Sailor Moon

Sailor Moon is a Japanese manga and anime franchise created by Naoko Takeuchi, serialized as the manga Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon from 1991 to 1997, following schoolgirl Usagi Tsukino as she discovers she is the reincarnation of a moon princess and transforms into the magical warrior Sailor Moon, leading a team of similarly transformed Sailor Guardians against threats to Earth. Its anime adaptation, airing from 1992 to 1997, brought the series to a large international audience and is widely credited, alongside earlier magical girl works, with establishing and popularizing the modern magical girl genre worldwide, particularly its combination of a young female protagonist, an elaborate on screen transformation sequence and a recurring team of allied heroines. The franchise has produced further anime series, theatrical films, a stage musical franchise running for decades and extensive merchandise, and its influence is widely cited in later magical girl works across anime, and in Western animated series that adopted its transformation and team structure conventions.