Global movement shows us an anime star we’ve seen many times, but in ways we’ve never seen before.

Sailor Moon is one of those anime characters that just about anyone can instantly bring up a mental image of, with her iconic flowing twintails and school uniform-inspired combat outfit. However, there’s actually been a lot of variation in how Sailor Moon has been depicted since her debut.

Starting with original creator Naoko Takeuchi’s intricate manga artwork, the character design went through a thorough reworking to make it feasible for artists to animate for the 1990s TV anime adaptation, and the modern Sailor Moon Crystal reboot is now on its third set of character designs.

▼ Trailer for the upcoming Sailor Moon Eternal movie

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2k5g6yO-rw

And now, over the past few days, we’ve been seeing a flood of new takes on the character, thanks to the #sailormoonredraw hashtag. Though it’s been floating around the Internet under various names for a while now, the practice of taking one particular frame from the Sailor Moon anime, then putting your own spin on it, has picked up momentum in Japan this month, with a number of anime/manga industry professionals joining in over the weekend.

▼ Crimson, manga artist for Aoi Sekai no Chushin de and World War Blue

▼ Toshinori Yano (No Guard Wife)

https://twitter.com/hosimaki/status/1261890840365916161

▼ Makoto Kudo (Mokuyoubi wa kimi to nakitai)

While many of the contributions are essentially filtering Sailor Moon through the aesthetic trends that have occurred in the 20-plus years since the ‘90s TV anime, some artists went all-in with applying their personal style.

▼ Kohei Ashiya (JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure animation director)

▼ Mitsurou Kubo (Yuri!!! on Ice character designer)

https://twitter.com/kubomitsurou/status/1262057978133266432

▼ Soichiro Yamamoto (Teasing Master Takagi-san artist)

▼ Keita Yatera (Ponkotsu Ponko artist)

Of course, with Sailor Moon being one of the Internet’s favorite fan art muses, #sailormoonredraw has also been embraced by amateur and independent artists.

https://twitter.com/norikoi_noriko/status/1258030639464366081 https://twitter.com/Riricalxx/status/1261591182590701568 https://twitter.com/nyu7nyu/status/1261849778821849090

Looking through the artwork, a lot of the redraws feature far more depth of color and glossiness than the anime’s reference shot. A lot of that is due to the luxury of drawing a stand-alone illustration, whereas animation requires simpler drawings, since hundreds of drawings have to be produced in a short amount of time while also sticking to a baseline model that multiple different artists can consistently adhere to.

▼ Had Sailor Moon debuted after the rise of the dark magical girl genre, maybe it would have looked like this.

The recent resurgence of the hashtag is also ushering in a new wave of art from Sailor Moon’s international fanbase.

https://twitter.com/fuenoteki/status/1262224730481766400

So while there’s never a bad time to share your love of Sailor Moon with the world, the #sailormoonredraw hashtag is making right now is an even better time than most.

Source: Twitter via Otakomu
Top image: YouTube/sailormoon-official
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