東京ミュウミュウ

TOKYO MEW MEW

MANGA

STATUS
COMPLETE
VOLUMES
7
RELEASE
February 1, 2003
CHAPTERS
33

DESCRIPTION

Ichigo is out on a hot date with her 'crush' when suddenly she's involved in an odd incident in which her DNA is merged with the DNA of an almost extinct wildcat. When four other girls' DNA is merged with the DNA of four other almost extinct animals, it's apparent that they're part of a much bigger plan. Ichigo and her friends have been chosen to become a part of a secret project called the "Mew Project." Their mission: To protect the planet from aliens who are using the planet's animals to attack humans.

(Source: Tokyopop)

CAST

Ichigo Momomiya
Zakuro Fujiwara
Mint Aizawa
Bu-Ling Huang
Lettuce Midorikawa
Quiche
Ryou Shirogane
Masha
Keiichirou Akasaka
Masaya Aoyama
Tart
Blue Knight
Pie
Deep Blue
Moe Yanagida
Miwa Honjo
Sakura Momomiya
Ringo Akai
Shintarou Momomiya

CHAPTERS

RELATED TO TOKYO MEW MEW

ANIME AdventureTokyo Mew Mew

MANGA ComedyTokyo Mew Mew a La Mode

MANGA ComedyTokyo Mew Mew Olé!

ANIME AdventureTokyo Mew Mew New~♡

Cover Art for Tokyo Mew Mew New~♡ 2nd Season

ANIME AdventureTokyo Mew Mew New~♡ 2nd Season

REVIEWS

RoseFaerie
50/100
When the story chooses to focus its worst aspects instead of its' strengths. How romance killed Tokyo Mew Mew.
I feel bad that I went into Tokyo Mew Mew expecting total mediocrity. I always go into things expecting good, unless it's widely regarded as trash like Brothers Conflict or Vampire Knight. Some of my Anilist friends were reading it and said it was completely mediocre, and that it was best to read something like this after something super good. (I had burnout from Your Majesty, Please Spare Me This Time.) And honestly, complete and total average-ness was what I got from Tokyo Mew Mew.

While Ichigo Momomiya is out on a date with her crush, she somehow gets caught up in an experiment where her DNA is merged with that of an endangered species of cat. She learns that the same thing happened to four other girls, and they are all chosen for the "Mew Mew Project", where they have to use their newfound animal based powers to fight aliens who control the animals of the world, making them attack humans.

It would be great if Ichigo spent more time fighting enemies with her friends. I found the chapters that introduced the other girls to be the strongest. I found the other girls to be entertaining, silly, and a bit different from the magical girl teams I've seen in my limited experience. We have Mint, who Tokyopop describes as "a super-rich totally sarcastic hipster" (I'm sorry, I just found that hilarious so I had to include that). Lettuce is shy and quiet, but she's also clumsy and is shown to have used the darker side of her powers. Pudding is very silly and hyperactive, with the very niche talent of circus performances. She's easily the most forgiving and has a short attention span. Zakuro is also very quiet, and she has the least personality of all of them (which comes down to her having very, very few lines). She's a loner by nature and is comically serious at times.

I'd love to see more of these girls, and I wish they got the same amount of exploration that the Sailor Moon girls eventually got. I had the issue that the manga didn't care about Usagi's friends and put more of an emphasis on her and her romance with Mamoru in the beginning. Tokyo Mew Mew had the same issue, but unlike Sailor Moon, it never outgrew that issue. I'd love to see more of Mint, Lettuce, Pudding, and Zakuro. However, they were all shafted in favor of the most boring romance in human history.

Masaya, Ichigo's crush, has the personality of a stick or a rock or even a blank piece of paper. He has nothing going for him. The manga tries to explain why he ended up that way, but it was very random, since we never saw any hints of his backstory or personal life in the earlier parts of the manga. It felt like a random, "Oh everyone hates Masaya and thinks he's boring. I've gotta explain why he's boring", instead of actual, natural character growth and a logical explanation. Tokyo Mew Mew also fails to explain why Ichigo and Masaya even like each other. The two will talk about how much they love each other, but we don't know why or what they even see in each other. The two characters have so little chemistry they make Kaname and Yuki from Vampire Knight look like the most interesting couple in the world. They deliver passionate love confessions, and they even get married in the end. (I'm not sure if it was a real wedding or not, because these are actual 12-13 year olds.) I hated how much time they spent on Masaya, because he was boring and I hated him.

Ichigo has three potential love interests: Masaya, Quiche (one of the villains), and Ryou (one of the heads of the Mew Mew Project). Quiche sucked as a person, but I found him to be fascinating to watch. If Ichigo had to end up with anyone, I would have preferred Ryou, since he actually had a personality. A part of me also wanted the other girls to have a shot with romance, since I found them to be more engaging than Ichigo, and all of their potential relationships seemed more interesting than Ichigo and Masaya. I'd rather see something about Mint's obvious crush on Zakuro than Ichigo and Masaya. (I also was shipping Ryou and Lettuce.)

Ichigo is just your average lead magical girl. She's similar to Usagi with Sailor Moon in terms of personality. She's cheerful and a bit of a crybaby, and she's the most responsible of the main girls. She was fine, but she felt like the least interesting of the girls to me. I wanted to see more of the other characters.

The antagonists were a bit flat, except for Deep Blue and Quiche. Pie did get a bit of development towards the end.

Speaking of the ending, it was very rushed. It didn't really phase me since most of the magical girl series I've read have been rushed. However, so much happened. We got our main villain reveal, the girls collecting two aqua mews to stop pollution (it's very strange), Ichigo revealing herself as a Mew Mew to Masaya, a wedding, double crossing, and all sorts of things in the last few chapters. I wish they had spent more time on these important plot revelations instead of Ichigo worrying about missing her date with Mr. Blandy McBland-Bland.

The art was cute if a bit chaotic. It was fun seeing that older shoujo art. The girls all looked very cute, and all the girls had distinct designs.

I didn't hate Tokyo Mew Mew. It had a lot of potential and a great ensemble cast. However, I felt like the romance and the main leads dragged it down a bit for me. I think I'm noticing a trend with canonical magical girl romances, and I don't like it. I'd say there's an equal amount of good and bad, making it an average read. While I prefer Sailor Moon and Magic Knight Rayearth, I wouldn't discourage die-hard magical girl fans from reading this.
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Juliko25
64/100
Tokyo Mew Mew is the first manga I read when I was a kid...though it's not as good as I remember it being.
(This review includes discussion of A La Mode, as I feel A La Mode is too short for me to justify giving it its own review. This was also written years before Ikumi's untimely death)

Tokyo Mew Mew has a lot of sentimental value to me as an anime fan. I actually knew that it was called Tokyo Mew Mew before 4Kids licensed it and changed the name to Mew Mew Power. I watched said dub religiously until it got unceremoniously cancelled. Furthermore, Tokyo Mew Mew was the very first anime I ever watched in Japanese, way back in 2005. It's also the first real right-to-left manga I ever read and bought in its entirety, though I randomly started with volume 3, which I found at my local Borders before it was changed to a Books-A-Million. I still own all the volumes of Tokyopop's release of the manga, A La Mode included, and just recently, I re-read the whole thing. I still like it, but I'm not gonna lie, it's kinda silly and cliche, and nothing really worth gushing about.

The story begins with a young girl, Ichigo Momomiya, going on a date with her classmate, Masaya Aoyama, at an endangered animal exhibit. Later on, when a strange light suddenly engulfs her, she finds herself acting like a cat: Saying meow, sleeping more than she usually does, eating fish, landing on her feet when she jumps, and sometimes, she grows cat ears and a tail! As it turns out, she and four other girls were injected with the DNA of Red Data Animals, made into a form that allows them to become animal themed magical girls. The Mew Mews have the power to defeat parasitic aliens called Chimera Anima, normal animals mutated into monstrous beings. As part of the secret Mew Project, the masterminds recruit the girls to save the world from aliens that threaten to destroy it, while making them into waitresses serving at a cute cafe as a cover. But all Ichigo wants to do is be with Masaya and have a normal romance!

As much as I want to love on this manga, as it means a lot to me personally, I can't let nostalgia blind me to its faults, and I wouldn't be a good critic if I did that, now would I? The artwork is at the very least competent, with the characters having wide, sparkly eyes, reasonably proportioned bodies, and cute chibis used for comedic moments. The costume designs, while simplistic, are good and devoid of unnecessary embellishments. But I won't lie, Mia Ikumi's art is rather unpolished. At various points throughout the manga, the art style tends to flip flop in quality. Sometimes, the characters are outlined with bold, dark lines while other parts of them, such as hair strands, don't look as though they've been inked properly, with lots of missing spaces. There are other times when the characters' Mew Mew marks randomly go missing or are in the wrong places on their bodies. Furthermore, her chibis tend to be really weird looking, with characters' heads made even bigger than is appropriate, with their bodies looking either like sticks or jelly.

But the artwork isn't the only issue Tokyo Mew Mew has. Personally, I feel the manga's biggest flaw is its characterization. To put it simply, all of the focus is solely on Ichigo, nobody else, and the other four main characters get little to no focus or any kind of meaningful development whatsoever. They're mostly just used as props to support Ichigo, never getting any time in the limelight, nor do the readers ever get any insight into what they're like outside of fighting crime. This is one issue the anime managed to rectify, as not only were the producers given 52 episodes to work with, they managed to give any character who's not Ichigo much more development and flesh them out more than the manga attempted (Except for Zakuro, who still doesn't get much focus). Say what you will about filler episodes in anime, but the anime for Tokyo Mew Mew recognized the manga's flaws and made optimal use of its run time to give each member of the ensemble their just dues, even the villains. The sequel manga, A La Mode, exacerbates the manga's disinterest in developing its side characters by kicking Ichigo to the side and focusing on a new character and nobody else. From what I've heard, Ikumi did want to do more with Ichigo's teammates and write stories that fleshed them out and gave them more development, but apparently, higher ups told her not to do so and practically browbeat her into shilling the new main character, Berry, for all she was worth and nothing else. That's...kinda sad, really. I personally don't hate Berry, as I've encountered characters in other media that are FAR more deserving of hatred than her, but I do feel the criticisms she gets is valid, and I'm more inclined to see Berry as just a product of really bad executive meddling. As for the characters themselves...they're fine, but again, the manga's disinterest in fleshing out anyone who's not Ichigo makes them come off as cliche, bland archetypes and not much else, and Ichigo herself isn't a very interesting character, even by magical girl standards.

As for the story itself, at the time the manga was published, magical girl shows never tackled themes such as animals and environmentalism before, so Tokyo Mew Mew became well known for challenging the status quo in that manner. But Tokyo Mew Mew just seems to wear its environmentalism themes like a hat, not doing much else with it other than giving the characters animal DNA and having the villains wreck the environment every now and again. Some anime fully embrace the themes and motifs they go for, conveying the appeals of the subject matter at hand and inspiring a desire to know more (An example being Heartcatch Pretty Cure with its intense focus on botany and fashion, or if you're looking for non magical girl examples, Laid Back Camp's focus on ground camping during winter) while integrating them into its setting. Tokyo Mew Mew doesn't really try to explore the issues and themes beyond scratching the surface, so it comes off as more window dressing than anything. That being said, Tokyo Mew Mew still revels in comfortable magical girl tropes and cliches, playing everything safe and not really trying to break new ground.

It really says something when an anime adaptation turns out to be better than its source material. Though rare, Tokyo Mew Mew's manga is one of those. It had the potential to be great, but it's inconsistent characterization, tacked on themes, cliche premise, unpolished art, and misuse of its time and resources make it little more than average. Just check out the anime, as not only is it longer, but fixes many of the manga's problems.
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