Anime Alphabet - C is for Cardcaptor Sakura

Cardcaptor Sakura might not be the most important magical girl anime of the 90s, but this is my argument for why it's the best.

(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.)

Ever since its publication from 1996-2000, and concurrent 1998-2000 anime adaptation, Cardcaptor Sakura has remained among the most lastingly-beloved manga franchises aimed at young girls all over the world. Unlike the previous shows talked about in the anime alphabet series, however, Cardcaptor Sakura was neither foundational in a genre’s creation like Attack no. 1, nor did it respark the popularity of magical girls and introduce a subtle shift in the genre the way that Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon did—in fact, it was very much a product of the 90s magical girl hype wave which Sailor Moon kicked up. What makes Cardcaptor Sakura special is simply that it’s so dang good; the very best in the genre if you ask me and many other fans—but that’s a pretty bold claim! There have been dozens of magical girl shows over the last fifty years, and no shortage of reasons for different audience members to hold certain shows close to their hearts; but in this video I'll be explaining in-depth why Cardcaptor Sakura is one of my favorite anime of all time. My name is Trixie, the Golden Witch, you can find my writing on goldenwitch.substack.com, and this is Anime Alphabet.

C IS FOR CARDCAPTOR SAKURA

I can boil what makes Cardcaptor Sakura special as an anime series down to three overall strengths which I will explain in-depth. These are: firstly, the iconic setting design by manga collective CLAMP and stellar production work from studio Madhouse; secondly, the well-rounded, believable, and endlessly lovable cast of characters; and finally, the dramatic narrative which builds into a satisfying climax across the show’s 70 episodes and two feature films. To best express what the show does so well in each of these categories, I will compare it extensively to Sailor Moon, in order to contrast the intentions and accomplishments of each show in their approach.

When Cardcaptor Sakura debuted in Nakayoshi magazine in 1996, its four-woman manga team CLAMP, led by writer Nanase Ohkawa, was just establishing their dominant popularity in the world of shoujo manga that was going to carry them all the way through the 2000s. If Sailor Moon had marked a shift in direction for Nakayoshi into more fantastical stories, CLAMP’s first magical girl manga, Magic Knight Rayearth, truly exemplified it, with its protagonists getting whisked into a fantasy world and fighting more as warriors there than as traditional magical girls. It wasn’t CLAMP’s first popular manga nor the only one they had running in the early 90s, but it was their first mainstream success which broke through to the point of eventually becoming known around the world as a classic in its own right. When Nakayoshi asked the group to create another series for the magazine, they decided to deliberately try and make something more in line with its typical character, and thus conceived the more traditional contemporary magical girl series, Cardcaptor Sakura.

Speaking as someone who loves the artwork of CLAMP but not necessarily many of their stories, I think the straightforwardness of Cardcaptor Sakura allowed the biggest strengths of the creative team room to breathe. Much of CLAMP’s work has a tendency toward complicated and heavily fantastical settings full of cryptic characters and tragic twists. While this unrestrained imaginative approach led to some iconic story aspects, and drug cult fans in droves to the manga collective’s work, the limitation of trying to make something unique and interesting out of a tried-and-true formula I think lead CLAMP to put deeper thought into their mellow magical girl manga than most of their contemporaries.

In episode 2 of Anime Alphabet, I claimed that Sailor Moon’s success was most fundamentally couched in the strength of its conceptual design. This is not also true of Cardcaptor, but design is certainly a huge part of its success, and it’s worth discussing how differently its design was handled from that of Sailor Moon. Even though both shows take place in fictional suburban cities around Tokyo, often with scenes in the girls’ bedrooms, classrooms, town backroads, parks, shrines, and any number of other similar contemporary locations, the way that these places look and feel are almost completely different in each show.

Sailor Moon takes place in a sort of heightened, hyper-aesthetic reality wherein everything is recognizable, but doesn’t look the way that it normally would in real life. The intent here was clearly to make the show as cute and fun to watch as possible, and give it this fairy tale-like atmosphere that brings the ordinary world to one of magical exaltation. It’s because this fantasy world is mostly just a somewhat-recolored reality that the show’s aesthetic was able to bleed out into real-world design and start to make reality more closely resemble Sailor Moon, which is a level of visual influence Cardcaptor Sakura hasn’t even come close to having--but that’s because Cardcaptor isn’t set inside of a fantastical reality, but something much more closely approximating the real.

Studio Madhouse has been anime’s gold-standard producer of realistic, anatomically and perspective-accurate animation since the 1980s; and you can most clearly see the roots of the approach they would take to Cardcaptor Sakura’s animation in Yawara, the beautiful Judo girl. Whereas most manga adaptations tend to favor pushing the camera up into the characters’ faces and emphasizing the imagery of dramatic moments, Madhouse consistently develops fully-realized three-dimensional settings to move their characters through, which gives the screen a feeling of depth that’s just missing in the super-flat style of so many other anime. 

Sailor Moon often leaves much of the background without detail; the characters rarely interact with or can be seen moving through the background from unique overhead perspectives, which happens constantly as a matter of course in Cardcaptor Sakura. Considering that every line an animator has to keep track of when moving a character through a space takes that much extra work, it’s nuts to me that they had to draw Sakura’s rollerblades all the time, and the shine in her hair, and all these details on some of the really ridiculous outfits that Tomoyo decided to test the animation staff with. Suffice it to say that the animation quality on display in Cardcaptor Sakura is on another level from Sailor Moon, and from most of the animation that could be found on TV in the 1990s--and that quality doesn’t let up for a moment across seventy episodes and two feature films. 

Equally integral to the effectiveness of the series’ tone is the phenomenal sound design, best exemplified in its endlessly warm and intimate soundtrack. Luckily, Sailor Moon makes this music easy to appreciate; compare the chintzy-sounding synthesizer compositions in that show’s background music against the lush orchestral instrumentation which swells with vigor in the Cardcaptor soundtrack.

Because the world of Cardcaptor feels so real, all of the magical elements stand out that much more, and (in my opinion), have a lot more impact. Sailor Moon has so few established rules about what magic can do and so little use for it besides conceptually the force which vanquishes foes and heals allies that it hardly would’ve made a difference had the girls just physically fought their enemies with fists, the way the girls in Pretty Cure were later going to do. While Cardcaptor doesn’t go so far as to explain why magic exists (which is a good thing), it’s very clear who can use it, what they can do with it, and all of the multitudinous uses that it can have and problems that it can pose just by existing. 

Ultimately, it boils down to the difference between fairy tale fantasy and magical realism. Sailor Moon is fundamentally an escapist story about a lazy, unremarkable girl waking up to the realization that she’s a reincarnated moon princess with super-powers that she has to use to beat a bad guy, and she does that. Cardcaptor Sakura posits that in the world we already live in, magic really does exist in the way that we wish it does--and with hard work and determination, those who are capable of tapping into that magic can use it to do some pretty cool things. There isn’t even a bad guy to vanquish in Cardcaptor Sakura: rather, it could be read as a story about turning enemies into allies, or more literally just the tale of a young girl finding out that she can use magic, and then getting better and better at it until she’s mastered all of the available spells through hard work and a “zettai daijoubu” attitude--meaning that no matter what, everything will absolutely be okay. 

Sailor Moon’s story is as self-centered as its main character. While we do meet all of Usagi’s family at the start, and her littler brother gets at least one episode worth of focus, most of them have almost nothing to do with Usagi’s life and hardly ever turn up in the story. Each of her relationships with the other sailor scouts are one-dimensional, and the relationships that those characters have with the scant family members and love interests introduced for them aren’t any deeper than Usagi’s. Cardcaptor Sakura, meanwhile, makes sure to explore the lives and feelings of everyone surrounding its titular protagonist, and shows us how the effect that each person has on everyone else around them changes those people and their relationships, until there has been significant evolution in all of the characters’ personalities and relationships by the end of the series.

It might be unfair to compare the amount of content in Cardcaptor Sakura’s 70 episodes against the first 46-episode season of Sailor Moon, but the former is just sooo much more dense that even if we only compared the 46-episode Clow Card arc against the other show, it would still be a night-and-day difference between how much I could tell you about the world and characters of Cardcaptor versus Sailor Moon. This is because Cardcaptor is a properly decompressed long-form story, whereas Sailor Moon is a thirteen-chapter story slammed with 75% filler, little of which adds anything meaningful to the setting and characters that isn’t repeated episode after episode. Cardcaptor has a little bit of filler, and I won’t claim that every single episode is going to give you something new to think about, but the percentage is significantly more favorable, and the filler is more cleverly dispersed throughout the series, and handled to a level of quality that you might not really notice a difference.

Because Cardcaptor Sakura has so much more content, more of its core concepts are endlessly memorable to me. I can’t remember what the stupid moon compact looked like, and Moon Tiara Action is one of the worst finishing moves I’ve ever seen in a hero show; but Sakura’s transforming wand (which is actually the only thing that has a transformation sequence in the show, which is less than twenty seconds long and animated differently with whatever Sakura is wearing in that episode almost every single time) is THE KEY that allows her to use THE CLOW CARDS--which summon 52 semi-sentient Pokemon-esque magical fairy creatures with specific abilities to assist their master in matter such as FLIGHT, SWORD, GLOW, TIME, DASH, and BUBBLE. Sure, Sailor Moon has one of the most iconic hero designs because its creator identified a timeless concept and ran with it, and it’s hard to imagine a magical girl ever having a more iconic battle costume--which is why instead, Sakura has a different battle costume almost every single time that she fights, thanks to her super-rich best friend and sewing enthusiast Tomoyo supplying her with clothing and filming her battles for her own enjoyment. A handful of these have remained iconic and been used for figure designs or even elaborated into fuller aesthetics, but with so many incredible fits in the show I really don’t think I can do it justice without reviewing all of them--which I’m considering if someone wants to see that.

I won’t belabor the comparison against Sailor Moon too much further--mostly I found this an opportunity to be more honest with my feelings towards that show after having watched it for the sake of my previous video, and then felt the need to select a show that I actually like for the next episode just to have an easier viewing experience. Cardcaptor Sakura is hardly the only magical girl show that I would consider better than Sailor Moon to have come before or after. I am far from an expert in the genre, but I really dig the aesthetic of Creamy Mami from 1983, Akazukin Chacha from 1991 is a fantasy mahou shoujo that’s absolutely adorable, and similarly Junichi Satou’s Crayon Kingdom of Dreams from 1996 might be the single cutest anime of the mid-90s. 1995’s Saint Tail is a super-thief-themed magical girl show that I’d consider similar to both Sailor Moon and Cardcaptor Sakura in good ways, and 1995’s Nurse Angel Ririka SOS probably has to closest thing to Cardcaptor’s realistically detailed setting, action-heavy animation and laid-back, comfy atmosphere. Revolutionary Girl Utena parodies the nature of Sailor Moon and brought magical girls to an older audience in 1996. 1998’s Fancy Lala is extremely adorable, also features different fits in each episode and a richly-detailed realistic setting, and stars a magical idol instead of a magical fighting girl--and this is mostly just the stuff that came between the start of Sailor Moon and the end of Cardcaptor, all of which I would consider worthwhile for fans of the genre--but none as satisfying as Sakura.

The greatest strength of Cardcaptor Sakura is the imminently lovable cast of characters, and so I think it’s about time I finally gave a proper introduction to the world’s one and only Cardcaptor, Kinomoto Sakura.

Compelled by a nearly endless wellspring of energy, nine year-old Kinomoto Sakura is always in a rush to get somewhere and beset with new things vying for her time. When she has a task to accomplish, she goes at it with such tunnel-vision that she’ll flippantly create more work for herself later in the name of making things easier for other people now. Having lost her mother at a very young age, Sakura’s hard-working attitude no doubt comes from the two older men in her life--her kindly father, who cooks wonderful meals and cleans between his gigs as a college professor--and her teenaged older brother, who we see working an endless stream of odd jobs over the course of the show, most likely with the hopes of putting his sister through college. Okay that’s just my headcanon, but given his constant concern over her, I think it’s a pretty spot-on idea. 

Sakura’s life is pretty straightforward at the series’ start. Her brother teases her by calling her a kaiju, which she’s not too happy about, but it’s worth putting up with because his best friend is the soft-spoken nice boy Yukito, whom Sakura’s got a massive crush on. She gets to see him on her skate to school each morning, before teaming up with bff Tomoyo for the rest of the school day. If she doesn’t have anything to do that afternoon with the group of girls in her class that likes to investigate new things happening in town, she’s likely to head straight home and handle chores while her brother and father are still out. One afternoon, while cleaning up the basement, she accidentally releases the magical lock on the book containing the Clow Cards, scattering them all over the city and summoning their guardian, Cerberus, in his weakened magical state, to wonder what is going on.

When Cerberus discovers that the Clow cards have been set loose, he immediately tasks Sakura with retrieving them, reasoning that if she has enough magical power to open the book, then she ought to have enough to use the key to go out and reclaim the cards as a Cardcaptor. Sakura’s immediate stance is that there’s absolutely no way she can do anything about this--however, when she hears a giant bird outside, and Kero pressures her to chase after it, she can’t help herself but to investigate a danger in her neighborhood that she set loose. She continues insisting that there’s no way she could tame such a large creature, but Kero keeps pressuring her, laying the title of Cardcaptor on her again and again and stating that the Cardcaptor’s job is to come up with solutions to problems like this. Being tasked to imagine a solution as she follows the bird on rollerblades, Sakura finally states that she has and idea, and then skates up a sloped wall and hops onto the off-brand Fearow’s neck.

This is straight-up one of my all-time favorite first-episode hero feats--especially considering that Sakura doesn’t even use a Clow card to get that height--this is just what she’s able do on her own strength. I think what stands out visually about this scene is how the lead-up to the jump is this really awesome perspective shot that establishes exactly how steep this slope is right before the shot of Sakura riding up the wall and then flipping onto the bird’s neck, then having to grab and hold on for dear life, Shadow of the Colossus style. There is no way Usagi could do this; I’m not convinced she’s creative enough to find a way to deal with an enemy which doesn’t involve decapitating them with a tiara.

I also need to touch on the fact that Sakura is doing all these badass maneuvers on inline skates, specifically. The mid-90s were the first time that inline skates achieved mainstream popularity as a means of transportation, thanks to the success of the Rollerblade brand. This was the first kind of skates that I owned, and as a kid who was terrified of falling off of a skateboard and kind of afraid at the height of bikes, it was the first kind of wheeling around that I felt comfortable with. When Cardcaptor Sakura went to air in the US in 2001, I was 10 years old--the same age Sakura would be by series end--and I vividly remember of the TV ads at the time taking note only of those pink-and-white inline skates, and Syaoran’s sword. At that age I was unwilling to even go out of eyesight of my house, and I really like to think that if I’d gotten to be a fan of this show as a kid, it might’ve encouraged me to get out more just to go skating around the neighborhood--but we can get more into the wishful thinking about what this show could’ve done for me as a kid later in the video.

Kinomoto Sakura may honestly be the character who sees the least change over the course of the series, and this is a good thing. While she is fleshed out to a depth at which we can fully understand her decision-making, part of the point of Cardcaptor Sakura is that its protagonist is already a really exemplary person right from the beginning. We watch Sakura overcome bigger and bigger obstacles while becoming more and more powerful, but the core aspects of her personality which led her to jump onto the FLY card’s back are the same ones which are going to compel her to gather all of the Clow cards and eventually transform them into her own Sakura cards, which rely on her personal magic to sustain form. 

I think it would almost make the most sense to describe Cardcaptor Sakura’s story as an exploration of the mechanism by which the purity of Sakura’s idealistic personality is protected, and the compound effect that the existence of good-natured people like her has on those around them. To best witness Sakura’s virtues, then, we should talk about the other characters.

Daidouji Tomoyo is Sakura’s second cousin and number-one friend, and the first person to discover her exploits as the Cardcaptor and start monitoring them. Just as Tomoyo’s mother had been obsessed with Sakura’s mother Nadeshiko up until her untimely death, Tomoyo is obsessed with Sakura, and particularly insists on the chance to film her wearing outfits of her own design so that she can watch the video back in her home theater. Obscenely rich from owning a toy company, Tomoyo’s family can back a security detail to the scene of wherever Sakura operates; and while this only really gets shown to happen once, I like to think that Tomoyo’s team is pretty much always waiting in the wings for her to give the call and jump in when necessary, because a pervasive undercurrent I felt as an adult viewer is the sense that Sakura is never really in any major danger in this show, because she’s so well-protected. Even in the first episode, the FLY card blasts her fatally far into the sky, but Kero-chan easily catches her in his teeth and glides her back to the ground. The question in all of these fights, then, isn’t so much of whether Sakura can win the encounter with her life, but more of whether she can take care of the problem before making it someone else’s burden. It’s precisely because Sakura approaches the problems before her as something to take care of on her own if she can that Tomoyo respects her so much, and also why she takes a mostly hands-off approach to her assistance, preferring to simply film Sakura’s exploits while guards wait nearby.

Tomoyo seems wise beyond her years, yet playfully mischievous in the way that she pushes to get the simple things she wants from life. She is a master of the mask--constantly projecting a placid image of class to hide the overwhelming emotions that she feels toward Sakura. In her conversations with others, she reveals her intention to simply keep her romantic feelings for Sakura buried inside, because she knows that Sakura doesn’t feel that way about her, and doesn’t want to burden Sakura with the knowledge of her feelings--instead encouraging her in other relationships with people that she trusts. One gets the sense that she will be watching over the Kinomoto family long into the future, but I really hope that she finds another romantic partner and isn’t just stuck thinking about Sakura from the sidelines forever.

A big portion of the interactions that we watch in Cardcaptor, especially in the early episodes, are between Sakura, Cerberus, and Tomoyo, as the core group involved in handling the Clow Card problem, and the voice performances of these characters by Tange Sakura, Hisakawa Aya, and Iwao Junko, respectively, make those a charming delight to experience. Iwao-san and Tange-san mostly play up the cuteness factor of the elementary-school girls to the maximum, with Tomoyo’s sweet, soft-spoken voice often remarked on by other characters, and filler episodes making every excuse they can to give her a chance to sing. Tange-san, meanwhile, is fully successful in making a meme out of Sakura’s surprised reactions to things. 

Hisakawa-san’s performance is my favorite, though, and requires a little explaining to get the incredibly specific thing that she’s going for. As Sakura points out after Kero-chan introduces himself, he speaks with an Osaka dialect, apparently as a result of the book having been left in Osaka for a while. Osaka dialect is often dubbed in English using a Southern accent, because it is seen as similarly kind of bombastic, rough and informal; but Kero-chan is originally from England, and in personality and manner of speaking also comes off as kind of haughty and pretentious, totally contrasting with his slangy vocabulary. I personally find that the melodic and lilting way that Hisakawa-san sings Kero-chan’s sentences more closely resembles something like a New Orleans cajun accent than what we usually think of as Southern American. It’s a very distinct voice, that I can pretty easily conjure in my head based on the Leave It To Kero-chan segment that occurs at the end of each episode for the show’s first half.

Eight episodes into Sakura’s anime adventure, we discover that there is another descendent of Clow Reed interested in becoming the master of the Clow cards, and that he’s moved into Sakura’s town from Hong Kong by himself, just so he can pursue them. His name is Li Shaoran, and he is the cutest little anime boy ever. Serious and studious since early childhood out of determination to appease his accomplished mother, Shaoran has learned martial arts and Chinese magic, and knows a lot more about the Clow cards than Sakura does. Initially in full competition with Sakura over acquiring the cards, Shaoran is highly critical of Sakura’s performance, noting her lack of serious drive in tracking the cards down, lack of understanding about which cards are weak or strong, and general clumsiness--and his critique, while abrasive, causes Sakura to self-reflect.

Right around when Shaoran is starting to gain a little bit of respect for Sakura as he sees her improve in certain encounters, his anime-only cousin Meiling shows up to help him get an advantage in card acquisition. Meiling is admittedly the weakest character in Cardcaptor Sakura, given that her personality is pretty much just that she’s obsessed with Shaoran to the exclusion of anything else, and has a one-sided rivalry with Sakura based on anger towards another woman hanging out with Shaoran, even though for most of the time that she’s in the show, he’s actually got a love-at-first-sight crush on Yukito, just like Sakura. We learn eventually that Meiling had an agreement with Shaoran that he had to marry her if he never met anyone that he liked more--and so, when he finds that someone, she graciously bows out of the show. 

On the one hand, I don’t mind Meiling’s existence because she’s adorable, she gets some pretty cool action scenes, and ultimately she serves her purpose in balancing Shaoran’s side of the competition for the Clow Cards and rounding out the group of main characters for the much longer section of card collecting that the anime has as compared to the manga (in which there are only 19 of them). On the other hand, Meiling kind of stands out as the only character in the series who I can’t really say is good-natured and kind like the others. She’s kind of a brat and a bully with the flaws of Shaoran magnified. Whereas Shaoran himself eventually tells Sakura that he started off as someone who only really saw his own mission as important, and was shocked with the way that Sakura always tried to make everything right by everyone in the process of accomplishing what she sets out to do; Meiling has this tunnel-vision even worse, and doesn’t really change in that regard by the end. Again, I don’t hate her character, but she inevitably feels the most disconnected and unimportant as she is literally tacked onto the story.

Around halfway into the show, Shaoran and Sakura share a heart-to-heart about their mutual affection toward Yukito--and this moment seems to be the spark that leads Shaoran to fall in love with Sakura. Now that he’s no longer capable of putting on airs or acting aggressively toward her, and is instead paying full attention to her as a respected friend, he can’t help but start noticing the fact that Sakura is blindingly adorable and good-natured.

Once Sakura and Shaoran have collected all of the cards, it is revealed to them that their mutual crush Yukito is actually just a fabricated consciousness housing Yue, another magical being like Cerberus created by Clow and assigned to guard the cards--this time, by giving a final test to the Cardcaptor to prove their worthiness as the new master of the cards. Shaoran is given a chance, but his paltry cards and magic are no match for Yue’s power. Sakura has a tough match, but is able to pull through and ultimately become the master of the clow cards.

Now that Shaoran knows his true identity, Yue informs him that Shaoran probably isn’t really in love with him, so much as that he’s attracted to the moon power that radiates from him. This is reasonable to Shaoran, who takes it for granted and focuses on his feelings for Sakura, but my headcanon is that Yue just made this up to get Shaoran off of his back. It’s not that different from saying that he just likes him because he’s attractive, or because he doesn’t know his real personality, both of which are more-or-less true, and Syaoran seems more aware that his awkward admiration isn’t going to get him anywhere with Yukito than Sakura does.

In the end, as mentioned before, Shaoran tells Sakura how she helped to change his worldview and mellow him out, and confesses his love for her. Sakura… doesn’t respond. She meets him at the airport when he’s about to leave back to Hong Kong and he gives her a teddy bear, but that’s it… until the sequel movie!

Four months later, with the kids now in the sixth grade, Syaoran and Meiling come back to Japan for another visit, and the first third of the film consists of Sakura getting interrupted in her attempts to confess to Syaoran over and over again as we explore the TV setting, gorgeously reimagined. Cardcaptor Sakura actually has two movies: the first one feeling like an overlong and largely pointless filler episode of the TV show, in which Sakura’s family goes to Hong Kong and Sakura captures a Clow Card. That film was awkward in its visual transition to widescreen aspect ratio, as though the staff were so used to framing things a certain way that they didn't consider how the aspect ratio shift would effect the composition of the frame. It did manage to have at least one great-looking shot, and we do get to meet Syaoran’s mom in this movie, but I think you’d be better-off looking up that scene independently of watching the mostly boring first film. The second one, on the other hand, aside from being worthwhile in that it offers proper closure to the TV series and has a much more conceptually interesting antagonist in the Sealed Card (which basically represents the yin to the rest of the deck’s yang), the film is also lavishly animated and actually feels like it was designed from the ground up as a feature film instead of awkwardly distending a TV episode. Even though the first half kind of treads water, as a diehard fan of the show it was effective fanservice just to see as much of what I was familiar with from the series as possible reimagined with higher definition.

By the very end of the film, after watching Sakura and Syaoran on a bunch of cute dates and saving Tomoeda city from total erasure, Sakura finally returns Syaoran’s feelings. It’s a cute, feel-good, romantic, actiony slice-of-life movie the likes of which I think only Kyoto Animation has really been interested in making more of. 

As we would later find out, the romance between Sakura and Syaoran is in fact so powerful that it transcends the multiverse, in CLAMP’s bizarre adventure epic, Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle from 2002. Featuring multiple versions of characters from every CLAMP manga, including alternate-universe teenaged Syaoran on a quest to rescue his version of Sakura, Tsubasa Chronicle is a massively ambitious crossover series which ran alongside CLAMP’s supernatural detective series, xXxHolic, and featured its characters heavily in the central storyline. But I don’t wanna get too CLAMPed down here, so let’s get back to Cardcaptor.

Sakura’s highschooler brother Toya is my favorite character in the series and one of my favorite anime characters in general. Introduced as kind of a bully toward Sakura, but secretly always looking out for her behind the scenes and working odd jobs both for the sake of funding her existence and keeping track of her movements, Toya is rightly recognized by his best friend Yukito as being a little over-obsessed with his younger sister. Yukito nonetheless plays his own part in helping Toya to protect the energetic younger girl, and the both of them are great at keeping Sakura oblivious to the fact that they’re looking out for her. Sakura’s not the only one these good boys are helping out though--the duo frequently subs in for missing members of sports groups, and are eager to assist in any way that they can anywhere that they are.

All of this constant hard work on Toya’s part may in fact be an escape from the persistent mild terror of his existence. Unbeknownst to anyone but Yukito, Toya has ridiculous amounts of magical energy, and is therefore able to see ghosts--basically at all times. It’s not all bad, though, because one of the ghosts he gets to see is that of his own mother, Nadeshiko. 

After the reveal that Yukito is actually Yue, which doesn’t seem to come as too great a shock to Toya, given he was at least well aware that his friend was a magical being all along thanks to his magical instincts; and in the latter part of the show, more emphasis is put on their relationship, thanks to the combination of a trans girl showing up to glom onto Toya like a toy, to his annoyance/indifference, and Yukito beginning to lose his physical presence thanks to Sakura having taken over as the host of the Clow Cards and not having enough magical power to keep him alive. Luckily, Toya is able to give all of his magical energy over to Yukito, sacrificing his ability to see ghosts (which he probably mostly hated anyways) and making Yue/Yukito live. It’s also here that Toya and Yukito confirm their feelings for one-another and solidify their relationship, in case you hadn’t already considered them a couple. Personally, when rewatching the series, I just took it for granted from the start that they were already dating because it actually makes a lot more sense in most of the scenes that feature them together. My absolute favorite is a moment when Sakura’s dad is out of town, and Yukito is spending the night in Toya’s room, and Sakura is all excited over just getting glimpses of him on her way to bed while her brother is thoroughly involved with the guy.

Just to touch on this momentarily because I think it’s interesting, Yukito and Yue’s relationship to one-another is framed as a kind of dissociative identity. Yue seems to be aware of everything that Yukito does, but Yukito is totally oblivious to his existence as Yue, and has no memories of his time in that form. While the other characters do inform him that he has another self, we never really see them actually telling him any of what happens when he’s Yue, and I really have to wonder if he’ll ever ask about it someday.

The last character that I think it’s important to talk about is Clow Reed, the creator of the Clow Cards and God-tier Western magician. We start to learn more about Clow in the show’s second arc, which kicks off after Sakura passes Yue’s final judgement and becomes master of the Clow Cards. A new student shows up at the kids’ school, called Hiiragizawa Eriol, and the show doesn’t really try to hide from the viewer that this kid is either Clow himself in some new form, or heavily connected to him; though it does conceal this from the characters, who simply “sense Clow’s presence” at moments when weird things are happening in the city, which Sakura has to convert Clow cards into Sakura cards to deal with.

As it turns out, Eriol is actually Clow’s reincarnation, and technically a separate entity--but one which was born with all of Clow’s memories just because of how god dang much magic his soul had inside of it. He creates problems pretty much just for Sakura to solve them until her magical power has grown enough to convert all of the cards. This stretch of episodes focuses much less on the episodic battles, and more on closing out the development of all the relationships and characters, most of which I’ve already talked about. Eriol shows up with a duo paralleling Cerberus and Yue, in the form of a winged, blue-eyed panther with a deadpan personality called Spinel Sun, who looses his mind when treated to any sweets; and Ruby Moon, who has a bombastic personality and butterfly wings, and assumes the identity of a high school girl to flirt with Toya. It’s implied by Spinel that a person with a body like her’s would not ordinarily choose a girl’s uniform, but Ruby asserts that since she isn’t human in the first place, it hardly matters.

Clow is mostly presented as sagaciously wise, but also a bit of a mischievous prankster, and very much prone to springing things on people--as he did his sudden death on Cerberus and Yue. As Eriol, he becomes friends with Sakura’s best classmate, Takashi, who is always telling hilarious and elaborate lies disguised as trivial facts; and when the two of them start teaming up, it shows us the best of Eriol’s character. He also sets up Mizuki Kaho, a beautiful woman who shows up as the kids’ new math teacher halfway in and turns out to be Toya’s ex-girlfriend from when he was in middle school, to help out Sakura in the final judgement by giving her an illusion-shattering bell. Kaho is also a shrine maiden and kind of implied to be as much of a crush for Sakura as Yukito had been, but she honestly doesn’t have much personality outside of being a mature woman that helps out her students, and Sakura never takes her feelings for her beyond a distant admiration.

Amid the show’s ancillary cast of less-explored characters, a particular duo stands out, only in how they push the show’s theme of boundary-free love in an interesting direction. One of Sakura’s classmates, Rika, is unabashedly in love with their homeroom teacher--and while it’s not really clear if the teacher necessarily recognizes it as romantic love, he certainly is aware that this student is particularly enthusiastic and gently encourages her to help him out with various odd jobs in his work. 

I really don’t think we’re supposed to view Rika and her teacher as a “potential couple,” in the sense that they’re meant to be ‘shipped’ or whatever; longshot odds, maybe she actually sticks around this guy and feels the same for the eight or nine years before she can legally date him; but again, I don’t think that’s really the point. I look at this more as acknowledgement--yes, a lot of nine-year-old girls have crushes on their teachers, and no, that’s not a bad thing. It would be a bad thing if the teacher took advantage of that attraction, but I think the goal of portraying this kind of relationship in this series is meant to both acknowledge the feelings of the audience, and also to show them how a loving relationship can materialize which isn’t sexual at all.

For that matter, it’s direly important to note that sex--in all meanings of the word--is a non-factor in the romantic relationships in this and in most of CLAMP’s work. I think it’s mostly pointless to describe sexuality in terms like “straight” “gay” “bisexual” “pansexual” “asexual,” etc., because ultimately attraction is always case-by-case. Almost no one is attracted to a single trait in uniform across all people who have that trait, and even if everyone you’ve ever been attracted to shares a trait such as their sex, it doesn’t mean you couldn’t possibly ever harbor an attraction to a person of the opposite sex, even if only circumstantially. Attraction is just way too circumstantial in general for labels to mean as much as anyone seems to think they do, and CLAMP doesn’t seem to think they matter at all. Their characters are just into whomever they happen to be into, usually based on the magnetism of their personalities and natures.

That aspect of romance may be the most refreshing theme explored in Cardcaptor Sakura, but my favorite thing about the series is its boundless good-naturedness and wisdom. Somehow the interactions are believable and entertaining, even though almost all of them are unnaturally kind as compared to what we’re used to from reality. Most of these characters are really looking out for one-another in more ways than they understand, and there isn’t even really a villain in the series besides the temporary mischief of each Clow Card before capture. You could alternately blame Clow for creating the cards or Sakura for setting them loose, but no one is actually hurt by the cards, and all the stuff that potentially could’ve happened to them only would’ve had all of what occured not been so heavily monitored by people who could do something about it.

If you are the same age as Kinomoto Sakura and maybe don’t pick up on all of the nuances in the series, then Cardcaptor Sakura will most likely read as a straightforward superhero story about a kid who fights monsters by moonlight just like Sailor Moon. As an adult, though, I view it more as a child-rearing story--a story about how a small community and especially a family unit comes together to help one-another become the best people that they can, centered around the boundless goodness of a young heroine that everyone wants to protect because of how dedicated she is to protecting everyone else.

In praising Cardcaptor Sakura, I don’t want to make it sound overly exciting or overly deep for what is, in the end, still very much a slice-of-life show aimed at children. Granted, I missed out on this show as a kid, and fell in love with it for the first time marathoning it at age twenty, and I still like it just as much ten years later, so there is certainly a crowd I can see appreciating it. If you think following the exploits of average elementary schoolers is a bit too childish, I think a lot of its themes of personal growth through togetherness are just as well-explored by shows like K-On! And March Comes Like A Lion; and romances between characters constantly trying to do right by one-another can be found in Snow White with Red Hair, as well as my personal favorite romance anime, Kare Kano. The indifference to sex as part of romance can be found in other CLAMP work, but if you want the queerness without skimping out on the sexuality, I recommend Revolutionary Girl Utena.

When I say that Cardcaptor Sakura is one of the best anime of the 90s, I don’t mean that it’s necessarily as good or important as Cowboy Bebop or Neon Genesis Evangelion, because those are shows that really defied genre and brought completely original, compelling stories into the world like nothing that existed before. I do think, however, that it pretty much perfects the genre it belongs to, and is one of the few things that a seven year-old could enjoy with their parents getting just as much out of watching it with them.

It’s unfortunate, then, that the release of Cardcaptor Sakura in the US was completely butchered. In spite of dubbing all of the episodes in English with insultingly awful casting for global releases, the US release specifically cut out almost half of all the episodes, refocusing the series to be about Sakura and Syaoran in equal measure, and retitled Cardcaptors. All of the queer content was removed along with most of the story, and while it might have still been a favorite to some children at the time, it certainly never caught on as a popular IP here in the way that it did in Japan and several other countries. I find this especially sad, speaking as a trans woman who has dated people of multiple sexual identities, because if by chance I had ever caught onto this show, I think it could’ve done a ton for me as a kid to see an admirable, badass boy character like Syaoran fall in love with another boy, or even just seen enough of myself in Tomoyo and her own love for Sakura to identify with her, and maybe been less homophobic and therefore closeted throughout my childhood. But that’s just wishful thinking, really.

Depending on who you ask, the US dub wasn’t the last affront to the story of Cardcaptor Sakura (though certainly the most offensive). In 2016, two decades after the start of the original manga, CLAMP began publishing a sequel series called the Clear Card Arc, set in middle school not long after the original series and retreading a lot of the same ground that it went over. Most fans have regarded this sequel as pointless pandering, and after watching the first episode of the 2018 anime adaptation, I personally didn’t feel compelled to continue. I tend to be extremely cynical of sequels and reboots made long after the original series, especially when it’s long enough that the creators could be completely different people. Even though most of the creative staff even behind the anime version of the Clear Card arc are the same, the magic feeling of inspiration that the original had just isn’t there in the new one. Having said that, if you think it would be interesting to talk about this arc for some reason, even if it’s to tear it apart or something, let me know in the comments below, and if this video ever gets to fifty thousand views, however long that might take, then I’ll make a video about it.

And in the meanwhile, subscribe to Ygg Studio and ring the bell so you’ll be notified with the fourth episode of Anime Alphabet releases--which is going to be about Digimon Adventure. Find more of my writing and bonus content available to subscribers on goldenwitch.substack.com, or support me on my patreon, which is linked below. Find my musical content on the Branches of Ygg channel, or by searching my hip-hop name, Trial of the Golden Witch, with any live events listed below, and find me @goldenwitchfire on social media. Thanks again for watching, and don’t forget: Anime forever!