Magic Knight Rayearth - retro anime (early) review

Published 2024-12-19

tag(s): #reviews #retro #film-tv

First things first, how did I get to this (quite old) anime.
I recently finished Arcane on Netflix[1]. Then I was offered (because of whatever I watched earlier) Dandadan, which is quite juvenile at times, but I find it really funny AND I am of course, very much drawn into the main romance.
The thing is, there's just a few episodes out (I think the last one for the season releases today), so I went and read the comic online[2]. And in the listing of comics in the server was Magic Knight Rayearth, memories flooded, nostalgia...so I added the original manga to my Amazon Wishlist, to read it "properly" (it's quite short!) and set out to find the anime.

Small sidenote, I am not watching that much TV lately, it makes NO SENSE that I want to rewatch a 90s anime instead of the myriad of shows (including anime) that I haven't seen and are in my Netflix list. But I figured I would allow myself to enjoy this and not overthink it. 🤷.
There's a different post I will write (someday™️) about how I am re-thinking how I use my time, and as a consequence, my media consumption.

Prelude 1: Finding the show

Now, here, among friends, I will just admit it...I could totally torrent this. But like I said in footnote 2, I am old now, and I wouldn't even know where to look for the torrent :)

Then I remembered that Crunchyroll offers some anime with ads, and I am at a stage in my life where I can live with some ads rather than paying yet another service that I will barely use.
Turns out that this show is only available with a subscription. It is a well known show, for sure. But it's not...Dragon Ball levels of popularity. Or Sailor Moon. Or One Piece, Attack on Titan, etc.
Yes I added the last two to have a "fellow kids" moment >_>

A meme image: and obviously old person, posing as a teenager.

I recall Crunchyroll asked for a subscription when Sailor Moon Crystal premiered, and that made a lot of sense: it is a hugely popular anime, just premiering, etc. Which is why I got a free trial and "burned" the show before 7 days went by 😏. But for this one? It felt like a robbery.
Looking for mmmm alternatives >_> I found this website called "Retrocrush". It is a smaller streamer. Their site is honestly not great, but they have this anime, and a few others, free with ads.[3]. So far, I haven't seen one, but they are supposed to show two ad breaks per episode.

Prelude 2: My memories of the show

I was about 15 years old, and at that stage I had started admitting to others that I liked "girly" things, including to my parents[4]. I had the VCR setup to record Sailor Moon on a cable channel (Magic Kids, in Argentina) at 4pm. And I don't know about the US, but in Latin America they used this broadcast model of showing episodes for a show from 1 to 50, start again from 1 but then go all the way up to 100, and start over again. Like, a way of stretching the content, since instead of showing one episode a week, they would do Mon-Fri.
One day I got home, and they were supposed to show the beginning of new arc in Sailor Moon, but instead it was episode 1 of MKR (yeah I am not typing the title anymore). I HATED it because I really wanted to see my usual show, but I gave it a chance because...well, I was already in front of the TV. And there wasn't a gazillion channels nor on-demand streaming to watch something else instead.

Honestly the first episode moves quite fast and by the second one I was into it.
And this thing is "only" 50 episodes, a quarter of Sailor Moon. It was nice to watch it all the way to the end in a relatively short time.
One strong impression I had from the show was that it had more focus on action than Sailor Moon, while still having lots of characters interactions.

(Finally!) The review, 10 episodes in

I am hooked on the show again, because there are details that I didn't remember, and it is enjoyable for what it is. That said...it isn't great. I don't think I can recommend it without the nostalgia factor.
I recall there was an OVA that told an alternative version of the story, and while I don't remember it fondly, the animation in that surely is better than the show.

Anime is known for many things, in the animation department in particular for two contradictory characteristics: extremely fluid and dynamic animation, and blatant cost cutting.
Who doesn't remember the Speed Racer (Meteoro in LatAm) still images, with the rolling background effect?
Well, MKR takes this to the next level. About half the running time of any episode is panning of backgrounds, or zooming in or out of a character's reaction to something. If you add opening, ending, a brief recap when an episode starts, out of 22 minutes of content, you have about 15 minutes of "plot advancing". And out of those 15 minutes, I don't think it is hyperbole to say that maybe half are not technically animated.

I would say one reason I keep watching is to see if there's later more action scenes like the ones I recalled. The ones so far ranged from "lame still frames" to "just fine".
Look, I know this won't be...I don't know. Escaflowne! But at least some more motion and swords hitting things and combat choreography. Again, I don't expect Samurai Jack levels of storyboarding, but something slightly more involved than what I've seen so far.

Story wise, it isn't very original. Maybe at the time it was (and it was the first time I watched as a kid, obviously). It's magical girls, but with swords and magic. The magic is wildly inconsistent. Fuu uses a healing spell in like the second episode, and it never came up again, even when it was the obvious solution to the current predicament.
In the last episode, Umi could barely stop someone from attacking her, but her sword "evolved" and then she smashed her enemy just like that. As if the sword being "better" made it so that she didn't need to put any extra force or ability in her swing.

One more thing I find annoying is how Mokona, the cute animal companion, basically solves everything for them, except when he doesn't (more inconsistency). It made me remember the Teen Titans Go! movie, when they mock themselves for "constantly forgetting" that Raven can create portals to any place in the universe, which would cut most episodes short very quickly :)

The magic progression, and weapons and armor evolving, and the "go here to fetch something, now go to this other place to do another task", all these things give me a sense of a JRPG game. Now, keep in mind I have played only a couple of these games, all really old, and finished none of them. So my view of the genre is very limited. But it does feel like the characters complete missions and level up.

Why I keep watching? Well, the opening and ending alone are worth the price of admission LMAO. This YouTube playlist has all the songs.
But also, for all its predictable sections, the story moves fast, and I remember quite clearly that there's a big twist at the end of season 1 that teenager me found very cool. And the second season takes a darker turn, although I also remember something about the ending that felt somewhat deus ex machina. We'll see.

The enemies follow the Sailor Moon pattern of sending one henchmen after the other. Like, if the big baddie had come out of his lair and taken care of business, the story would be done by now. Instead, they send minor adversaries, and the main characters grow stronger: by the time they reach the big baddie, they will be at their strongest. So far they didn't give a story reason why Zagato didn't just kill them all as soon as they arrived.
But unlike Sailor Moon, it doesn't take 20 episodes to dispose of one enemy. Each henchmen gets 3 episodes tops and they move on from them.

I am pretty sure I will finish the show, and I will probably make one or two follow up posts about it.
This was probably my longest post so far >_> time to wrap it up.

Footnotes
  1. My surface-level thoughts posted here. Contains spoilers.
  2. You can read it for free with Shueisha's "Manga plus" phone app, but I am old and need a bigger screen, so I used..."another" app to read it >_> it is in Flathub
  3. They have Galaxy Angel!!! remember Galaxy Angel, on Animax, in the 00s in Argentina? I KNOW!
  4. Silly things you are embarrassed about when you are a kid, I guess.

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