Sailor Moon Crystal Season III is a workmanlike production that inadvertently highlights the flaws of its original material and the improvements made to the same material in the much less faithful 1994 version by Kunihiko Ikuhara. By ditching the frankly atrocious art and animation of the first two seasons in favor of attractive character designs by Akira Takahashi and competent if unexciting direction by Chiaki Kon, the show removes the veneer of awfulness that obscured the flaws in the manga story in the first two seasons, making them all too clear.
The visual presentation here is well-rounded and perfectly decent, but lacks the artistic flair of Ikuhara's earlier adaptation of the same material. Backgrounds and framing is by-the-numbers, adding a realism to the show's look that is at odds both with Takeuchi's whispy manga art and Ikuhara's theatrical directing style, and the result is a loss of the dream-like quality of both prior versions which served to make the events seem larger-than-life, instead rendering events in a clear but underwhelming fashion.
The character designs are a highlight, modernizing Takeuchi's originals without losing their distinct shojo flair, while the animation is serviceable, especially for a modern Toei show, possibly due to the use of stock footage for transformations and attacks. While the use of stock footage in a magical girl show is perfectly normal (and in fact can be seen as a nostalgic callback to the 90's series) the transformation scenes here serve as a microcosmos of the problems with SMC III: Replacing the off-putting and cheap CGI transformations of seasons one and two, we get a set of remakes of the originals that don't bring any new ideas to the table and while perfectly decent lack the rock-solid animation of the originals. Frankly speaking, the 2016 versions don't look better than the 1994 versions, and they should.
Music is, again, serviceable but not memorable, serving its purpose but lacking standout themes like the Outer Senshi transformation music of the 1994 show. The OP by Etsuko Yakushimaru is a real highlight, though I'm at a loss as to why her version was replaced not once but twice, since the song was very clearly written with her rather peculiar singing style in mind (by herself under the pseudonym Tika α no less) and the versions by other singers sound like they're awkwardly trying to marry her style with their own and failing.
The main problem, however, is the story. Like the two seasons preceding it, SMC III is an almost panel-by-panel adaptation of Naoko Takeuchi's original manga, and while that is something many fans of Sailor Moon have wanted for over a decade, now that we have it, the end result is a shining example of 'be careful what you wish for.' The manga has always been breezy, held up by Takeuchi's ethereal art and the mythological scale of the story, but put into full color and grounded by a typical anime presentation, the story is revealed for the skeletal blueprint it really is, more an outline for a full story than an epic in it's own right.
To be fair, it's a pretty great outline: A soldier of destruction awakening in the body of a frail girl who should have been dead, a conflict between allies over the morality of killing, a friendship that changes destiny, an organization of evil alien scientists, a lesbian couple in a story for little girls. All of that is great and could make for a wonderful story, but the rushed presentation and Takeuchi's more than shaky grasp of character writing drags it down, reducing the story to a breakneck rush through a not fully thought out plot. Character moments and world building are pushed to the side in favor of Big Events and a narrow focus on the two or three characters central to a given story arc (in this case, Chibiusa, Usagi and Hotaru), a result of the manga having to tell a full story in twelve monthly chapters.
Where SMC III goes wrong, then, is in adapting this outline into a full series, but without filling in the gaps of that framework. The end result is a story that feels like a summary, with dozens of characters that have no role beyond being there and a storyline that seems impersonal and cold. Things happen, characters are there, but we are given very little reason to care. The story is so focused on destiny and duty that it forgets to show us that these are still /people/, teenage girls at that. One thing the 90s anime was great at was showing why these girls were friends, why they would fight for each other and why we as viewers should care. In the manga and by extension SMC, meanwhile, the answer to all of those questions seems to be 'because destiny', and the blind devotion everyone shows to Sailor Moon others seems borderline cult-like. Likewise, the villains are evil for evil's sake and never feel like a real threat, a faint shadow of the comical, selfish and even tragic Death Busters of the 90s anime.
SMC III is a perfectly decent show that stands on its own as well as the third season of a nostalgia revival could reasonably manage to, but it lacks the flair and scope of something truly memorable. There is a great anime to be made from the Sailor Moon manga, but following it this closely is not the way to go about it. A straight-forward adaptation like this can work for some manga, but the Sailor Moon manga is too fast-paced, too uncinematic and, frankly, too flawed to be adapted one-to-one, and Sailor Moon Crystal Season III suffers for it.
