Sailor Moon S: The Movie Review
3rd January 2019 at 6:57 pm
Dear Chibi,
Sailor Moon S: The Movie finally made it’s way down under to Aussie land last month on Bluray & DVD. Considering Tuxedo Santa makes his debut, it’s kind of fitting for the festive season XD (Though it’s actually summer here! *melts in the heat*)
The film is adapted from a side story of the original manga series created by Naoko Takeuchi, The Lover of Princess Kaguya. As a result, it has a very different vibe to the 90’s anime we’re all so used to, as that has deviated quite a bit from the original source. The story focuses on Luna and her relationship with a young astronomer named Kakeru Ozora.
The original title ‘The Lover of Princess Kaguya’ has always been a bit of a confusing one for me. Who is Princess Kaguya? Why is the main villain named ‘Princess Snow Kaguya’? Kind of hard to delve into this without spoilers so I guess that’s a discussion for another day XD.
The plot is otherwise pretty straight forward, and an easy introduction to the series:
“A snow storm has hit Tokyo, marking the arrival of the deadly alien Princess Snow Kaguya! She has a chilling plan to freeze the earth, but it requires a single piece of her ice comet returned to her. After falling ill due to the cold, Luna is rescued by a handsome astronomer, Kakeru, who happens to have the remaining shard of the comet! Called into action to protect Luna and her new found crush, Sailor Moon and the 8 Guardians are now the only hope the world has of avoiding an eternal winter!”
I love that this movie features all 8 Sailor Guardians (The poster artwork looks epic), but I was also disappointed how minor their roles were, especially the Outer Guardians Sailor Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. The Guardians have taken a back seat to leave room for Luna, Kakeru and his girlfriend Himeko to take center stage. I just want to see the Guardians more. The action scenes while good, felt more like an afterthought. The Snow Queen is just another typical villain who wants to take over the planet for the sake of being evil.
This is the biggest reason why I prefer Sailor Moon R The Movie: The Promise of the Rose. It has the perfect blend of romance, drama and action. The villain Fiore also had some kind of connection to the main characters (namely Mamoru) so there was at least a care factor there. The writing is more of my type I suppose but each to their own.
The Australian release does not come with any bonus or extra materials (apart from some Madman trailers)
I hope you found my review helpful! Let me know in the comments what you thought of the movie!
If you’re interested in grabbing a copy, you can find it here (Region B). For more links to other merchandise, check out this Sailor Moon Shopping Guide.
P.S Can’t wait for Sailor Moon SuperS Part 2 to come out in February!
Love this movie, still have it on VHS :-D it’s a cute movie that builds on a classic Japanese folk story. It was nice to have something a little different from the usual.
As a kid S movie was my least favourite of the three, and for some reason my favourite was the SuperS movie? Over time though R movie came to be my favourite, especially after rewatching SuperS movie again recently and realizing that it’s just… not that good. Though that definitely could just be because it was the old dubbed version that I was watching (someone had uploaded it to youtube, and since the old dub was how I used to watch the series as a kid I thought it’d be cool to watch it again, seeing as I hadn’t seen it in years). It’ll be interesting to see what VIZ will do with the movie, and how that’ll impact my enjoyment of the movie. I still don’t like S movie that much, but I think I like it a little more than I did when I was a kid. Probably still my least favourite though.
I really like the artwork for the packaging for the movie and think it looks really cool, but for some reason it really bugs me that it says ‘The Movie’ next to the series title, while it says it underneath the series title for the R movie. It’s such a minor thing, but it annoys me so much! I guess it’s because now they don’t match… oh well, it’s not like the entire artwork for the S movie is inconsistent with the artwork design for the R movie… it’s such a weird decision on Viz’s part. Like I know they got a lot of criticism for the R movie artwork, but that doesn’t mean that they should make an entirely different and unrelated art for the S movie. And even worse, the artwork for SuperS movie has the same design as S movie, so now they both look different from R movie and having all three of them together on a shelf would look weird because they don’t match. It’s such a weird design choice…
Speaking of SuperS movie… now that there’s a release date for the Viz release, hopefully it won’t be far behind for us! Since it is now February and SuperS part 2 has just come out (I haven’t watched it yet, but I’m really excited to!), SuperS movie should be the next thing we get (and I already mentioned how I’m looking forward to that). And of course after that, the thing everyone has been waiting for, Sailor Stars! I’ve waited years for this :’D as a kid I would watch the fandubbed episodes of Stars over and over again because that was the only way to watch it in English, so to finally be able to watch the full series in English will be the most surreal thing to me.
Viz has stated that they plan to release Stars in Spring 2019 (so Autumn for us, I think) which means that we’ll hopefully have it sometime in the months following that… I’ve never been more excited for anything in my life. The things I’m most excited to see are 1) the packaging that Madman will use when they release it (I don’t have much faith in the Viz packaging, it always end up looking pretty boring. Nice, but boring) and 2) the voices of the Starlights. I wonder who will be cast for them? I’m just curious to see if they can pull it off… we’ll see pretty soon I guess~
(Sorry this ended up being so long… I can ramble for ages about Sailor Moon apparently ^^;)