Shugo Chara!
Shugo Chara!, Shugo Chara! Doki, and Shugo Chara! Party!, directed by Kinji Yasuta. Satelight and TV Tokyo, –. 127 episodes of 25 minutes (approx. 53 hours). Not rated. Available on Crunchyroll.
In Revolutionary Girl Utena, Kunihiko Ikuhara’s magnum opus, there are several screwball gag episodes dedicated to the side character Nanami, a spoiled rich girl who laughs inappropriately—a requisite character in shoujo anime. In the most fascinating of these gag episodes, Nanami awakens one morning to find an Easter egg in her bed. Convinced that she laid it, she at first tries to hide its existence but, on account of some misunderstood conversations, eventually concludes that egg-laying is normal for girls. In keeping with the coming-of-age theme of magical-girl shows in general and Utena in particular, the egg becomes a multivalent symbol by turns representing puberty, menstruation, childbirth, and child-rearing.
This one-off episode apparently inspired another whole magical-girl franchise, Shugo Chara!, by Banri Sendo and Shibuko Ebara, the two-woman manga-ka team known collectively as Peach-Pit. They got their start with works aimed primarily at a male audience: The little-known harem comedy Prism Palette, the raunchy magical-girlfriend series DearS (which is sort of like Chobits with more bondage), and an action series called Zombie-Loan. In the U.S., probably their most famous title is Rozen Maiden, an unusually classy harem series that’s like a cross between Pinocchio and Highlander with a veneer of Gothic horror. It’s spawned internet memes and a modest cult following.
is one of the biggest titles in the magical girl genre. It was the first foray into mahou shoujo manga by the unbelievably prolific four-woman team Clamp, which produced it from 1996 to 2000. Its anime adaptation, which began airing in 1998, is one of the few TV cartoons that can hold up in terms of technical quality more than a decade after its run. The anime adds a great deal to the story; some of it is padding, but a lot of it is real improvement. A sliced, diced, and dubbed version was released in English under the title of Cardcaptors.
by Richard Henry Dana Jr.,* sailors view soldiers with contempt and even use “soldier” as an insult meaning “lazy good-for-nothing.” To mimic the sailors’ slangy speech, Dana renders the word soldier as “soger.” According to him, the captain of a sailing vessel might even punish an especially lazy crewman by making him march up and down on the deck, holding a marlin spike as if it were a rifle. Such a humiliation is sufficient to break some men.
, the 1990s anime series that roughly follows the third, “Infinity” arc of the 
manga. So now seems to be a good time to finish up our review of the third season of 
