You had to have seen that joke coming. (If you're not sure, that's the Codec frequency Solid Snake uses to contact Otacon in Metal Gear Solid. Yeah, gamer joke.)

Episode 7 of Card Captor Sakura, "Sakura's First Attempt as a Thief?!", apart from being punctuated, deals mainly with Sakura and Tomoyo infiltrating an art gallery to, as usual, capture a card. There's a lot of use of the word "kaitou" here, which is often translated to "phantom thief". (Literally, the kanji are "strange/mysterious/suspicious" and "thief/robber".) I would assume that this refers to the sort of gentleman thief who uses smarts and tricks and illusions to effect near-magical getaways, and which seem to be a fairly popular anime trope, on both sides of the protagonist/antagonist line.

The kaitou in Yoshinaga-sanchi no Gargoyle, Hyakushiki, states (whether he personally believes it or not) that the duty of thieves such as himself is to "liberate" various valuable items and put them "where they belong". I suppose in this case, it kind of fits.

Darkness, and not a creature stirred… except for a nameless and probably underpaid security guard. Also, a kid who's sneaking around. Nothing much really happening in the beginning, or at least nothing I can really talk about without falling into the pits of inappropriate and puerile banter. You'll get your immaturity later, when I've really gotten into the swing of things. Not right at the beginning.

Sakura attempts to draw Kero-chan using the pencil as a guide. Personally, I've never actually seen anyone in real life use this method to draw or paint, but then I don't hang around a lot of artists anyway, so it may well be a valid technique. She's also closing one eye, so possibly she's also testing which is her dominant eye. Supposedly, according to folk wisdom at least, one's dominant eye is supposed to be the same side as one's dominant hand, but this doesn't apply to me, and presumably Sakura as well. (Both of us appear to be right-handed with a dominant left eye.)

I kind of like the perspective blurring of the "foreground" of Sakura's hand and pencil. Yes, I know it's probably a relatively simple animation trick.

In any case, all this practice at drawing is supposed to be for a field trip to the art gallery, where the students get to draw various art exhibits, possibly as a form of cultural exposure. I suppose the younger aspiring artists can get their inspiration this way.

At the art gallery itself, Sakura's attempts to draw a sculpture looks like, well, the rest of ours, who don't really have much artistic talent or training.

Tomoyo's, on the other hand, is, um, professional. I mean, wow. Is there anything (non-athletic) that girl cannot do well?

Sakura wanders around the art gallery, looking at all the pretty pictures. I may or may not have been a normal kid, but I remember being distinctly bored out of my skull at my early visits to art galleries, mostly because I was wondering why someone would spend time and effort to splash some colour onto a canvas to convey the impression of "fish", when one can just visit an aquarium or something. I've broadened my views since then, but I still have a gut reaction to certain forms of artwork that is summed up pretty much to "so what?"

But then this is the CCS-verse, where little kids are amazingly bright and precocious. And so Sakura is, presumably, appreciating art.

At least, until a commotion drags her attention away.

Meet Yuuki Tachibana. Yuuki is attempting to attack a certain painting, since it was supposedly drawn by a master painter who happened to be Yuuki's father. The painting was altered, though, and Yuuki is trying to get it back to how it was before.

In this scene, the security guard who's restraining Yuuki looks suspiciously like the one who was patrolling the grounds the previous night. But since we don't know whether it was really the "previous night" or several nights ago, I'll leave him the benefit of doubt.

I just realized that I didn't really have a good screencap of the painting in question, so here it is. The title of the painting is "Hohoemi" ("Smile"), and the woman with a hidden mouth may well be artist eccentricity or something. As are, presumably, the pointed ears, which may be a reference to Vulcans and even more artist eccentricity.

While Yuuki is struggling with the security guard and causing a commotion, the woman in the painting raises a finger to her lips, and then everything is suddenly silent. Yes, I think we've pretty much established that this is No Ordinary Painting.

Sakura believes this to be the Gallery Ghost or some such. Tomoyo suggests, instead, that it's a Clow Card.

CHECK!Point: I'm sorry, I know this is just Tomoyo pointing something out, but still, moe~ She just looks so cute in this picture.

Sakura sneaks out at night by climbing onto a tree outside her window in a way that makes me think that she's done this many times before. Along the way, she encounters Yukito, who appears to be visiting the Kinomoto home, most likely for a late-night meeting with Touya. But then this blog is PG-13 and we're going to be following Sakura anyway, so we'll just leave it at that.

Yukito cheerfully assures Sakura that he won't tell Touya about Sakura's little excursion. I assume they're going to be otherwise occupied anyway.

CHECK!Point: Tomoyo surveys her latest creation on Sakura. I really like Tomoyo's outfit in this sequence, being cute and classy at the same time.

Kero-chan deduces that this time, it's the Silent card, who doesn't really talk much. Um, yes.

Tomoyo presents a schedule of the guard's patrol route, and conveniently fails to mention how she got it. She also sets her watch alarm for about five minutes before the arrival of the guard, or fifty-five minutes from this time. Considering that they're up against a Card with the ability to teleport them away at the slightest noise, I have to wonder about the wisdom of this.

Inside the art gallery, they meet Yuuki, whom they try to scare away, but end up joining anyway. Yuuki wishes to use art skillz to clear up the painting with the Clow Card on it (not realizing that it's a Clow Card and thus MAGIC), and Sakura wants to, well, seal the Clow Card. Yuuki wonders exactly why Sakura is dressed as she is, and Tomoyo replies, with a disarming smile, "It's our hobby." Hee.

Along the way, Yuuki talks about the history of the painting, in flashback:

Note the presence of the hat. This will be slightly significant later, but not really a lot.

Every attempt to approach the painting gets foiled, however, when some small noise is made, and the Silent teleports them back outside. I have to wonder how the Silent can stand it in the daytime, when the art gallery is open and there's bound to be some ambient noise, from footsteps and people explaining exhibits to their clueless friends, if nothing else. It may be that the Silent judges whether a single sound is considered loud compared to background noise… or maybe it's just waiting for an excuse to teleport away the interlopers clearly intent on capturing it.

I also had a long ramble on wondering how exactly the Silent nullifies sound, but I don't think this is really the place for it. Maybe next time.

CHECK!Point: Tomoyo and Sakura communicate to each other with big words on their sketchpads. Here, Tomoyo's message is "There's no time left."

When they found the time to write all this down is uncertain. Shades of Ranma 1/2 and the miraculously-appearing wooden signboards, maybe.

The Silent teleports them outside again, and Yuuki decides to go in alone. Sakura wants to follow, but Tomoyo stops her, and the two of them hide behind a statue outside, as Yuuki predictably gets caught by a security guard. Either the art gallery hires just the one security guard who never needs to sleep, or they stamp these guys out like clones or something.

Sakura gets the idea to use the all-purpose Shadow card to manipulate events inside the gallery, without actually being inside, and, most importantly, not making any noise. So apparently the Shadow card can transfer qualities of the actual object onto its shadow, since the shadow of the Sealing Wand seems to do the job as well as the original, which makes me wonder once again just how that card works.

Yes, yes, I know. MAGIC.

The security guard is distracted by a strange unknown force suddenly shoving him, and Yuuki runs and hides. Like NINJA.

The Silent is captured into card form, and the vital difference between flashback and painting is revealed. Also, now I can finally use pronouns for Yuuki: yes, Yuuki is a girl. Typically, she uses "boku" (the more masculine version of "I"), in an attempt to Throw Us Off.

I'm also aware that just because a character has long hair may not actually make them a girl, but then that's obviously what we're supposed to assume.

CHECK!Point: Yes, I admit it, I think Yuuki is cute. Her blush in this scene adds significantly to the deredere factor.

While Sakura and Tomoyo are congratulating each other outside the art gallery proper (but still inside the gates), an mysteriously ominous person dressed in mysteriously ominous strange green clothes watches them in a mysteriously ominous manner from the mysteriously ominous rooftop, from which he does not, mysteriously and ominously, fall screaming to his mysteriously ominous demise.

Instead, he just watches. Mysteriously. And ominously.

Feel the foreshadowing.

This episode's Kero-chan ni Omakase first talks about Sakura's battle costume this episode, and how it's made to be especially quiet, and then segues randomly into Tomoyo's personal watch. Yes, it's her personal watch, being that her name is written on it. Judging from the episode, it's not very large, and probably has the usual extra features of being very hardy and shock-resistant or something. Useful for catching rogue magical cards in the darkness and still knowing the time.

Clearly an essential function.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 11th, 2007 at 6:21 pm and is filed under card captor sakura. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.