some mysterious hero called Tuxedo Mask, setting her up for the chance to finish the enemy. The bizarreness of Tuxedo Mask as a character ended up being one of the most memorable aspects of the show in its early run, even as it would eventually be made fun of for the repetition of his encounters with Sailor Moon in that extra-long period some viewers experienced before the plot proceeded.
Regardless of how I feel about this stretch of episodes revisiting them now, Sailor Moon’s success was instantaneous and explosive--and so I think it’s fair to say that the core elements which made the series successful were already present as early as this introductory arc. This is only possible because I don’t think the story is anywhere close to the biggest driver of Sailor Moon’s enormous reputation; that honor goes to its conceptual design.
Nowhere is the conceptual design of Sailor Moon on fuller display than in the anime’s iconic opening theme. It actually starts off kind of spooky, with smoke-like clouds rising from a city skyline so impressionistically drawn that when I showed it to my mom she thought she was looking at flowers—and I definitely don't think that's an accident. Haunting clock chimes ring out and something swells in the background as the clouds part over the town, revealing a brilliant moon in the center-top frame.
If this imagery seems a bit foreboding for a magical girl series, I think that speaks to the heart of Sailor Moon’s appeal both as a show and as a character design: it is suggestively very dark and mysterious and even a little bit racy compared to the complexity of the narrative. For young girls, Sailor Moon is enticingly adult. She’s a fourteen year-old girl that Takeuchi is alternately drawing in Haute Couture dresses, and the shortest mini-skirt you can have before it becomes a porno parody of itself.
As the Barenaked Ladies so eloquently put it on their 1998 single One Week, “gotta get in tune with Sailor Moon cause that cartoon has got the boom anime babes that make me think the wrong thing.” Sailor Moon isn’t just some magical girl: she is the Beautiful Warrior of Love and Justice, Sailor Goddamn Moon.
Her self-appointed title and catchphrase are the perfect encapsulation of her appeal. Do you see yourself or want to see yourself as beautiful? Are you willing to fight like a soldier in the name of love and justice? Then Sailor Moon is the heroine for you—and in the manga and certain episodes of the anime this title is actually justified, as Sailor Moon avenges the emotions of manipulated girls and fights to protect the relationships of her friends. Sailor Moon is an appealing hero in concept alone, but the execution of the design is what took this character worldwide.
The sailor uniform is an insanely persistent fashion meme dating back to the 1800s, when it started being used by the British Navy. More importantly, the four year-old prince of Wales was given a scaled-down version of the uniform that his mom thought he looked so precious in she had it painted; and then it became popular childrens’ dress attire forever. Here’s me in one. Fast forward to the early 1900s and the sailor look has caught on all over the globe, including as a school uniform for kids in Southeast Asian countries. At the time that Sailor Moon went to air, the sailor fuku wasn’t likely as common in Japanese schools as it once was, but that only made it continue to grow in power as a nostalgic symbol to be called on in Japanese media. When the show aired in the United States, though, I had to have the concept of a sailor uniform explained to me before I understood Sailor Moon’s outfit—she just looked like a badass superhero to me along the lines of Wonder Woman, except that she was a kid.
Sailor V, with whom the sailor scout uniform was drafted, is an exceedingly Japanese character design in all ways but that her hair is blonde; given it is long and straight with a pair of braids held back by a large red ribbon in what to me read almost as a yamato nadeshiko kind of look. I think Takeuchi-sensei was in more of a retro mindset when she designed this character, which suits her aesthetic very well. Whereas most of the shoujo anime releasing around the time had a more rounded and cutesy look, Sailor V was sleek and angular like the classic 70s shoujo manga which Takeuchi-sensei had grown up reading and taken most of her inspiration from—but drawn with the more postmodern fantastical edge of 90s design, leaning less towards old-fashioned doll beautiful, and more towards Barbie doll beautiful.
All it took to give the design that extra edge and take it to the next level is a completely preposterous hairdo. Designing iconic human characters is incredibly difficult, as the most instantly-transmittable aspects of any object to a human eyeball are the color and silhouette. The simpler the silhouette, the more endlessly reproducible, and therefore iconic. If you can boil an entire design down to one emblem that everyone who knows that character immediately identifies as them, then you’ve got a strong character design. Goku is iconic for the hair, the orange gi, the symbol on his gi, and honestly I wouldn’t be surprised if hardcore DBZ fans could tell him by the sillhouette of his build at various points in the series. Sailor Moon is iconic, more than anything, for the hair.
Shoujo manga designers have a major disadvantage as compared to shounen designers in that girls don't usually prefer to look completely ridiculous. I knew boys growing up who made fun of Goku’s pointy hair, but every single one of them was keeping up with the show because the dude was just built as hell, and every little boy who had any reason to want to be a planet-crushing badass fantasized about looking like him and having his powers. Sailor Moon found a way to make the exact same thing happen with girls. I am confident that no one in human history had ever attempted to wear their hair the way Usagi does before she existed, but I know for a fact that millions of girls have tried since. And it's not one of those things where you could just do your hair this way and pretend you came up with it yourself—the hairstyle is so unmistakable that if you’re going to bother trying it, you may as well pull a full-on Sailor Moon cosplay. Hell, get four of your friends to do it with you as the other Scouts, you know they’ll take any excuse to show their legs in public. Yeah, suffice it to say this has always been a massively popular series for cosplay.
The other character designs are all gorgeous, but none of them necessarily matter the way that Moon does. I am very happy that Takeuchi didn't take the route anime would soon end up going down of trying to make every character equally ridiculous in an effort for every single one to get popular; instead, the other designs all sort of follow that of Sailor Moon, unified by the similarity in their uniforms, but allowed to be drawn as more conventionally pretty and down-to-Earth. They don’t seek to match Sailor Moon, but instead sort of ground her closer to reality. The villains and love interests all look very cool and grown-up, which also lends this edge to the series where the protagonists are some of the younger people in the story, leaving them seeming subtly out of their depth. By far the most important decision made by Takeuchi-sensei in designing these characters, though, was deciding that every single one of the sailor scouts ought to be a beautiful girl.
Takeuchi-sensei talks about the pushback she got on this idea, with executives arguing with her that teams of five usually have a fat one, or a nerdy one, or anything to represent the diversity in their group of friends. What Takeuchi-sensei acutely understood is that fans don’t project onto characters based on their appearance, but on their personality. Most people want to see themselves represented as a beautiful badass, and certainly not as “the ugly one” within their group of friends. Even if you found yourself relating to the studious and affably aloof Sailor Mercury, or the somewhat staunch and self-serious shrine maiden, Sailor Mars more than the braindead boycrazy Sailor Moon, that didn’t mean you weren’t represented by a beautiful avatar. Rather than trying to draw in different types of girls, the manga makes the assumption that there are a few things which almost all girls want to be on some level, while maintaining aspects of their individual personality.
Nevertheless, I think it’s likely that the other Sailor Scouts end up feeling kind of sidelined through much of Sailor Moon’s first arc even after getting introduced because the creators were so keen on solidifying the star power of the main character before even bothering to flesh out any other aspect of the story. Sailor Mercury and Mars are hardly even present in the show’s first opening, because they wanted to make absolutely goddamn sure that you were well acquainted with the character Sailor Moon.
Aside from Takeuchi-sensei’s phenomenal original character art, there is a lot to be said about the way that the anime adaptation brought the world of those characters to life, especially in the color choices made by the animation staff, and the wardrobe’s worth of outfits which they designed for each character.
Sailor Moon is a pretty fast-paced manga, without anywhere near as much time spent following the girls in their everyday lives as the anime series, and Takeuchi-sensei doesn’t show them in much casual attire. Most of the time they are in sailor uniforms, and when she draws them in other outfits on chapter covers or for additional Illustrations, she tends to favor depicting them in haute couture fashion. After all, Takeuchi Naoko-sensei herself, much touted for her beauty at the time of the series taking off in popularity, wasted no time in putting the apparently crazy money she was suddenly making into designer clothes and owning a Porche.
The animation staff on the other hand painstakingly crafted more unique pieces of casual wear than I’d wager had ever been given to a cartoon cast before; setting the stage for CLAMP to ratchet things up to the next level in Cardcaptor Sakura by actually giving her a whole different magical girl costume on every adventure—but that’s a story for another time. Each of the Sailor Scouts has their own distinct style that reflects their personality, while remaining contemporary, cute, and marginally appropriate for girls this age. I’d say these come off more as college or at least late high-school wardrobes, if only because the average middle schooler probably couldn't afford this mich mall fashion; but then again, Usagi’s family lives in a full-size house in Tokyo, putting them firmly in the upper middle-class, and she certainly acts like the most spoiled brat on planet Earth.
There’s this one episode of Sailor Moon that has a young female animator getting chastised for the lack of “passion” in her drawings; to which she retorts, “you mean draw her sexier, right?” And I couldn't help feeling like this episode came after a series of staff conversations. I certainly remember being a little uncomfortable in some of the early episodes with how Usagi’s extremely immature personality is juxtaposed against the sexy ways in which she is often posed and drawn. Both versions of the story perfectly convey the beauty of Sailor Moon without sexualizing her, and I think it’s fine in and of itself that she is a hot character, but there isn’t any real need to highlight the curves of her body in moments when she is just lounging about at home being lazy or doing nothing. I get why the animation directors might’ve wanted to present Usagi’s sexiness every chance they could get, but it doesn't always feel tonally appropriate in this children’s show, and thankfully seems to be toned down a bit after the initial stretch—the female animators having been given an entire episode’s story worth of vengeance it seems.
The on-point fits and model-bodied teens wearing them were certainly important to Sailor Moon’s success with young girls, but I think the color palette is what made the series truly iconic. The manga’s editor talked in interviews about how Takeuchi-sensei has a unique talent for color, and would use shades of pink which were rarer and more expensive to print, which Nakayoshi was only willing to front the cost of because Sailor Moon had doubled the magazine’s readership in the first year of its run. She would also attach beads and stuff to the pages, necessitating that they be photographed before they were scanned, which the editors complained about, but she just kept doing it, because--as Takeuchi-sensei has said--Usagi is the one with the personality closest to herself.
Toei’s team perfectly picked up on the pricey pink look and saturated the series in deep fuchsia, purples, and blues, along with vibrant pastel. There is a great video by a youtuber called B-Mask about what he calls “the purple feeling,” which is the weird, off-kilter feeling that some of the older Disney movies and cartoons like Peter Pan Adventures would convey by using these trippy color palettes and the occasional haunting imagery, symbolism or dialog, that would shock its intended child audience and leave the story lingering in their minds for years to come. Sailor Moon seems to be chasing this feeling as well, with its comfy pacing and dreamy imagery sort of lulling you into a state where you might find you've kind of stopped paying attention until suddenly this creepy-looking lady is strangling Usagi’s friend and turning her head 90 degrees.
The first kind of dark moment in the anime series comes when the first general of the Dark Kingdom, Jadeite, whom we’ve seen in every episode so far, is banished by Queen Beryl to the shadow realm for his incompetence after losing to Sailor Moon in a direct encounter. You could say it’s not really that dark for a one-note villain to be killed off in an action series, but the fact that he’s unnecessarily vanished by his own boss does a lot to increase her threat level without having to kill a main character; and it's not long after this that Sailor Moon starts to get a little bit punchier with its subject matter.
During the Jadeite arc, one could easily read Sailor Moon as a shallow condemnation of the very consumer culture that the series was fundamentally built to cater to, and which would push the franchise to continue for decades. Every episode has a horde of sheeple falling for some vapid fad and getting turned into zombies, and almost none of the victims are characters with any kind of personality. In the subsequent Nephrite arc, each episode showcases a singular victim being seduced by the dark side as a way of escaping their frustrations. This arc seems to critique the fast-paced Japanese culture of the 90s that created a pressure cooker of stress for people all over society. I would argue that this arc is by far the most clearly echoed in what magical girls were going to become when mega-franchise Precure kicked up at the end of the decade, and also blueprints the structure of Revolutionary Girl Utena’s Black Rose Society arc.
It's also around here that Sailor Mercury and Sailor Mars are finally introduced to give some pulse back to the story. Each of their introductory episodes is mostly the same as in the manga, except that once again Usagi stops short of making a heroic show in the crucial moment that she would have in the manga. During the Sailor Mars introduction, this goes so far as flipping who saves who at the start of the battle. Sailor Mercury has a great scene wherein Usagi takes her to the arcade and, having never played a video game before, she instantly beats the high score just because she’s so god-tier intelligent; but we barely get any more out of her character for the entire rest of the season. She’s usually not thinking about anything but her studies, and while some humor is derived from her conflict-avoidant personality and she has decent chemistry with Usagi in the few scenes that focus on their friendship, I ultimately felt she was extremely underutilized in both the anime and manga incarnations of this first arc.
The strong-willed shrine maiden Sailor Mars fares much better than the rest of the non-Moon scouts, if only because she is pitted as the voice of reason against Usagi’s idiocy, giving them lots of little bickering scenes over the course of the show. I’d heard that Mars was the most popular of the girls besides Moon, and this is hardly surprising given not only that she has the most screen time by far, but also that she is placed in direct opposition to Sailor Moon, as if to say, “hey, do you think Usagi’s kind of an annoying brat? Well, this girl is on your side.” It totally works, too, as I felt the anime become substantially more tolerable after she was introduced, even if I still think she is brutally under-utilized.
Funnily enough, in spite of taking so long to introduce them, the anime actually does an even better job of giving the other sailor scouts some limelight by comparison to the corresponding arc of the manga, just by virtue of having so many more episodes. The anime creates love interests for each of the girls and gives them at least one independent story, which is more than I can even say about the manga. Both of them end up focusing mostly on the story of Usagi and Tuxedo Mask remembering their past lives as the moon princess and her lover--so let’s move into talking about the central plotline of this whole first season.
As I mentioned before, the Sailor Moon anime and manga were running at the same time, and as such follow a very particular structure. Published monthly, the manga would’ve reached the end of its first fourteen-chapter arc only a few months before the anime--airing weekly with all of its extra filler inserted in--reached the end of its 46-episode first season. There are five total arcs of the manga and five corresponding anime seasons, totalling 18 volumes and 200 episodes; but for now we’re just going to talk about the plot of the first arc, the Dark Kingdom saga.
Initially, Luna’s mission for Usagi is to find and recruit the other sailor scouts, find something called the Silver Crystal and someone called the Moon Princess, and prevent the advancement of the Dark Kingdom in looking for the same. After locating the tall and beautiful, affable and virtuous Sailor Jupiter, it isn’t long before Sailor V, who in the universe of Sailor Moon has up until now been talked about in the newspaper as an active hero somewhere else in Tokyo and starred in an arcade game that Usagi plays constantly, finally reveals herself to the heroes as Sailor Venus; and also that the arcade is secretly a base which the cats from both stories had set up together, and the video game was actually made to train Usagi to be a Scout all along!
In the manga, this reveal is coupled with the revelation that Sailor V is, in fact, the moon princess they had been searching for, and is herself in possession of the Silver Crystal. In the very next chapter, however, when everyone gets their memories of their past lives back, they realize it’s actually Usagi who was the moon princess before, and the rest of them had been her guardians. The idea is that Sailor Venus was actually a decoy, made to believe she was the moon princess because she had been given a crescent compact--but in fact, just as Galileo Galilei discovered the heliocentric model of the planets by way of noticing that Venus has a crescent phase not unlike Earth’s moon, we discover that she totally isn’t the moon princess; which honestly just confused the hell out of me before I researched that astronomy fun fact I just dropped, and that’s probably why it was cut from the anime entirely, with Sailor V simply revealing herself as Sailor Venus and joining the team. I have to assume that a lot of details in this story would have that much more impact for astronomy, couture fashion, and even flower nerds like Takeuchi-sensei herself, which I have to admit are over my head. Thankfully there are tons and tons of blogs and videos about the nitty-gritty details of Sailor Moon’s symbolism.
After everyone remembers their pasts, Tuxedo Moon is possessed somehow by Queen Beryl and turned against the sailor scouts. This causes them to head up to the ruins of the moon palace and retrieve a cool sword, with which Sailor Moon murks Tuxedo Mask and then brings him back to life with the silver crystal. She and the girls go into a big final battle with Queen Beryl, who is summarily vanquished by Sailor Moon. She brings Tuxedo Mask back to life, then realizes all the other girls are dead and is sent to the Moon Palace to retrieve another power brooch with which to use Moon Healing Action and bring all her friends back to life, so they can go back to Earth and live happily ever after. Sailor Moon and Tuxedo Mask are a happy couple now and everything is fine until Usagi’s daughter from the future suddenly appears and puts a gun to her head, demanding she hand over the silver crystal. It’s honestly a pretty goddamn hilarious twist ending.
Unfortunately, the anime isn’t so ready to roll the story right into the next arc--instead, after each of the sailor scouts dies dramatically in the penultimate episode, Sailor Moon restores everyone to life and everything to normal, but no one has any memories of anything that happened for the entire season. Yep--they wanted to make sure that new viewers getting aboard the hype train in year two could pick up the season with just as much of an idea of what’s going on as the main characters; and I can’t say I blame them. This gravy train had only just gotten moving, after all.
I actually think that the second half of the anime series is superior to the second half of the manga, because this was the place where the story actually did need to be fleshed out and colored in to have more of an impact. In the manga, it really felt to me like all of the other Sailor Scouts had been introduced just to become four lame sidekicks to a story that almost had nothing to do with them at all. The anime integrates them into the story much better, with Sailor Mars actually dating the college student Mamoru Chiba even after it’s revealed that he is Tuxedo Mask, and then losing out in the love rivalry to Usagi in the end and moving on to continue flirting with the boy who came to intern at her grandfather’s shrine.
Even if she doesn’t get as much to do in the story, Sailor Jupiter is a lot more fun in the anime, with a running gag going that every time she meets a nice boy and likes him, he reminds her of the first guy she fell for who turned her down for being too tall. Usually she finds herself rejected, but she always picks herself up, and has probably the strongest sense of active justice out of any of the girls even outside the sailor uniform.
Sailor Venus… is honestly just kind of there, and often plays into comic relief scenes along with Sailor Moon, but doesn’t have much personality even in the anime. Also, the anime does this fun thing where every single one of the girls has a crush on the guy at the arcade, but he’s dating a college girl that they end up ultimately supporting in their relationship.
The anime series also does way the hell more to flesh out the villains, especially lovers Zoisite and Kunzite. We spend a lot of time with Zoisite, a proto-typical Revolutionary Girl Utena character who is mostly fighting so that his hubby will praise and pay attention to him, and has a hilarious streak of embarrassing failure that perfectly screws with his prissy ego. I can’t think of much reason that these characters were so much more fleshed out in the anime other than that the staff really wanted to write a gay relationship into the show, and it honestly gets more attention than a lot of the girls’ own romantic relationships. I thought these characters were fun, and I think it would’ve been really nice if the homosexual aspects of Sailor Moon’s story hadn’t been extensively censored in the American release that aired during my childhood.
Before I start to sound like I’m praising the anime’s story, though, I will clarify that every single thing I liked about the story was underutilized in comparison to how much of what we watch are uninteresting single-episode storylines full of Usagi flailing about like a moron until we cut to the minute-long transformation sequence and usually underwhelming climactic battle. There is a little bit more action in the later episodes after the other girls start getting involved in the fights using their own special powers, but there’s not an action scene I’d consider memorable in the show. The baseline experience of Sailor Moon rarely grabbed me, and I felt the whole thing kind of glide over my brain like jell-o through a bladed grate.
If you’ve never seen any of Sailor Moon growing up or taken interest in its re-adaptations such as the live-action remake that Takeuchi-sensei supervised in the mid-2000s, or the Sailor Moon Crystal anime which started in 2014 and has culminated in a new film just this year, you are likely aware of it at least as a major aesthetic inspiration for the Vaporwave movement, or seen gifs of it in future funk compilation videos, or been advertised Sailor Moon merchandise on Instagram as soon as you liked something related to anime. I want to talk a bit about why I think Sailor Moon has so much nostalgia power, and how its aesthetic influence rose to prominence.
When Sailor Moon hit US TV in 1995 there was not another show like it there. Sure, it could be compared to Power Rangers to the extent that it was conceptually somewhat based on it, but the shows don’t really feel all that similar at all, and Sailor Moon is a lot more in line with the tone of magical girl shows that lead up to it than it is with Super Sentai. Magical girls had been a completely foreign concept to Americans up to that point, and there weren’t any mainstream TV anime that had cute girls with their legs out like that until then either. This was the first cartoon girl besides Tinkerbell that appealed to young girls and looked sexy--and I don’t even think Disney started treating Tinkerbell like an icon of cuteness until the late 90s. That’s when Powerpuff Girls went to air, shows like Magic Knight Rayearth and Cardcaptor Sakura by CLAMP which had followed from Sailor Moon’s success as combat-focused magical girl shows were brought to the US, and America got introduced to the concept of anime for girls in general--right around the very same time that boys in America were first getting Dragon Ball Z.
But Rayearth and Clamp didn’t have nearly the impact in the US that Sailor Moon had, nor did Tokyo Mew Mew or Fruits Basket or any of the other girls’ anime that were going to come out over the next couple of decades. When stuff like this came out in the 90s, it was a come-and-go craze that everyone remembered as weird in its immediate wake. No one knew back then that these Japanese cartoons were still going to be around in twenty years, or how these kids were going to remember this stuff when they’d gotten old enough to admit having been into it again.
If you ask me, 90s nostalgia got its start right around the beginning of the 2010s. Nerdy 90s kids like me were entering our late teens and early 20s, and by this point our generation had almost entirely adapted to internet social media. If you were a little too nerdy for facebook, you might have taken up residence on Reddit or Tumblr--the former being driven by communities for specific topics, and the latter being a personal blogging site which allowed you to follow and reshare from other blogs’ post feeds to your own, like on Twitter. Whereas Reddit nostalgia culture had more to do with digging up or recreating things related to the nostalgia property in question and sharing them on the forums, Tumblr culture was all about cultivating a specific aesthetic identity for your blog. With Sailor Moon having such a specific and identifiable aesthetic that perfectly conveys the comfy atmosphere of its episodic stories, while also harkening for a lot of people back to fond memories of a more simplistic time in their lives, it was perfectly poised to explode through and help to shape the culture of aesthetic that has since largely permeated the internet, fashion, and music worlds.
It is in this memorial space of Sailor Moon’s existence that its impact is most felt, as it is stirred into every aspect of culture to the point of being an unavoidable influence even to people who wouldn’t be able to identify it as having ever been an animated TV series. You can’t avoid seeing Sailor Moon’s influence if you notice it or not, and that says way more about the level of Sailor Moon’s success than the fact that it has however many video games and anime seasons.
There is so much more which has been said and can be said about Sailor Moon and its influence, and I’ve hardly even scratched the surface with this analysis of its first season, but I wanted to try and see if I could boil the entire thing down and look at what exactly made this the one that mattered so much more than all the others. Some part of it is time and place, some part is careful planning and cunning design sensibility, and some of it is that indescribable purple feeling, where the confluence of influences comes together to make a new sensation.
Neon Genesis Evangelion creator Hideaki Anno, who would animate on later seasons of Sailor Moon and befriend its next director, Kunihiko Ikuhara, has said of anime in the 2000s and onward that its greatest weakness is how much it takes influence just from other anime, and how the creators need to look outward for more inspiration. I think Sailor Moon inevitably interests so many people because Takeuchi-sensei was herself interested in so many different things, from haute couture fashion, to astrology, to hero shows and 70s manga, that when she brought it all together in one cohesive product, it made equal sense to fans of any one aspect of the show. So many of the magical girl shows which have followed have tried to combine various feminine interests to create a particular kind of atmosphere, but none have approached the universality of their theming with the same authenticity and conviction that Takeuchi-sensei did.
Even though I didn’t really get much out of the story of the first arc of the Sailor Moon anime or manga series, there is so much to think about when it comes to the series that it’s hard not to take interest in it. For the sake of continuing the Anime Alphabet series, I will be putting Sailor Moon aside for now as I move on to the letter C, which will be for: ; but as soon as this video makes it to 50,000 views, whether that takes five days, five months, or five years, I will look into producing follow-up videos in which I continue my way across the Sailor Moon franchise. In the meantime, please support my work by subscribing to goldenwitch.substack.com, where I post articles and podcasts that don’t make it to youtube, or by subscribing to my patreon, linked in the description. You can find me on instagram, twitter, and tiktok @goldenwitchfire, and send business inquiries to goldenwitchfire@gmail.com. Find my music as Trial of the Golden Witch on soundcloud and bandcamp, and catch me at any shows listed in the description! Thanks again for watching and don’t forget: anime forever!