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Episode 3 – Sakura’s heavy rain alert
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MADHOUSE continues to show they are masters when it comes to animation consistency. The close-ups were spot-on. And although it is true that the character designs looked less detailed when characters were seen from afar, they looked “accepted” as far as character design at distance goes.
The scene were everyone is having their bentos inside the school because of the rain was extended in the anime. We got to see the particularities of each character’s bento, like Syaoran’s looking impressive and showing his cooking skills having done all by himself and automatically winning a place at the “husband material” CLAMP contest. Someone pointed out that Yamazaki’s bento has suama, which happens to be his favorite sweet.
They all spoke a bit about their club activities, including Naoko’s theater club. She points out that most students there are girls while the play she is thinking has a lot of male characters. This reminded Tomoyo of the gender switching play of The Sleeping Beauty. I don’t know if Ohkawa is hinting anything but I would love to see another gender switching play.
I don’t understand why Chiharu looked very puzzled when the others were complimenting Yamazaki for his role in the play. She was there along with everybody else, after all. It is true though that his role in the manga as the Witch was done by Meiling in the anime. He ended up having a minor role as the Queen. Is Ohkawa using Chiharu as device to remind the audience that Yamazaki was there? Or is there another meaning to this scene? I got the joke now, guys. Sorry for being such slowpoke! Yamazaki was terrible but everybody is too kind/too naïve to tell him otherwise.
We have a new RELEASE animation sequence! THANK YOU TOMOYO! No, seriously, I am glad that CLAMP and MADHOUSE made this. A mahou shoujo needs a proper transformation sequence.
It looks shorter without the part about the “contract”, but it still looks great. She looks fierce when she’s rotating the staff, like she’s supposed to look. I just think the comedy soundtrack that was playing was a bad decision. It just put off the mood completely. I understand it was because of Tomoyo, but I think they should have added the real RELEASE music, whichever it is.
The way Sakura handled the situation and secured the card just shows how much confident and stronger she has gotten. In the beginning of the Clow Cards, and also somewhere along the way of the Sakura Cards, she would “cry” and “whine” a lot before actually doing something. This time she has more control of the situation and she feels more secure about herself. The way she quickly figured out what to do and how she threw the staff in the air, climbed on the King Penguin (nice to see it again, by the way), grabbed the staff again and secured the card was just WOW! I was screaming YOU GO GIRL! on the inside. Props to MADHOUSE for the great animation and Sakura Tange for the amazing performance.
Sakura is now reading both the Japanese and English names of the cards. That is a first and I wonder if it’s only because the English words seem more unusual and having their Japanese names make it easier for the Japanese audience to understand their names — or if there is another meaning behind this…
They cut the part where Syaoran is in his room, after hanging up his phone talk with Sakura, and the three glowing balls are floating above his rashinban. They also didn’t show his and Eriol’s long overdue phone talk — probably to be shown on the next episode. They sure are taking their time on raising the suspicion around Syaoran.
When Yukito sees Sakura’s message in his cellphone, in the manga her name is spelled as “Sakura”, but in the anime it’s “Sakura-chan”.
Loved the whole sequence for REFLECT too. Very action packed. I love that they are investing more in the action scenes, more than CLAMP are allowed to do in the manga, at least. This is exactly how the battle scenes are supposed to look and feel so far I am very pleased with them.
I also love Fujitaka and I feel like we’re not seeing enough of him in the manga. I hope the anime will give him more focus and possibly an episode in which we get to see him a lot, like the one with The Sleep card. We need more Fujitaka (and Sonomi!).
And the episode ends with Sakura meeting the Mysterious Cloaked Figure in a dream, while s/he watches the scene from a nearby lamp post. Nice cliffhangers, Ohkawa. It’s working.
Next episode Akiho appears and ACTION will be secured.
14 thoughts on “Review: Card Captor Sakura Clear Card arc TV Anime – Episode 3”
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Chibi Yuuto's CHRoNiCLEs 
The thing about Yamazaki: his acting was terrible. Everyone was complimenting him, but Chiharu was there while he was acting and she saw how badly he did it, that’s why she didn’t understand why everyone was complimenting him, she wondered if she saw something different than the others.
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Lol so that what it was? They seemed to be genuinely praising him. And he nailed it in the manga version as the Witch.
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Well, from what I saw in that small flashback clip he was actually pretty bad! AHAHAH
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Meiling did it better though 😉
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That’s for sure 🙂
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Well episode 3 huh
I didn’t quite like it as much as the previous two episodes. Can’t tell if was for the heavy packed action (nothing wrong with that but lately I pay more attention to the cute slice of life) or for the decreased animation quality.
I did notice in several scenes the characters were drawn weirdly, specially their mouth motion. It wasn’t even faraway perspective, pretty close even. I didn’t understand why it turned that way.
As the episode covered two card captures, it was pretty fast paced, maybe too much.
Anyway about the captures themselves.
Actually I loved the part when Sakura secured Aqua. She got the hang very quickly to use the new wand that well in a point to throw it in the air while clinging in that slide and catch it mid air while chanting the capture spell? Hardcore. Hope to see that more often!
Ah and that’s the best animated part, with the heavy rain and all. And to speak Aqua is a beautiful card.
I find interesting how the known clear cards are somewhat counterparts of the clow cards. GALE is like WINDY, except while the latter was mostly used for chaining, GALE is aggressive and it focus on attack only. Btw why Sakura had to summon GALE so many times instead making it stay on field in order to attack REFLECT in a better timing?
AQUA has a very interesting design choice, specially that crown it has hovering on its head. It’s pretty similar to WATERY in terms of behavior except when apparently forgot to dispel all that water before to turn into card form and soaking its supposed master that way. What a bird-brain lol
I have the feeling Sakura doesn’t control the clear cards very well yet. She is more flexible and ready to take any situation but sometimes things go out of her way when uses them, like just what happened with AQUA. Another good example is she doesn’t control at all a certain over-friendly upcoming card which….it’s just a good thing that one loves her so much :3
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I didn’t feel the animation that bad (to the point of bothering me). To me, the designs looked less detailed during the faraway shots.
I have the feeling Sakura doesn’t control the clear cards very well yet.
Yes. And this could be related to the plot, since we don’t know the cards’ true master.
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I haven’t read past vol 1 of the manga so for a change I have no idea what is happening after a certain point. This being said Touya being all mysterious and secretive about having something he can do to help has be utterly terrified. Should I be this scared? Clamp has a tendency of messing with my favs and I left CCS very happy for him and Yukito.
My wife and I are watching both the original series and this new stuff simultaneously because she’s never seen the series outside of the terrible hacked up mess released in the United States when we were kids. She was commenting on how much the kids are going into teenagerdum compared to season one. It makes me so happy to see how well they have been developing over time.
(Thanks for being such an awesome CLAMP fan ChibiYuuto. I’ve been reading your stuff since LiveJournal forever ago and it’s nice to see how much you still love this stuff too)
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Hi there!
Thank you so much, Nef for such kind comment! Thank you for reading me since all those years! You’re welcome anytime here to share your thoughts =)
I also got a little worried for Touya while watching that scene. He looked very concerned.
Question: isn’t your wife getting spoiled watching Clear Card before finishing the previous two arcs? xD
She was commenting on how much the kids are going into teenagerdum compared to season one. It makes me so happy to see how well they have been developing over time.
Yes. They are growing up very naturally, I feel.
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Loved so much this episode. I think the anime is going well…
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I feel a bit uncomfortable seeing Sakura lying to her dad so naturally, even though it is a white lie. I can’t remember whether similar lies have been told in previous seasons.
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I think so, when it comes to cards she lies all the time to Fujitaka and Touya.
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YAY WHO WINS THE AWARD FOR MAKING AN EPISODE REVIEW MORE THAN A WEEK LATE?
That’s me, who else? LOL
This is not going to be a long ass review but I still wanted to give my 2 cents for, you know, posterity!
SO! Yes I did notice the tiiiiny drop in the animation quality, but just on the shots taken from a distance, I still had the chance of screencapping a lot of pretty close ups, so yeah…good job, animation team! Now that I think about it, one of the things Asaka said in the big interview on Animage was that he decided against having a general animation supervisor, one who would check the consistency of the art throughout the series. He said he purposelly wanted each animation director’s style to come out , and iirc Hamada would be the one checking that everything stays under control. I have to re-read that part better. But yeah, they’re doing a good job so far, isn’t it?
I’m loving the battle scenes. For real, if Asaka wants to push a bit more on this I’m all BRING IT ON BABE, BRING IT ON, SAKURA NEVER LOOKED SO BADASS OMG YES!
I was very surprised at the decision to put the capture of *two* cards in one episode, that was surely action packed!
I ALSO LOVE everytime Sakura finds herself in The Dream…they’re doing those scenes amazingly and it always get me excited. That’s what I wanted.
I guess I’m done here, with this episode! On to Episode 4!! XD
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Whatever they are doing (or not doing) to keep the animation consistency, KEEP DOING IT, cause it’s working.
I also think it’s working all the scriptwriting decisions in always leaving a ~mysterious~ cliffhanger in the end, a very action packed episode 3 and Sakura looking so badass. These elements really hook the audience.
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