Animschar’s 30 Day Anime Challenge – Day 1

Day 1 – First anime: Sailor Moon

Like most anime fans (or even those in my age bracket) my first anime was Sailor Moon. My first memory of the series was when I was around five years old and it was, of course, the catchy opening. I didn’t understand what anime was back then; I simply thought it was just another cartoon. But I did make the connection that this particular ‘cartoon’ was different than the normal ones I’d watch on Nickelodeon and Disney. Little did I know that this show was part of a much larger genre of media I would soon become obsessed with.

As I got older, I came to realize exactly what anime was and how it was not just a cartoon I watched after school. It also turned out that this series was not made for kids and that they had heavily censored it for North American audiences. When i was in middle school, one of my classmates’s older sister actually had the original on a VHS she got from Japan. We watched the first few episodes and from then on, I knew I wanted to watch anime in it’s original state. And now we have been graced with a reboot of the series that is trying to follow the manga more closely. Thank God we live in a generation where companies like Funimation, Crunchyroll and Hulu exist. They are able to bring anime in it’s original form to the rest of the world. It’s a great time to be an anime fan.