Good grief, that was boring. I quite liked the original Cardcaptor Sakura anime in 1998-2000, but this sequel is almost entirely without meaningful content. If you fast-forward through the empty placefiller scenes that add nothing, you'll sometimes be skipping entire episodes.

The problem is that the main cast is static. Sakura and Shaolan are girlfriend and boyfriend. Cerberus is loud, dull and obsessed with food and computer games. Tomoyo appears to have got over her crush on Sakura by becoming a one-dimensional stalker. She makes Sakura wear costumes she made for her, then films her. When she's not filming Sakura, she edits the footage or perhaps just has daydreams about about filming Sakura. If she's unable to do the filming, she gets Cerberus to film Sakura instead. (She's completely open about it and she'd never dream of doing anything without Sakura's permission, but that's become the limit of her characterisation.)

A few of the satellite characters are livelier, mind you. I quite liked Shaolan's sisters, Tomoyo's creepily overenthusiastic mother and Sakura's brother and grandfather. I'd have liked the show more if they'd had more to do. There's also a peculiarity in everyone being filthy rich. Tomoyo lives in a house as big as Alaska, while Akiho lives in Eriol's old mansion (i.e. similarly enormous) and Sakura has a great-grandfather rich enough to give you a house as a present. At least two main characters have butlers.

I don't really mind that the show's formula being a cut-and-paste of its predecessor. Sakura's cards have all disappeared and she has to collect lots of new cards! Wow! What did get a bit wearying was that in a show largely driven by hollow slice of life, even the magical girl battle scenes are dull because the cards are non-sentient. It's like bad magical weather. Heigh ho, time for another card battle.

It's hard to exaggerate how pointless almost all of this show's scenes are. The cast are nice, but boring. They discuss recipes for making cheesecake. They cut their hair and discuss who normally cuts their hair. They lend each other books. They talk and cook and help my brain is melting, stop it stop it.

Does the show eventually grow a plot? I can't bring myself to say "yes". We get a sort of baddie, in an understated way that doesn't actually mean doing anything bad. It's homeopathic villainy. Stuff sort of approximately starts happening towards the end, occasionally, but then it stops again. There's a Squid Hat Person, if that helps.

The show's a waste of time. Don't let it put you off the original show, but for goodness sake steer clear of this sequel. They've backpedalled completely on the original's controversial Rika-Terada relationship (romance between a ten-year-old and her school teacher), while Yamazaki's tall tales made me want a meteorite to hit him. That said, though, I eventually found a way to watch it without going out of my mind. You fast-forward through the stuff that doesn't matter. This works okay, since after all everyone's thoroughly nice and the show improves a lot if you've chopped out the most blatant filler. It's still a waste of time even in that improved form, though.