Meanwhile, the eponymous Cardcaptor Sakura is a sweetheart who wears colorful frilly outfits and would rather have her card spirits be her friends instead of just her servants. Sailor Moon's lead character Usagi Tsukino is known as a ditzy crybaby, but she fights evil with empathy as well as sparkly wand attacks powered by the moon. One aspect is that they featured a theme of young girls coming of age with the help of magical abilities that are powered by feminine qualities or objects. This is largely due to the fact that all three of them share common traits that would appeal to Japanese and American audiences beyond its female-targeted demographic. Magical girl manga empowering a new generationĪlthough Sailor Moon, Cardcaptor Sakura, and Revolutionary Girl Utena weren't the only magical girl manga around, they could pretty much be considered the Holy Trinity of '90s magical girl media.
Alongside Sailor Moon would arrive Kunihiko Ikuhara and Chiho Saito's manga and anime Revolutionary Girl Utena and CLAMP's manga series Cardcaptor Sakura. Moreover, Cutie Honey featured a lot of action not typically seen in magical girl works at the time, which would make her anime adaptation popular with both boys and girls.īy the '90s, Naoko Tekeuchi's Sailor Moon would combine the influences of the aforementioned with influences from tokusatsu (Japanese shows with live-action special effects) and super-sentai (a Japanese superhero team franchise that would be localized as Power Rangers). Not only did she call out her transformations, but she also made grand speeches about love and justice. Although aimed at a male audience, Cutie Honey possessed traits that would later be applied to other mahou shoujo works traditionally aimed at young girls. In fact, a magical girl manga and anime series of the '70s that utilized the henshin in creative and lewd ways is Go Nagai's manga Cutie Honey.