Nehelenia wants to conquer the world, and her henchmen the Amazoness Quartet attack the Sailor Senshi by trying to trap them in a nightmare, but Sailor Moon and Chibiusa outfox them and join forces with Pegasus from the dream and defeat Nehelenia.
This two-part anime movie was based on the best season from the original “Sailor Moon” manga, SuperS, and yet it still was not able to reach the level of the 90s anime version of it. Nominally, the movie did everything right: the relationship between Pegasus and Chibiusa is better explained; the story is more compact; there are no fillers; the Outer Senshi were included in it—and yet, it simply lacks that magic and pure, untrammelled ingenuity of the 90s SuperS anime. It is just so lifeless, mechanical and porcelain, as if it is too scared too be anything more than formal. For instance, what is the motive of the villain? The whole sequence that gives a background to Nehelenia’s grudge against Queen Serenity unravels something like this: the former came uninvited to the latter’s party, they spoke vaguely back and forth until the Queen sentenced her to a neverending banishment, and Nehelenia cursed her dynasty—this whole moment is just so muddled, underdeveloped and haphazard that the viewers cannot accept it as a valid argument for all of her evil. One of the better aspects is that the story explores the theme of clashing, rival dreams: the five girls all confess their private dreams (from running a shrine to becoming a doctor), but being a superheroine Sailor Senshi gets in their way. Therefore, at the beginning, they all secretly realize they cannot transform anymore, as if their passion for being a superheroine has redirected to their other dream.
The way they undergo this crisis and get to a resolution, namely that being a superheroine is their true identity, and more important than their dream, is a well earned lesson. There is also a fascinating excursion to Haruka, Michiru and Setsuna living in a retirement of sorts, raising Hotaru in a desolate house, as if it is from a different movie. The much talked about sequence of an 8-year old Hotaru touching the mirror and seeing a taller, teenage version of herself as Sailor Saturn also touching her hand really is mysterious, and could be interpreted in a way that the Sailor Senshi are the ultimate, fullfiled version of themselves, their psychological shadow or their collective past heritage that is always a part of them. Unfortunately, out of five individual stories that follow the inner Senshi, only two are interesting: Minako and Rei. Sadly, all the rest are uninteresting. It is as if their irresistible personalities were removed from their bodies. In Rei’s segment, Rei complains that hiring a worker in her shrine is expensive, so Minako jokingly suggests she should marry and thus get a worker for free. In another humorous moment, a little Usagi complains that she had a nightmare of a beast that eats crybabies. In the said two rare moments, they had them—they recaptured that 90s frequency of the personalities of these great characters. Unfortunately, they immediately lost them after that, and thus returned to good, but underwhelming, bland personalities. Rei in this entire edition is simply never as alive of a character as Rei in the 90s anime who wipes her out with just one move in episode 159, where she takes a sip of coffee, but then just opens her mouth after shocking news and the coffee just spills out of her jaw back into her cup. The same goes for the 90s Minako, who tries to seduce a teacher in episode 154 by offering to have as much children with him to fill a football team. And these versatile sequences abound in the original. “Sailor Moon Crystal” is Salieri, while the 90s “Sailor Moon” is Mozart.
Grade:++
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