Originally,
I hadn’t meant to combine these two anime titles, then I realised I
couldn’t give a full reference of one without the other. Sadly, I also
could not honestly discuss the iniquities of one show without giving its
counterpart praise, kind of like an Anime yin and yang.
It might be cruel to compare
Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicles to its sire (- dam?) the
terrifically popular Card Captor Sakura, but it’s unavoidable and
nobody ever accused me of being nice. In the days right before the
giant Western Hoover sucked up any and all anime titles it could gobble
up, the pickings were still pretty slim where US broadcast anime was
concerned. Card Captor Sakura was the first series created by
the incredibly successful all-female artisan conglomerate CLAMP that was
shown regularly on North American network television. A sharp
counterpoint to the male dominated cartoons of the WB’s Saturday morning
lineup, CCS was one of the greatest of the magical girl genre.
The eponymous Sakura was a sweet, elementary school girl who
unwittingly releases a deck of powerful cards that hold the keys to the
earth’s elements, (- wind, rain fire, flower, etc.), that if left
untended, will destroy the world. She is talked into retrieving the
cards by the deck’s lax guardian, a stuffed animal looking thing, called
Keroberos. Kero-chan coaches Sakura in the fine art of card capturing
and she is cheered on and protected by her devoted friends and family.
Frightened and unsure at first, as the series progresses, we watch
Sakura grow into a strong, smart fighter who bravely risks her life
repeatedly to get the cards back. Beautifully drawn (- As per usual
from CLAMP) and building to a thrilling crescendo, Card Captor
Sakura ran for sixty-four episodes and two feature films and many
were sad to see it go.
People
were so sad that CLAMP decided to resurrect dear little Sakura in an
alternate universe and call the series Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicles
(- Don’t ask me, I dunno). This time the characters are the
same, but in very different roles. Whereas Card Captor Sakura
took place in present-day Japan, the world in which Tsubasa’s
Sakura resides is something of pure CLAMP imagination: Could be the
future or the past, might be earth, but maybe not. The alternate worlds
and dimensions are a huge part of the show. In this world, Sakura is a
princess living happily in her brother’s kingdom and quietly adored by
her friend, commoner Li Syaoran. Sakura isn’t aware that she’s
possessed of a magic much coveted by unseen evil forces. Those forces
are able to bring her power forth in the form of two wings on her back.
In his attempt to free Sakura from capture, Syaoran accidentally
scatters the wings, which leaves Sakura a shell of herself without any
of her memories. Syaoran now has to gather the wings to make Sakura
whole again. Is this last bit sounding familiar? There’s a lot of
familiar in Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicles. A lot of the series
feels like either a love letter from CLAMP to their huge die-hard
following, or a really pathetic double-dip. Many characters and
references from other CLAMP projects are constantly laced throughout
Tsubasa. Of course, nearly all the inhabitants of Card Captor
Sakura are present; although the device is that they are not the
same people we watched in the original series. This is the big problem
with Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicles.
They’ve
taken away the spunky little girl who endeared herself to viewers
through her courage and good heart and replaced her with a waffling,
worthless weakling. Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicles shows us a
lobotomised wuss of a girl too inept and frail to anything but smile and
babble about dreams. I felt like I was watching a character from the
1970’s in the years pre-Sailor Moon, heck, pre-Princess from Battle of
the Planets! Tsubasa’s Sakura is good for nothing except to model
various princess and maid outfits and be rescued. I understand that in
the first episodes she wasn’t up to snuff with all her feathers missing
(- Feathers clearly equal marbles in Sakura’s dimension), but
after fifty-two episodes, it would be nice if she was an actual
participant in her own rescue instead of leaving everything to the three
men who accompany her. Li Syaoran is still with us from Card Captor
Sakura, and unlike Sakura he appears to be a little older than his
original primary school incarnation. There are two yaoirific new
characters from alternate universes recruited to help the two kids, a
lovely blonde wizard called Fai D. Flourite (- Yeah, I know, but it
actually suits his wispy character) and Kurogane, a fierce warrior
banished from his world by his queen until he learns to calm down. They
also have one of the most irritating creatures ever seen in anime; a
whining, babbling beanbag with big feet and silly ears called Mokona,
who is supposed to be the radar for Sakura’s feathers, as well as the
traveler’s mystical mode of transportation through dimensions, but all
the incompetent, baby-talking thing really is is a blatant attempt at
merchandising. The only way you’d see me run out to buy a Mokona doll
is if I bought a shotgun to go with it. So not cute.
What’s
even worse about Tsubasa is how terribly boring it is. The group
wanders from world to world and if they’re lucky, that obnoxious white
pillow hasn’t led them to the wrong place. Once they land somewhere,
they have no clear idea where to look and have to depend on Mokona
getting a reading, which often the little gremlin will be sleeping
through and thereby miss the opportunity to quickly move onto the next
world and the next feather. Nothing in Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicles
is done fast; every adventure in a new place moves at a glacial place,
with the four needing to adapt and learn the ways and means of each new
world, only to never use it again once they move on. Most of their
visits take at least four episodes before a single feather is obtained,
which is just painful. I don’t really want to see them being
goody-goody’s to random people at the loss of their quest.
The
big scam is that there’s no way of telling how many freakin’ feathers
they need to collect. Ostensibly, this could go on forever! I’ve come
to realise I need rules in my anime. I’d like a structure; tell me when
I can expect to the end of this series and give me exciting stuff to
watch until we get there. The other scam is I’ve reached the end of the
series and the story’s big bad has gotten up out of his chair once.
This shady character is so boring that he just lounges through every
show talking about some evil thing he’s gonna do to the group sometime,
but we are never told what it is or why. Great, they have an enemy for
no reason! The monocled villain is also a master of ESP because
everything the team does that unbeknownst to them screws with the bad
guy’s grand scheme is always something he predicted. ‘Oh, see Sakura
stub her toe? Hey, Kurogane’s picking his teeth. Wow, Fai ate a Big
Mac. Don’t worry, I planned for it all. It’s all going exactly as I
predicted’. Absolutely ridiculous.
xxxHolic
xxxHolic
is another anime title from the ladies of CLAMP. Marginally related,
xxxHolic is a spinoff featuring Yuuko, the Witch of Time and Space,
one of the featured characters of Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicles.
Kimihiro Watanuki has a little problem: The high-strung high schooler
can’t walk down the street without being set upon by the dead. Ghost
and other spirits are attracted to Watanuki like raccoons to a trash
can; the onslaught of too many aggressive spirits nearly chokes the life
out of the unfortunate boy and he literally must flee for his life from
things no one else can see. The chase leads him to the front gate of a
house that won’t materialise to anyone who doesn’t need to enter.
Living inside that house is our heroine (- of sorts) who claims
she can rid Watanuki of his evil spirits for a price, before he can
agree or run screaming from the voluptuous weirdo, the deed is done and
now Watanuki owes a debt. The witch takes a slave, making the high
schooler cook, clean and perform household chores for Yuuko, her two
strange childlike assistants and her best friend, a pudgy little
creature called Mokona. Aha! “Stop right there,” you say, “I thought
you hated Mokona?” I loathe Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicles’ white
Mokona with a passion unbridled; the Mokona in xxxHolic is a
different one, black in colour and entirely more bearable in attitude.
Like its pal, Yuuko, this Mokona enjoys eating to excess and drinking
even more and unlike its paler counterpart, actually seems good for
something. Watanuki plays an unwilling slave day in and day out with no
idea how long he must work before his debt is paid, while Yuuko plies
her trade, seeing abstract bits of the future and solving problems for a
select few customers who all have to pay a non-monetary price for her
aid. This is where xxxHolic drags; many of the volumes of this
short series, like Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicles, are devoted to
helping random characters. It’s only very gradually that you realise
that there’s something quite a bit more to Watanuki than meets the eye,
even beyond being a ghost magnet. A pair of schoolmate friends,
Watanuki’s crush Himawari and the preternaturally sedate Doumeki, who
inadvertently drives Watanuki mad with jealousy, eventually seem to be
affected by whatever it is that is drawing supernatural phenomena to
him. Little by little we meet rain sprites, vestal sprites and the
air-surfboard riding yakuza tengu who protect them. There’s also a
deceptively tiny pipe fox spirit that protects Watanuki as the spirit
world comes closer and closer to the hapless student.
Sadly for viewers, we never
find out why this is all happening to Watanuki, or what the end of all
this trouble is. Just as xxxHolic ups the ante and devotes
itself to Watanuki’s story, it’s over. All one can hope for is that a
continuation of the series will give us what we signed up for in the
first place.
xxxHolic
is a very different looking CLAMP offering. Artistically more daring
than any of their other projects, xxxHolic’s designs are a
beautiful, baroque mix of genres styles. Watanuki is a bizarre-looking
thing by CLAMP standards, all long, straight, thin lines and insanely
out of proportion. Rather on purpose he’s like a stick figure or paper
doll in contrast to the rich, typically CLAMP-esque sumptuousness of the
way Yuuko and her home are drawn. The blend of the two are unexpectedly
hypnotic and do a lot toward getting the viewer past the dry narrative
of those chapters that have nothing to do with Watanuki. The
backgrounds whenever Watanuki winds up in the spirit world also go
strangely flat. It would be easy to discount those designs as a
lessening of the great CLAMP’s legendary aesthetic standard, but there’s
so much work, colour and thought behind these ideas that it’s obvious
this is more a demonstration of CLAMP maturing and getting better rather
than leaning back.
The other brilliant thing
about xxxHolic is the fact that it’s a hoot. Silly and completely
unselfconscious, xxxHolic’s scripts display a wit that works on
many levels and keeps those slower patches in the narrative from
becoming too wearing.
The
transfers for both titles are immaculate. Having no patience for the
dubbed versions, I’m very pleased with the subtitling. My only gripe
about Funimation’s subs is that for any fansub I’ve ever seen, the
fansubbers normally take the time out to do a small explanation of
terminology English-speaking audiences may be unaware of. With
xxxHolic in particular, there are many cultural references that are
going to be plain old lost on non-Japanese folks. Still, unlike other
distributors, at least those references remain and aren’t homogenised
down to nonsense phrases. Also, I wish on their new DVD box set for
xxxHolic, some extras had been included, but the inset art is pretty
sweet.
I don’t know if either of
these ended series will make it back into production and with Tsubasa
Reservoir Chronicles, I couldn’t care less. The beautiful,
hilarious and hypnotic xxxHolic, however, I would love to see
more of and soon.