I liked the designs for the past two seasons…but they were just so sloppy I was ready to move on and see something new. I think the new designs are great, if a bit average. I think it will draw in more people in that style.

I will miss this style. The character designs here are more flowing like the hair. The new characters designs are more structured and stiff for example the hair. I will give praise to the obvious new bigger budget, better care, and quality control because the animation is definitely smoother although there are some off moments as well but definitely not as bad as season 1 and 2 although I haven’t finished season 2 of Crystal. At least this time they realized the fans are not just looking for good character designs and good animation only for the first episode. It was like every episode was a bad animation/character designed episode of the 90’s anime after the first episode almost every other scene. I mean the 90’s anime had a lot of bad animation/character designed episodes but here since it was digital it was much easier to fix than when they actually had to hand paint or draw stuff on film or cels. Here there is much less of an excuse since things are digital. It probably all came down to lower budget and the animators who got paid little money are not going to put their best effort. I certainly would not put in quality work if there is little pay involved. The character designs to me were said to be difficult but I don’t see it. Plus they had a whole extra year so they obviously didn’t care enough to put in the effort to fix the issues that arose from the bad animation. If they just started working on it when it used to be a two week per new episode of Crystal it is still a lot more time then what they use it have and digital art makes it easier to fix and clean up.

Plus the biggest reality is their job as an animator is animation. How are they going to actually animate something that is more detailed than Sailor Moon? The character designs were not more difficult than animation where characters features are actually more distinct. In most anime and particularly in Sailor Moon almost everyone looks similar. It’s not like they were animating people with different features and variation in body shape and facial features. I don’t think they are untalented as doing animation is a difficult job, but Toei wasn’t looking for quality in the reboot at least not after the first episode where it seemed like they somewhat cared. On top of that Toei obviously thought the fans would just eat up anything that was new without much effort/quality control on their part.

I felt that Mamoru Miyano did a better job as Demande, however. His voice suited Demande better in my opinion.