Sailor Moon passed me by in its original run. By the time the English dub hit square screens in 1995, I was already in my penultimate year of high school and pretending I wasn’t into comic books anymore. So I had absolutely no idea what to expect when the live-action PRETTY GUARDIAN SAILOR MOON: THE MUSICAL hit cinemas. Introducing me to the phrase “Star Gentle Uterus,” it’s fair to say this was…an experience.
Despite the near sold-out session, the penny hadn’t quite dropped for me on the notion that this was a cultural phenomenon. Starting as a manga in 1991, it was the 1992 anime series that brought the character to the world. The super recognisable costumes have been cosplay staples for decades, and the open homosexuality of several characters has made this an especially important show for a generation of millennials hip to progressive narratives on gender fluidity. For me, it was another pop-cultural reference that stopped me from identifying as a 90s kid on Buzzfeed polls.
As the cinema lobby began filling up with a slightly larger number of cosplayers than your average Friday night in the city, the popularity of the show began to sink in. The almost three hours of subtitled musical theatre that followed wasn’t so much a screening as it was an event, one in which a cinema full of Australians laughed along with (and more often than not directly at) a musical filmed months ago in Japan. Ages ranged from middle aged men through at least one crying child, and everything on either side of the demographic curve.
Also known as Le Mouvement Final, the show’s narrative apparently comes from pretty late in the canon. The “final” part of the title probably should have been a bit of a giveaway. So as someone completely uninitiated with the lore, the show doesn’t even attempt to hold your hand. As the THIRTY-FIRST musical since 1993, there’s an assumption that you know the origin story and who most of the characters are in this 25th anniversary special. The official synopsis reads as follows.
So if that’s what it says it was about, I guess that’s what it was about.
Adding to the surreal confusion, at least for someone who had no prior connection to the franchise, was the all-female cast. This has actually been par for the course for at least the last few years in Japan. It was occasionally difficult to tell who was a couple, who was cisgendered, and which of the characters change gender throughout the show. A trio introduced as a heartthrob boy band (the “Sailor Starlights,” the Sailor Moon Wikia reliably informs me) later appears in busty underwear with the aforementioned power Star Gentle Uterus.
Yet what struck me the most was that the viewing experience was a collective one. Not since the 2007 Sydney Film Festival screening of David Lynch’s Inland Empire have I experienced such an interactive session. People didn’t sing along with the Japanese language tracks, but they cheered them. Covering an entire season in a few hours, it was like a giant pantomime filled with recognisable character cameos, a scenery chewing villain, and some of the worst set design this side of a high school musical.
The story reaches a semi-bummer of an climax, one in which they seem to agree that even if they all die (which they do, and frequently) their fight will go on. There’s a marriage proposal and Usagi and Mamoru-chan share a kiss under a full moon. (These kisses, however, tend to be obscured by capes and camera turns. The progressive attitude doesn’t seem to extend to girls kissing girls on stage).
Wandering back into the near-reality of George Street later that night, it occurred to me just how enveloping the experience had been. It was confusing and exhausting, but for 159 minutes I was completely suckered into the spectacle. Even the 30 minute song-and-dance number that dropped the subtitles did little to shatter the communal feeling. So despite being born in the 1970s, and being 25 years too late to the bandwagon, I might just pass one of the 90s kid tests after all.
