prokopetz:

gifmourningu:

Cardcaptor Sakura Card Summonings Set #1 (E01-E09)

☆ Synced! Open post separately to see them play at the same time. 

☆ Specific episode noted on each gif

This image set beautifully illustrates one of my favourite little things about the Cardcaptor Sakura anime. Most magical girl shows get a lot of mileage out of stock transformation and summoning sequences, and if you examine any given episode in isolation, Cardcaptor Sakura looks like it goes the same route.

It doesn’t, though.

Because the protagonist wears a completely different outfit in every single episode, they couldn’t use any stock footage for transformation and summoning sequences – they had to re-animate them every time. They just deliberately framed them to look like stock footage. Certainly, standardised templates were used, but there’s no direct recycling of cels even when they totally could have gotten away with it. Look at the leftmost GIF in each of the first two rows, for example; she’s wearing identical white gloves in both, but the shadows on her hand fall differently in the second one.