Weekly review: Sailor Moon anime

This classic anime, adapted from the manga by Naoko Takeuchi in 1992, is probably one of the series with more dubs available in the world due to its success, and yet it is probably one of the most censored and cut apart ever.

And even the anime as we know it differs greatly from the manga, that it could be well worth it to remake this anime in the future.  With quality we see today in most animes, why not?

It is actually a shojo, 'magical girl' type of story with sentai (squad) elements, but it definitely became popular with male audiences ever since its publication in Kodansha's Nakayoshi magazine.

Sailor Moon is the story of 9 girls that are progressively introduced as they team up to fight the forces of evil that are constantly a menace to the world, and ultimately, the galaxy.

The protagonist, Usagi Tsukino (known as 'Bunny' in Spain and 'Serena' in Latin American dubs), is a 14-year old girl that is introduced as lazy and a drama queen, crying all the time over everything. Until she meets a mysterious black cat named 'Luna', who tells her of her true destiny. Thus she becomes Sailor Moon, a warrior of love and justice.



She then meets Amy (Sailor Mercury), Rei (Sailor Mars), Makoto (Sailor Jupiter) and Minako (Sailor Venus) to conform the Inner Sailor Squad for the first two seasons.



Then, the Outer Sailor Squad, formed by Haruka (Sailor Uranus), Michiru (Sailor Neptune), Setsuna (Sailor Plut) and lastly, Hotaru (Sailor Saturn), who is originally thought to be an evil sailor with enough power to destroy a planet by herself.





The series caused a lot of controversy when it started being licensed and distributed worldwide, due to its relatively mature content in regards to how relationships were depicted, especially in the case of Haruka (a cross-dressing girl) and Michiru (a yuri relationship). It's actually a perfect example of how in Japanese culture, sex and homoeroticism isn't such a great and uptight deal as in Western culture.