This week on Comically Rough Japanese Translations Theatre is Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon Cosmos The Movie (now on Netflix), an anime epic that could really use a colon or a dash in there somewhere. This two-parter debuted theatrically in Japan in 2023, the latest a/v outing in the Sailor Moon franchise, which, like so many anime franchises before it, sprawls across many decades and many media formats, from manga to stage musicals. The pair of 80-minute movies function as a sequel to the Sailor Moon Eternal films, and an official wrap-up of the Sailor Moon Crystal series. If this makes sense to you, then by all means, read on. If not, beware, because it only gets more convoluted from here!
The Gist: Sailor Moon, aka Usagi Tsukino (Kotono Mitsuishi), mooshes face with her boyfriend Mamo (Kenji Nojima) beneath a sky streaked with meteors. ELSEWHERE, a woman with evil hair, Sailor Galaxia (Megumi Hayashibara), schemes dastardly, as all evil-haired women in anime sagas do, mu-hahahahahahah! It was the last night for Usagi and Mamo to be together, at least for a while. They’re at the airport. Mamo’s going to the U.S. to study at Harvard. He gives Usagi a ring and she just about EXPLODES because she’s so in love multiple exclamation points!!!! But before he can pop the question, Galaxia turns him into dust, snatches his golden crystal and poofs right back to whatever planet it is where she schemes dastardly – and boy, does she want to attain power and/or control of this and that and everything else, as terrible entities inevitably do.
From here, Usagi exists in a weird state of delusion. She doesn’t quite remember what happened, and believes Mamo just hopped on the plane and is hitting the ol’ college books right now. Curious, though, how he hasn’t texted or mailed her letters like he promised, almost as if he’s totally dead! She just goes about her daily thing in high school, hanging with the other Sailor girls – Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Mercury – and worshipping the hot new highly androgynous boy-band trio Three Lights. And then, they learn that the incredibly feminine boys of Three Lights are now attending their school! In fact, the three Three Lights boys transform into galactic girl warriors, the Sailor Starlights, who hail from a different solar system, like true space oddities!
Weirdly, a small girl named Chibi-Chibi (Kotono Mitsuishi) appears out of nowhere and is accepted by Usagi’s family with roughly zero questions. What gives? There’s a scene in which one of the three Three Lights boy-girls sings a song for Usagi, and one of the lines is “Your scent remains, oh, it still lingers,” and it hits her REALLY HARD, but not hard enough for her to realize why Mamo isn’t communicating with her. Interspersed amongst all this are battles between the good Sailors and bad Sailors, all of whom declare their powers by bellowing seemingly random words plucked from streams of consciousness at approx. 119 dB – e.g., “STAR GENTLE UTERUS!”, and no, I didn’t make that up – just before zapping their enemies with said powers, so the element of surprise is rarely a factor. It soon becomes clear that Galaxia is behind all this cosmic f—ery, and intends to assault ALL of the Sailor planets, and she’s gotta go down, but it’s surely not gonna happen in the first part of Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon Cosmos The Movie, more likely in the second part of Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon Cosmos The Movie. Autoplay, do your thing!
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: I haven’t been this engaged with boy-band dramatics since The Idea of You. Or Turning Red?
Performance Worth Watching: Anyone who can explain what happens here in a manner that outsiders can understand.
Memorable Dialogue: A prime example of this movie’s nukeproof exposition, via Sailor Lead Crow: “Long ago, we were all soldiers-in-training with our own dreams. Every living thing in the galaxy has a Star Seed. And those among them with the chosen Star Seeds, those who possess Sailor Crystals, have the right to call themselves Super Guardians! I am Sailor Lead Crow, a Sailor Guardian!”
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: Full disclosure: I’ve seen plenty of anime, but Sailor Moon isn’t in my wheelhouse, as it’s not quite built for my demographic. Does that matter? Aesthetically, yes, since the somewhat stereotypically youth-feminine fashion element of this franchise has rendered its title character pretty much instantly internationally identifiable. And the boy band stuff is so teen/tween coded, anyone old enough to buy cigarettes will burst out into hives in its presence.
But thematically and narratively? Doesn’t really matter, because this Sailor Moon exercise adheres to formula: An assumption that you’re familiar with the lore that’s been established in a zillion hours and/or pages of previously released content. Lunatic action sequences featuring ceremonial transformations from normalish humans to ludicrously dressed intergalactic beings who speak exclusively in very loud declarative sentence fragments and resolve their conflicts with bloodless zaparoo. And that action is broken up by massive viscous wads of exposition that are to be consumed solely by experts, the true Sailor Moon pros who comprehend how all of this works, in all of its insane detailed worldbuilding and weird narrative rhythms.
Of course, this is just too many words dedicated to the simple sentiment: FFO. For Fans Only. Unfamiliars will find it impenetrable, and too visually stereotypical of anime fodder to stand out among the scads of similarly inaccessible decades-in-the-making franchises. Inaccessible, unless you want to start binge-consuming a massive library of content dating back to 1991. Which is to say, Sailor Moon fans, knock yourselves right out.
Our Call: Obsessives, go ahead and STREAM IT. The rest of us should take our STAR GENTLE UTERUS powers elsewhere.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
