English Dub Review: Cardcaptor Sakura: Clear Card “Sakura, The Rabbit, and the Song of the Moon”

I detect evil in that bunny.

Overview (Spoilers)

Sakura is out grocery shopping for dinner, and has Kero along for the ride. She runs into Akiho, who is also out shopping for dinner. She’s new in town, so she doesn’t know the best place to go for that. Sakura offers to show her around. Along the way, she spots Akiho’s stuffed animal, a rabbit named Momo. The new girl wanted to bring it along, but wasn’t sure how everyone would feel. To make her feel better, Sakura promises to bring Kero to school. With that, Sakura returns home. She has a quick conversation on the phone with Meiling, the girl who had been Syaoran’s combat partner in the past. However, as the family eats, Sakura starts spacing out. She slips into a vision of the cloaked stranger. The environment is loaded with clocks. Tiny motes of light are actually clocks. Giant clocks form the landscape. All the while, strange noises echo. Through it all, barely audible, someone whispers “Danger”. Her father brings her back to reality, and she claims she just spaced out. Her brother doesn’t buy it.

Courtesy: Funimation

The next day, she brings Kero as promised, and the class has a really successful reading from Ten Nights of Dreams. The passage speaks about sunset, perception, and about being above it all. The teacher talks about how many of the dreams written about in the text may have been premonitions, which leads Sakura to think that her visions may have been premonitions as well. Afterwards, The gang have another conversation about school clubs, and Tomoyo begins to plot. She snags Syaoran, and the group go to the music room. They convince Akiho to sing a duet with Tomoyo, while Syaoran accompanies on the piano. He doesn’t like talking about this skill, but Meiling told Tomoyo, so his secret is out. Her confidence bolstered by the adoration of her peers, Akiho joins the choir club. However, through it all, Sakura hears the strange noises from her visions. Detecting something is off, Syaoran and Tomoyo snap into action, giving convincing reasons to get Chihiro and Akiho out of the room. Finally, Sakura is able to pinpoint the noise. It sounds like Tomoyo’s old camcorder! She traces the sound until she spots it, a mote of light watching her from one of the portraits. Using her staff, she captures Record, and makes it her new Clear Card.

Our Take

Before we go further on the review, I have one big thing. They finally, after five episodes, provided subtitles for the credits. Given that they already had subtitles in Japanese, this should have been a no-brainer. I really do like having those translations, and I’m glad they gave us that effort. Okay, go about your business.

This episode seems a bit slower than the last couple, but it is doing so with a purpose. In dialing back on the action, it instead amps up the tension. We see a new vision and one that has no new content. Instead, it just gives us more unease. We encounter a new card, but it’s just a creeper. Even the lessons they are learning in school seem to discuss surreal themes surrounding the end, and how one perceives it. After the singing is finished, we linger on a far-off view of the group as Sakura hears the noise. I half expected her to simply flop over, consumed by another vision. It would have been a shock, but I would have expected it… and it didn’t happen. All of this is building the feeling that something bad is about to happen, which is only more pronounced by the growing number of parallels between Akiho and Sakura. That rabbit plush is important enough to warrant being in the episode title. There must be more to it. It seems as if it is an Akiho’s Kero, and her caretaker is her Yue. But is Akiho’s intent truly malign? She seems far too sweet to be an evil magical girl.

The visuals in this episode are stunning, but only in the second half. The first portion of the episode is kinda average in animation quality, and we aren’t given anything to look at beyond people talking, and Sakura’s vision. Given that the vision is primarily CG clocks in a void, I wasn’t particularly impressed. However, as soon as we entered the music room, that all went away. The light filtering into the room, and the many portraits of composers. The room is artfully presented. Syaoran’s hands are masterfully animated as he plays just a couple chords of the song. It isn’t a lingering shot, but its enough to give us the feeling that he really is playing this piano. Many animators just have the characters bash random keys. This felt real, perhaps rotoscoped. The animation of the girls singing was done well, with their mouth movements smooth and detailed. I may have also picked out some other slight movements in the characters, which is effort other studios wouldn’t have gone to.

In the previous episode, Tomoyo sang for the group. It was not pleasant to me in the slightest. This time around, however, both girls (Amanda Lee and Natalie Hoover) sang well enough to be soothing to the ears. Not what I would have called inspiring or amazing, but good enough that I liked what I heard. That is all I ask. The two characters are untrained singers who have good voices. They don’t have to be professional, just not painful. In the meantime, Sakura (Monica Rial) and Syaoran (Jason Liebrecht) demonstrated excellent emotive depth in the episode. I may have been reading into it, but there felt like they managed to capture the underlying emotions beyond what was on the surface.

Score

Summary

Despite the slow build up of the episode into a slow tension, the episode has me wanting more of the series. The animation didn't have much to do early on, but when it did, it took off! I give this episode eight mystical hidden cameras out of ten. But seriously, that card is a creeper.

8.0/10