Cardcaptor Sakura Review

Morio Asaka directs this for NHK across two years, and the achievement is tonal. Sakura Kinomoto is a fourth grader with no tragedy behind her, no destiny, and no enemy who wants her dead. She catches cards, most of them mischievous rather than dangerous, and the tension comes from whether she can finish before dinner and whether her brother notices. In other hands that is nothing.

Here it becomes the warmest series of its era, because the show takes a child's ordinary problems at exactly the weight the child assigns them. The cast is why people keep it. Sakura's crushes land on people who cannot return them and the series treats that as sad rather than as a joke. Tomoyo films everything and loves Sakura without ever making it Sakura's burden. Toya and Yukito get an arc a 1998 children's series had no obligation to attempt, handled with more grace than most adult drama manages.

Syaoran arrives as a rival and is quietly rebuilt into something better. Madhouse draws it well rather than lavishly, with lovely card designs, heavy stock transformation footage, and the occasional flat week. The structure sags too, since a monster of the week format run seventy times produces a middle stretch that repeats itself. Neither costs it much. The Animage Grand Prix in 1999 got it right, and this is still the high point of the genre.