Let's do a community Crystal rewatch

It doesn’t matter what format Crystal is in. Movie, TV show, ONA, etc. The actual adaptation aspect of it will always suffer by copying the manga frame by frame without thought. Anime and manga are two different mediums.

It’s like someone mentioned before, there’s no mandate that Crystal had to be locked into a 1:1 adaptation. Was the Rental Shop Dark plotline actually THAT important in the manga? Were manga fans really going to go on strike if it was replaced by something better?

I will say though: a movie format would theoretically work because it’s a lot harder to copy the manga frame by frame. Whereas before they could take a very simple and barebones manga act (such a Episode 7) and pad it to last an entire 22 minutes, there’s not as many shortcuts they can take to fill up more than an hour.

The issue becomes what will be cut out and whether they can actually format the movie to have a decent rising action and climax when the first half of the manga is episodic. I have minimal faith until they fire the current screenwriter.

We don't know yet if he is doing it. I hope the script delay was because they changed him. But we shall see.

Hahahaha. Hilarious.

Actually, they should bring all things in order to fulfill the mission "adapting the manga". However, I don't want to spend time looking the whole CD rental shop, watching girls chatting with each other. There should be a 4-second footage of the shelves, girls speaking lively, bringing a lot of CD, and the group of Usagi walking outside the shop, and Rei with an anxious expression.

In order to convey those things in a shorter period, a lively and constantly moving animation is the key.

Lively and constant animation has been the one thing they avoided like the plague so far. Sadly they have been doing whatever to avoid even basic animation sequences.

Is is really a good idea to make a movie? That mean you have to marathon 6 - 7 chapters in 2 hours. Many places and many characters appear.
I just watched season III 30 minutes ago. To be honest, watching 2 episodes in a row is a little... too much for me. Many events happen in one episode!
What about three-part movie for the first four arcs and two-part movie for the last arc? A part to be released for each year, or every 8 months, and a two year break to prepare for the next arc?
(That is my dream)

Again, there is no reason for them to keep an outdated concept such as a video rental store... Especially when Crystal started out on a STREAMING service. It flies on the face of attempting to modernize the manga.

To be perfectly honest, I have heard Japanse have strange fascination with old stuff. They still got flip phones and I believe these rental stores ae still a thing there, considering their piracy policy being so severe. So for Japanese it might not have been so bad.

It still was an opportunity for them to dust off such an inconsequential plot line and try to breathe new life to a 20-year-old story.

I mean just look at their priorities. Rei’s grandfather? Absolutely must cut! The senshi’s personalities? There’s no room for that! Rental Shop Dark? This is so vital to the manga’s themes we must honor it!

Remember in Act 1 when Miss Haruna got her shoujo close up character intro like she was going to be a major character and then we never saw her again? Crystal's incomprehensible adaptation choices are its only consistent trait (apart from bad animation, of course)

I agree, touched it on my notes for act 7. The whole act was not needed on it's own so...

Yes, the manga is over twenty years old. I think Crystal would have been better if the staff had made updates to the technology in the series.

I think I understand the scenario with Rei's grandpa as far I'm aware he was omitted from the live action (which should be discussed on that thread). And yes, one of Crystal's weakest points was the Senshi's personalities (or lack thereof), that I can agree on. Rei was the worst offender, IMO.

Rei was indeed glossed over, but for me Minako has it even worse... She has her importance n the manga and she was robbed of it. And the fact she was so badly done in the 90s anime doesn't help. Rei was one of the most developed in the og. Minako started it all and has always been shrugged under the carpet so far.

Act. 9 Serenity - Princess
Sorry for the delay, but having a newborn around kind a do thiese things to you. Anyway, let's go back to the episode. This one I remember I liked at the time, but I have mixed feelings on it now. The episode just like Usagi hersef has identity crisis. Parts of it are gorgeous, almost movie like and they suddenly drop to 2000s level of trash. And then the storyboarding and pacing were so awkward. Ok this is important plot point, we are getting some very needed flasbacks. It was supposed to be the level of the music video of Moon Pride thing and it wasn't. It was just stills, stills, awkward camera angels and more stills. The begining was cheesy but good, emotional and well executed. Princess Serenity transformation looked very well. And then the whole flashback was sloppy and dragging. The highlight of this show was Usagi screaming in agony while they were taking Mamoru. But at this point it would have made so mich more sense if she was yelling Endimion, as this was obviously her Princess Serenity side. I like they included the scene in her bedroom and how they tried to give us some friendship moments there, but the horrid off models shots that were not retouched really ruined it. This was a great idea to play a bit with Usagi's identity crisis and explore Serenity a bit more. Not to the level of PGSM which got really too far. But to some degree at least. The one that had identity crisis was the animation hereand not the main character.

To be fair they are still a lot video rental shops in Japan.You can't compare the west to Japan.There still a thing.

Act 9 is a mixed bag. On one hand, (some of) the scenes of Princess Serenity’s awakening looked beautiful. The rest of the art is... well you already know.

Time for an unpopular opinion... But I found Kotono’s screaming kinda grating after a certain point. It’s weird because I found her performance moving the first time around watching, but honestly the episode felt so terribly melodramatic and annoying.

A lot of it is down the complete lack of chemistry between Mamoru and Usagi in Crystal... From how awakardly animated their scenes are to how robotic Mamoru sounds half the time (and also the few cute scenes between them in the manga being cut). Without having a believable romance (and with everything happening too fast), the over the top performance falls flat.

The second part of my uncomfortableness with this episode is that this is the beginning of one track mind “Mamo-chan” Usagi. Usagi shaking Sailor Venus was an addition that was not needed (the emotional stakes are high enough) and made her look kinda awful. She really starts to become unlikeable after a certain point.

I believe this was an intentional choice too, I really wish I can find the translations of the mook because I recall the writer saying that he wanted to portray Usagi as less of a good girl... Again, while it certainly didn’t help that the show had a rushed schedule, the creative choices remain terrible.

I think this is where the live acion series was an overall better display of their chemistry, neither the 90's anime or Crystal got it right!

I feel the original anime more spread out the chemistry between them in later seasons (or are we only talking about the first arc?), but what about the manga? Somehow I felt Naoko was still able to capture the romance well in the manga form, probably because the manga somehow still has some kinda fairy-tale feel to it.

The manga did it right. Last episode of Crystal being all about foot fetish and stills, Usagi looking dump and he looking like emo didn't help. The manga had one panel of Usagi's feet, while leaving the bed. They really had to drag it to a fetishism point... Then the Silver Millenium flashbacks, with the slow mo and lack of all the manga beautiful sparckly eyes...

The manga not being afraid of making Mamoru look like a bit of a goofball also helps a ton.

But I 100% agree with @FloraKiraraHime. The live action versions of Usagi and Mamoru not only have the most chemistry out of the other versions, they also just look and act more realistically as a couple.