Magic Knight Rayearth #1: Daybreak Mediablasters 100 minutes English/Japanese English Subtitles 05/30/2000

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I've gotta tell you guys, nothing's more fun than sitting down for three hours on a Saturday and reformatting reviews for what must be the third time in as many years. If that doesn't sound fair to you that's probably pretty appropriate, but I have no one to blame for myself seeing as how I'm the one who always shows that miraculous and wonderful total lack of foresight and talent. Which is, one and the same, the very reason I'm rewriting these reviews. Some of these shows I enjoy and don't particularly mind (much) watching them again. Some I positively loathe, and some... like Magic Knight Rayearth I really just don't know to what to say. So MKR gets the distinction of being the very first review to be used with the "Question Girl", whom Skabs didn't entirely finish shading, so you only have him to blame if it looks grossly different than the rest of them. Still, a quality effort by Herr Skabs. Magic Knight Rayearth is done by that wonderful all girl studio Clamp, and is the story (like it always is with them) of young girls getting empowered and showing the world what it's like to love and believe in yourself. There was a conspicuous lack of wavy haired fops for the girls to obsess over though, which caught me by surprise. I'm no expert on Clamp works so some of my assertions might be a little circumspect but I think I've basically got the jist of it.

As if they wanted to confuse me even more, the only prominent male character in the entire show so far, Ferio, has a very discernible gender and that only went even further towards confusing me as to what, exactly, Magic Knight Rayearth is all about. You know, besides the heart and the power of love and all that. Even more interesting, the girls don't immediately go obsessing over Ferio like I expected they would. This is even stranger because of all the "sexy" scars he has. I'm positively befuddled by this show. Though not entirely on account of the whole "guy" thing. Clamp goes out of their way to make anything and everything as weird as possible. Giant flying fish and weird flower-petal monsters are seen all over the place and there's an overabundance of "super deformed" characters. This extends to the point where you'll have trouble telling the difference between the two. I've come to call this state "Kind-of sort-of deformed". That's just a temporary name though, as it's not very convenient in casual conversation.

This is not something I'm ipso facto against, the SD stuff, but the way it's portrayed here (as it usually is) to make everything all weird and silly. I don't got this, but I think it's because I'm not a fourteen year old girl. If I was then I'd probably like this show a lot more, if you're not I pray to god you're at least a woman... that'd ameliorate the situation, if only slightly. This show certainly isn't as childish as some others in the Magical Girl genre but it isn't perfect either. It's way too goofy for my tastes and the serious parts come and go so fast you're left wondering if they ever existed or if they were just figments of your drug addled imagination. Honestly though, I'm really just against mixing genres like this. I can like these things separately, but together is just a total no-go. Take my love of robot anime for example. I can totally be down for the realism of Gasaraki OR the hyper-ridiculousness of G Gundam. However, when you mix them together the effusive turd that spills forth is not exactly to my liking. Such is the same with Magic Knight Rayearth. When Umi's getting all sorts of trashed by the crazy witch lady on her My Little Pony it's pretty cool, and I'm down with that. But when the very next scene involves the six inch tall characters frantically waving their arms it kind of kills the mood for me.

So I guess I'm not really into the SD in any shape or form. That's okay though, because it's not all that Magic Knight Rayearth has to offer (just most of it). It sucks for people like you and me that everything else it has to offer are life messages we all learned watching Care Bears and stuff like that. Well, you might've learned it from that, I never watched sissy shows like that. All my life messages came from The Streets of San Franciscoand In the Heat of the Night. I learned you sure as hell don't want to be a black man in the South, but that's about it. In the end, this show might not have Michael Douglas doing his own driving stunts, but it sure does have a lot of heart. This isn't good for you or me, or anyone else unless they have a daughter between the ages of nine and fourteen. Everyone else would probably do best spending their time on other things like, I don't know, getting a job and not whittling their life away watching shows about strange rabbits who make food and turn into giant tents at night. There's no proper ranking I can give to this show and so, the "Question Girl" was born. In closing, if you like Super Deformed characters and fourteen year old girls... just try not to tell anyone about it?