What the Imperfect Feminism of Sailor Moon Taught Me About Being a Dad

Vivian, 9, knows every word to the Sailor Moon theme song, “Moonlight Densetsu,” which is a little complicated, culturally speaking, since Vivian doesn’t speak Japanese. She’s big into phonetics, though. And singing aloud. And she’s irrepressible, performative, quick to execute any number of dance-and-song routines for TV theme songs she likes.

She has magical girl energy, in other words, and so Sailor Moon is up her street. I introduced Vivian to the classic 1990s anime about three years ago and together she and I have watched 59 episodes, one at a time, whenever there’s a few moments before bed. Fifty-nine is not an impressive total given that there are 141 to go, and that’s before we get to the Sailor Moon Crystal reboot series from the 2010s (39 episodes), and the two new Sailor Moon feature films that Netflix has just released. Vivian and I may be novice Moonies but we’re completists, so we’ll get there.

Nearly thirty hours of television, and watching them has been complicated—that word again—in all the ways that raising a girl in 2021 can be complicated. Sailor Moon is what’s called a shoujo anime, which means that it’s Japanese animation expressly designed for young girls: candy-colored, giggly, and studded with excitingly mounted action set pieces. The premise is that a 14-year-old named Usagi Tsukino discovers that she can transform into a superhero named Sailor Moon with magical powers, and teams up with four other sailor guardians to fight a series of otherworldly monsters and villains, and do teen stuff like fall in love and wear makeup and go shopping along the way.

I’m treading lightly here because I’m an anime-culture dilettante who began watching Sailor Moon as a parent, out of desperation. Logging TV hours with young kids is basically awful—a watchdog exercise in tedium that gives rise to dinner-party-silencing claims like the How To Train Your Dragon films are surprisingly great. I turned to anime as a way to liven things up, vanquish the likes of Paw Patrol and Masha and the Bear, and because I’m a Gen X’er who believes the ‘90s are the decade to beat. Sailor Moon’s iconography was familiar to me. Vivian likes princesses. The episodes were all there on Hulu. I pressed play.

And I was entranced, by the spare modernist cityscapes, the period specific Tokyo fashion and the savagery of the monsters, but more importantly, and I guess this is where it gets tricky, by the delightfully confusing empowerment messages. Sailor Moon has been called feminist and I am not here to debate the merits of that claim, only to celebrate the show’s bewildering contradictions. Let’s just get this out of the way. When Usagi transforms into Sailor Moon, declaring her battle cry, “Moon Prism Power, Make Up!” her clothes momentarily disappear, and she is silhouetted in nothing but light, before she’s wrapped in a sailor getup with an extremely short hemline. Nail polish appears, as does a jeweled tiara that doubles as a weapon. In front of a crescent moon she strikes a flattering limbs-akimbo pose (that Vivian and I have strained to imitate in the living room). My wife, seeing Usagi’s peekaboo transformation for the first time, seeing Vivian observe it with a fixed expression that could best be described as awe, was like, no.

Vivian was 6 so Liz had a point. It was a bit early in my daughter’s emotional development to consider things like high heels, makeup and jewels, and blown out hair. Early in season one there is an episode with a dieting plotline that drove Liz out of the room. It’s fair to say that size inclusivity is not part of the Sailor Moon value set, and yet friendship, loyalty, and a kind of indomitable relentlessness of spirit are. Sitting beside my daughter for all those hours, I relished the spectacle of a meticulously rendered world and a set of young girls who band together to save it.

I also relished the feeling of a series that offers Vivian no clear or reassuring messages about how to grow up. Usagi is bad at math, obsessively in love with a boy named Mamoru Chiba (who appears as the mysterious Tuxedo Mask to help get her out of peril—this always elicits a groan from Viv), and just generally exists in an anarchic landscape of peer pressure, extreme fashion choices, and sexualized villains. That all strikes me as close enough to lived reality that I can forgive the idealized bodies and gender cliches. Though it’s not all cliche. Sailor Moon is studded with androgyny and instances of queer love—which were sanitized in the U.S. broadcast. The four evil henchmen who serve the villainous Queen Beryl in season one are guys with long flowing hair, earrings, and a kind of delicacy of bearing that scrambles expected tropes of threatening masculinity.

Compare this to your average Pixar homily, your run of the mill Nickelodeon sitcom. Squint at Sailor Moon and it feels radical. Or at the very least confusing in an emotionally welcome way. Vivian is older now and there’s less tension in the room when the animation lingers on a bodice or a short skirt. If she has one sartorial criticism it is that she thinks Usagi should try wearing pants in the winter months. She still freaks out whenever Usagi and Mamoru kiss but you can tell the romance is growing on her. And she still hates when Tuxedo Mask saves the day. “The girls were fighting,” she yells at the screen, a refrain that never fails to thrill me. “Let them fight!”