Pretty Guardian
Sailor Moon
DVD 4
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Usagi and Ami must deal with their personal lives while the fourth and final Dark Kingdom General awakens!
Cover: With all five Sailor Soldiers having been awakened there are more and more characters to fit onto these covers. Luckily they manage to stick with the single Sailor spotlight look for the front cover (this time Sailor Jupiter) while still managing to include everyone.
The back cover features a great action shot of Sailor Jupiter neatly surrounded by episode summaries of the four episodes on this disk.
The Menus: The menus for this fourth live action Sailor Moon DVD are pretty much the same as the previous three only with Sailor Jupiter and a green theme. The overall design is fresh and fast loading though so I really don't mind them recycling the animations that much at all. Doing so also helps create a "series" feel with the DVDs as well actually which is probably what's intended.
The Chapter Select menus once again feature wonderfully rare production photos of each episode that are worth checking out even if you don't need the select menus and just button surf through a disk like I do. This really is a good looking disk.
The Special Features: Continuing the 10 minute Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon behind the scenes documentary series, the one featured on this disk surprisingly sees Miyu (Sailor Moon) once again team up with Keiko (Sailor Mars) who was with her on the previous DVD.
I was looking forward to seeing either Myu Azama (Sailor Jupiter) or Ayaka Komatsu (Sailor Venus) this time around but I guess there are eight more DVDs in the series so they're bound to make an appearance sooner or later.
The clip itself follows in a similar style to the first three with Miyu and Keiko reflecting on the episodes shown on the disk and as usual what they have to say is both interesting (Keiko wished that the series focused more on the fighting than the relationships), funny (in her coma scene in Act 14 Miyu actually did fall asleep in the bed on set despite all the crew being present!), and comes across and genuine (the girls still have no idea how to plug the next few episodes.)
Something that I noticed while watching this clip is how involved in the series Miyu seems to have become. She (and Keiko too for that matter) seem to watch every episode themselves and actually follow what's going on. When Miyu mentions that one scene in these four episodes makes her cry because of how it has more meaning in a later episode (I'm guessing Usagi and Mamoru's time spent together on the beach) it shows just how much she cares for what she's doing.
Several deleted scenes are also included on the disk though none of major importance. It was fun though to see Nephrite and Queen Beryl plotting against Kunzite behind his back and Mamoru and Motoki talk about the girls during their downtime though.
The Episodes: After the gathering of the five Sailor Soldiers on the previous DVD, this disk's four episodes take the series into it's next big story arc with two batches of two parters!
Act 13 and Act 14 begin to develop (and rather well I might add) the romantic chemistry between Usagi and Mamoru while introducing the final General, Kunzite (superbly played by Akira Kubodera). Several interesting plots touched upon here are exactly where the four Generals come from, what is Sailor Venus really up to and most interestingly how does Naru react to Usagi sending more and more time with her new friends?
Act 15 and Act 16 continue to develop all of these themes as major conflict begins to grow between Naru and Ami over their friendship with Usagi and comes to a head when Naru is caught by Kunzite's latest energy grabbing scheme.
The disk finishes on one huge cliffhanger as an all new character is introduced that's sure to spin the Sailor Moon universe on it's side and continue the live action Sailor Moon's process of become an entity of it's own that stands apart from the manga, anime and musicals.
The series really begins to evolve with these episodes and while nothing big happens like on the third DVD the episodes here are very well acted and written making them not only worth watching, but rewatching again and again (especially Sailor Mercury's ice sword fight which has got to be one of the coolest scenes in the entire series!).
Sailor Moon Says!
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