Anime Meta-Review
Card Captor Sakura, The Movie
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Title Info
- type: movie
- grade: exemplary
- genre: magic_girl
- Other elements of this title:
- This title is a personal favourite.
- source: asian
- people: CLAMP Hayashibara
- made: unknown
- Review created: Recently, but I didn't record the date.
- mod: none
See the review for the TV series, because this movie will be a lot clearer if you've seen a decent portion of the TV series. I'd seen about 20 episodes when I watched this and that seemed sufficient to reach this point in the CCS continuity. What can I say, this is a great movie and helps confirm my decision to give CCS TV an exemplerary rating. The story involves the characters going to Hong Kong after Sakura wins a store raffle. Once there they meet Li and Meiling, who live in Hong Kong and one or two other characters. Unfortunately it seems that Sakura's win may have been in the nature of an invitation from a strange figure who appears in her dreams. As she is warned, people of power attract evil very easily. Will Sakura's Hong Kong Holiday turn into one of the greatest challenges she has yet faced?
Well here comes the spoiler, yes, more happens than a movie length Hong Kong shopping trip. The start, after some card capturing action, is the quite familiar cheerful, cute aspect of CCS. But the slow gathering of mystery and danger is masterfully done, even approaching a creepy sort of horror. The atmosphere on this piece is very solid, and has an underlying dark ambiance. This merges, beautifully, into solid action as the situation resolves and Sakura acts, with a conclusion that is very fitting and satisfying. This is just a very good movie, well paced, firmly directed, interesting and exciting. The balance of humor, character, action and danger, alongside the normal life of a young Japanese girl is beautifully balanced and solidly believable. The dialogue, story and scenes are all wonderful as well. This is both a good film in its own right and an excellent job of bringing the CCS magic to big screen. Enough already, you've got to be sick of all this praise, the take home message is that this is a good movie. Unless you are deathly allergic to the whole Clamp/CCS thing, then you'll probably enjoy the experience.
The animation is very interesting as well. This movie has some serious bucks behind it. However it seemed to me that they had made efforts to keep the look and feel of the TV series. Thus the money has gone into such things as more complex backgrounds, higher quality animation and wonderfully observed character motion rather than flash. Thus it feels like normal CCS but everything is just a little bit richer. Of course when effects are needed the animation is capable of rising to the challenge, but the effects are not allowed to dominate. This is probably going to upset you if you hate CCS (and many do) and were hoping you could just watch the effects. In addition the move to Hong Kong allows for new flavors and backgrounds, which makes good use of the freedom a movie budget offers. This is quality, stylish production which is simply good fun to watch.
Herself the Elf, Lord Carnage's offsider pointed me to a review of the movie (at the bottom of the page). The review is positive, mentioning that it has strong writing, a nice touch of suspense and retains the strengths from the TV series.
Words by Andrew Shelton, Web by Ticti, Last Compile: Wed Aug 5 12:39:16 WST 2009