Whether watching it in Japanese as Cardcaptor Sakura (カードキャプターさくら), the heavily westernised Cardcaptors, or if you were in one of the few countries that retained the Cardcaptors dub with a few differences such as proper episode orders and a localised opening sequence – the late-90s/early-2000s morning cartoon served as a fresh relief from the more intense offerings of the time — Pokemon, Dragon Ball Z, and Yu-Gi-Oh!. While the original series completed production more than a decade ago, the manga in particular receives the occasional artbook release, compiling all the incredible artwork crafted by CLAMP for arguably their most iconic franchise. The same quality of books was never available for the TV anime… at least… until recently.
After a trip destined for Cairns found itself diverted to Sydney of all places, during a heatwave nonetheless, I found myself heading to the bookstore Kinokuniya. Within their cool, hidden-away Japanese books section, my eyes were drawn to TV Animation Cardcaptor Sakura Archives (テレビアニメーション カードキャプターさくら アーカイブス), which for the sake of brevity I will simply call Cardcaptor Sakura Archives hereon out. While shrink wrapped and a bit of a gamble, I decided to buy it. Was making this purchase worth it? Yes! I was pleasantly surprised to learn that this wasn’t just a simple collection of artwork, but an in-depth, 536-page design compendium looking at not only finished artwork but mostly the planning and setting sketches that were used to bring the setting of Tomoeda and the many characters of Cardcaptor Sakura to life.
So, what is it like to have Cardcaptor Sakura Archives in your hands? The softcover book is printed on high-quality A4 paper, given its 536-page page count, it is bulky and has a lot of weight to it, and has cute cover artwork featuring Sakura and Kero (as you will see to the left), with a simple spine that is easily readable on the bookshelf.
As for its contents, Cardcaptor Sakura Archives is split into six chapters. Each, you will see, has a clear purpose:
Art of Anime Creators: The first and surprisingly smallest section of the book focuses on the finished artwork of the TV anime. This is the art you might expect to find on DVD cover artwork, posters or in one of the several magazines released monthly in Japan showcasing new high-resolution key artwork for a multitude of shows. Cardcaptor Sakura Archives offers a decent number of artworks present, split between whole-page and multiple-to-a-page views, and all of it is high quality. My main qualm is that after 20 years since the anime concluded, why can’t we have just one book that compiles all the artwork, instead of segmenting them between multiple books or, in this case, only offering a sampling of them? I feel that when pitching the book as an “archive” of the show, it should be all-encompassing in this department wherever practical.
Design of Main Characters: After you go through all the key artwork – everything is monochrome from here on out. The remainder of the book instead favours sketches and line drawings. Across the next 160ish pages, the largest chunk of the book, readers are presented with hundreds of sketch and line-art reference sheets for the appearance of each main character, with Sakura Kinomoto, Kero, Tomoyo Daidouji, Touya Kinomoto, Yukito Tsukishiro, Syaoran Li and Meiling Li receiving the brunt of the main pages (with, obviously, Sakura receiving the lion’s share) and a few other main characters receiving a couple of pages each. Each included sheet felt purposeful, each depicting multiple perspectives of the character, designer notes etc. Do you get every outfit? I would argue this isn’t a fully comprehensive look, but you get an immense deep dive that it might as well be.
Design of Sub Characters & Guest Characters: Following that is 50ish pages focusing on the sub-characters and guest characters in the anime, from the incidental episode characters to Sakura’s classmates. This section is similar to the last, but it also includes depictions of the dynamic between certain groups of characters. While each of these characters receives fewer reference sheets, they in return, often contain more within them – so no character feels shafted.
Design of Props: 124 pages are dedicated to the different objects and “props” featured in the world of Cardcaptor Sakura, with a particular focus on the clow card designs, their respective spirits, and items/objects associated with them. Other items on display include a comprehensive look at the Kinomoto family cookware and utensils that made the anime world not just characters and a pre-rendered backdrop. Looking back, this attention to detail is characteristic of an anime based on a CLAMP work.
Design of Backgrounds: Following the section on props, we go to where they are located in the world. The next section looks at the backdrops, room layouts and little nooks featured across the series. The most fascinating section of the book, it provides the definitive layouts and styles of iconic locations including the Konomoto Household and its rooms, Tomoeda city, the public spaces commonly seen in the anime and more. This made me appreciate all the work that went into crafting a consistently aesthetically pleasing world. Also, by far, the most text-heavy.
Storyboards and Others: The remaining 30 pages are dedicated to storyboards of different iconic scenes in the anime, and some more specific, in-detail and design language information around Sakura, Clow Cards, etc. Regarding the latter, these are cleaner and more text-heavy content, but unlike the images in the other sections, the text is a bit more legible and should be easy to read through an app like Google Lens.
The primary limitation of TV Animation Cardcaptor Sakura Archives is that, understandably, all the text is written in Japanese. In a traditional design compendium that is usually fine, with typed text which makes the pages easy to OCR using a tool like Google Lens on your phone. However, as this show was produced in the late 90s and early 2000s, much of the text is handwritten. The authenticity is perfect, and it is great being able to look at the same resources the anime team would have all those years ago. However, the handwritten text is a bit harder to understand if you are not well versed in Japanese – although I found Google Lens did a half-decent job at translation, or at least extracting the text.
Cardcaptor Sakura Archives is the true definition of a design compendium and is one I would like to see more of in the future. For some major IPs like Granblue Fantasy, Genshin Impact, or one of the big-name modern-day animes with hundreds of episodes to its name, pushing out multiple artbooks with fully rendered artwork, interviews and the like is arguably the best way to go. But for a series as beloved as Cardcaptor Sakura, and one with its varied characters, settings, and apparel designs, being able to enjoy the raw concepts and design documents that went into creating the iconic anime, I found it a wholly enriching and fulfilling experience. That said, again, I wouldn’t have objected to the archives containing a full collection of official illustrated promotional artwork.
