Crystal Watch!

Act 1: Usagi - Sailor Moon

Let's begin my first ramble/thoughts on the new Sailor Moon series.

Start off we get some beautiful scenes of Space and then we get this!

A small scene of Princess Serenity sneaking to Earth to see Endymion. I love it!

Then we see Usagi go through her usual morning rush. She steps on Luna and introduces side characters like Naru and Umino. Let's just skip to when she meets Mamoru. Classic paper-toss meet cute.

Have to say, Chiba Mamoru, you got hot! (Also safe to say, the new Anime director decided to turn Mamoru back to a High School student. Never understood why the previous director made Mamoru into a College student? This is why I never liked him in the Anime. Pedophila much?)

Beautiful shot of Usagi. And that's what you can expect from this new reboot, very pretty graphics and no funny faces. So I am guessing this reboot will be more serious and not as comedic as the original Anime (which is too bad, love the funny expressions shown throughout the original Anime).

Sailor V game looks like fun and hey, there Motoki! I hate back-seat gamers but you can help me anytime.

Luna is still cute even without Keiko Han's voice. I am surprised at how fast I got used to the new voice-actress.

Not a great fan of the CG for the transformation sequence though do like all the spinning. I think they decided to put all their artistic efforts into Sailor Moon's introduction speech instead, because it's just beautiful.

They have made the whole Naru's Evil Mama and Energy zombies thing much scarier. There was no fat zombie lady to make it comedic like they had in the original one (Just to be clear, I am not saying it was funny, in fact I think it's rather fat-shamey. But they obviously put that fat rich lady in as comedy relief.)

Another beautiful shot.

And at the end of the episode we get a glimpse of Ami and we are told the next episode will be Ami - Sailor Mercury, which means no 10 billion filler episodes* of Usagi fighting and whining till the plot finally moves on. Thank god.

The ending theme is gorgeous!

Overall: The Sailor Moon Crystal is quite clearly following the original manga closely. The entire episode was line for line, scene for scene from the Sailor Moon Manga. Of course they added some extra scenes (like some flashbacks to the Silver Millennium, which are just lovely), but besides that it all came from the manga! Love that they included Usagi's other non-Naru friends this time. Also the fact that this anime doesn't have to worry about outpacing the manga so this series will be more streamlined so hopefully no Doom Tree Arc. Looking forwards to the next 25 episodes!

*Not the actual number, it was more like 5 or 6.