At the recent Animate Girls Festival 2014 event, the first key visual for the second arc for Sailor Moon Crystal, the currently airing anime adaptation of Naoko Takeuchi’s Sailor Moon manga.
The arc itself will air in the next season, the Winter 2014/2015 anime season from January. The visual itself also showcases a new character that will appear in the arc, Sailor Chibi Moon. The Black Moon arc of the original manga was previously animated in the 1993 anime Sailor Moon R.
Sailor Moon is an internationally popular anime franchise. The series first started off as a Shoujo manga in early 1992, created by Naoko Takeuchi. The manga was published in Kodansha’s Nakayoshi magazine, where it ran until 1997. Toei Animation produced an anime adaptation of the manga months after the manga was first introduced, running alongside the manga where it also ended in 1997. The series was split up into yearly seasons, with each new season having a different name. Since then, three films, a live stage production, live action TV series and a slew of video games were released.
A synopsis of Sailor Moon Crystal from MAL:
Usagi Tsukino is a second-year middle school girl who is a little clumsy and a crybaby, but she is full of energy. One day, she meets Luna, a black cat with a crescent moon on her forehead, and she transforms into Sailor Moon, a sailor-uniformed pretty guardian of love and justice! As a chosen guardian of justice, Usagi seems to have a mission to find the Illusionary Silver Crystal with the other guardians and to protect the princess.
Meanwhile, the queen of the Dark Kingdom, Queen Beryl, also sends minions to the town where Usagi lives to obtain the Illusionary Silver Crystal, which has immense power. This causes strange events to unfold….
The Black Moon arc of Sailor Moon Crystal will be airing in January next year, during the Winter 2014/2015 anime season. An advanced screening of the first episode of the arc will be held at an event on December 27.
You can visit the anime’s official website: http://sailormoon-official.com/animation/
You can also follow their Twitter: @sailormoon_20th
Source Image – Natalie Comics
“Sailor Moon Crystal”, “Sailor Moon”, images and all associated brands and titles © 2014 Naoko Takeuchi, Kodansha and Toei Animation