Card Captor Sakura (カードキャプターさくら), also known as CardCaptor Sakura (without the space) and often abbreviated to CCS, is a manga series from the well-known all-women artist team CLAMP. It is also an anime show (1998-2000) created from the manga, consisting of 70 half-hour episodes in three series and two theatrical-release movies.
The series begins as a simple girls' anime of the magical girl genre (similar series include Sailor Moon and Pretty Sammy). Ten-year-old Sakura opens a mysterious book in her father's study and accidentally lets loose the magical Clow Cards. As she lost them, it is her job to retrieve them, which involves finding each card and battling its magical personification. She is assisted by Keroberos (a.k.a., Kero-chan), the beast of the seal assigned to protect the cards, but who was unfortunately asleep when Sakura opened the Clow book. Kero-chan, who appears throughout most of the series rather like a cute animated plush toy, makes Sakura into the Cardcaptor and gives her the key of the seal which allows her to fight and capture the cards.
As CCS progresses, you begin to see a strange pattern of foreshadowing and dreams that lead to a rather interesting conclusion. Like in Magic Knight Rayearth, one of CLAMP's previous works, CCS is a new twist on an old genre.
Due in part to its beautiful animation, Card Captor Sakura has a wide fanbase on the Internet.
Card Captor Sakura was dubbed and brought to the United States but many anime fans consider the resulting series, Cardcaptors, to be one of the worst dubs ever made. Entire episodes of the original series were taken apart and spliced together in an attempt to make Cardcaptors more appealing to American teenage boys. This makes the plotline of Cardcaptors seem rather haphazard to someone who has watched the original. The shoujo-ai and shounen-ai romantic subtext was also excised. Cardcaptors Uncensored provides an incomplete list of changes between the two series.
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