This past Saturday, December 5th, there was a two hour long Sailor Moon special which aired on NHK in Japan. This special centered around voting on fans’ favourite characters, episodes and songs from Sailor Moon and also included a number of special guests and clips from the upcoming Sailor Moon Eternal films! Though the special was televised you can watch a version online by following this link. There’s a lot going on in this two hour video so I’ll point out a few places where you can find new Sailor Moon Eternal footage.

At 64 minutes and 24 seconds you can see the voice actors who portray Chibiusa, Misato Fukuen, and Mamoru, Kenji Nojima, doing a live read of a clip from the upcoming film which features Chibiusa and Mamoru speaking in the build up to Chibiusa’s transformation.

At 77 minutes and 28 seconds we see a clip of Chibiusa, Mamoru and Usagi speaking. Diana is also present but doesn’t speak in this footage.

And while it’s not Sailor Moon Eternal footage there is something quite interesting at 114 minutes and 8 seconds. Here we see Kotono Mitsuishi, the voice of Usagi from the original Sailor Moon anime and Sailor Moon Crystal, doing a live recording of some lines from the first season finale. Why is this important? She didn’t have a chance to record these for the original episode as she was off with an illness. That episode, and a few others, were recorded instead by Kae Araki who later returned to voice Chibiusa in Sailor Moon R. I shared this on Twitter after having seen it posted by the Sailor Moon Canada account which prompted an interesting discussion where I learned that this was not the first time Kotono Mitsuishi recorded these lines. As noted in the Tuxedo Unmasked article about her illness which kept her from recording those episodes, she had recorded audio of that final scene. The article mentions that this was an audio tape though I understand there is a CD which exists as well. She also recorded those lines for the 2018 Classic Concert. I have that CD but it is boxed up somewhere but user David Perez on Twitter says it’s on track 9.

There are some odd things in this video such as footage of Kazuko Tadano with an image of the anime character which was based off of her hiding her face!

We also get a look at some storyboards for the film. Some aren’t easy to make out but there is a pretty close up shot of a couple of pages at one point.

We’ve also got a new 15 second commercial for Sailor Moon Eternal Part 1 which shows Usagi and Chibiusa with the Holy Grails, Helios and Pegasus. You can watch the commercial on YouTube below.

With Sailor Moon Eternal Part 1 coming to Japanese theatres on January 8th and Part 2 coming February 11th we are getting a lot of new content coming at us lately! There seem to be new clips and images of the film most days! I’m trying to keep up with the news. Feel free to share anything you spot in the comments!

Keep reading for more screenshots from these clips.

Soon in Japan the Sailor Moon anime will be airing in an HD remastered version. It will be airing starting on April 6th 2015 at 6:30pm Japan Standard Time on NHK BS Premium, a satellite channel by NHK, the Japanese Broadcasting Corporation.

Nothing official about the remastering process has been revealed at this time. A high quality image of Sailor Moon from the original anime is included on the Sailor Moon official site along with news of this broadcast. This image is of great quality, though at 670×447 resolution this does not appear to be an actual screenshot from an HD version of the show given it’s low resolution and improper aspect ratio. An HD screenshot would need to have 1080 or 720 lines of vertical resolution and the aspect ratio would need to be 4:3 or 16:9 if it were cropped for a widescreen display, not the 1.2:1 that this image has. If it is a screenshot, it’s been scaled and cropped to look best on the web to the point where not much can be told about the state of the remastering. Perhaps this will simply be an upconverted version of the standard definition video. Hopefully they will be going back to the film source to get better quality footage. Although this method is more difficult and sometimes impossible depending on what source material is available, it will result in the best quality HD version. With the Japanese DVD release of the series the first season of the anime was remastered in progressive scan though this was not done for later seasons.

With a new HD version of the anime being made, a Blu-Ray release in Japan may be coming as well, though no such announcement has been made at this time.