Sailor Moon Review

Takeuchi's series is the reason a generation of readers found manga at all, and its influence is not in dispute. It welds the shonen fighting team onto a shojo romance, gives its heroines the battles and the feelings both, and hands the genre a template nobody has replaced in thirty-five years. The art is the strongest thing on the page, long limbed and ornamental, and the character work is warmer and stranger than the reputation suggests, with Usagi allowed to be lazy and frightened and heroic in the same chapter.

The consensus faults are structural. Takeuchi works fast and it shows, so arcs compress into a handful of chapters, villains arrive and die inside a single volume, and the Silver Millennium backstory is explained in bursts rather than built. Fights resolve through willpower and speeches more often than through anything a reader can follow. It reads as a run of gorgeous, hurried sketches for a story the anime later had room to tell properly. The influence is landmark and the execution is merely very good.