Cutting Back the ‘Secret Garden’: (Re)Gendering the Gaze in Mia Ikumi and Reiko Yoshida’s Tokyo Mew Mew (2000-3) and 4Kids Entertainment’s Localised Mew Mew Power (2005)

The henshin, or transformation, sequences of mahō shōjo (magical girl) manga and anime are much more than a simple, though sparkling, outfit change. From early prototypes of the genre — Osamu Tezuka’s Princess Knight (1953–6), Mitsuteru Yokoyama’s Sally the Witch (1966–7), and Osamu Kobayashi’s Creamy Mami, the Magical Angel (1983–4) — the henshin has encoded bodily transformation as central to magical girls’ power. This bodily transformation, frequently between species or maturity, is tied to the adolescence and social freedom which typify the shōjo, and shōjo culture, within Japan. Focusing on henshin as bodily transformation, this paper will examine the body poetics and politics of Mia Ikumi and Reiko Yoshida’s Tokyo Mew Mew (2000–3). Through a reading of Ikumi and Yoshida’s original manga series as a model of the mahō shōjo genre, this paper will establish the Magical Girl as an embodiment of shōjo values subject to a uniquely female gaze within its native market. Before comparing the treatment of Tokyo Mew Mew’s henshin sequences within the native and US localised distributions of Pierrot’s anime adaptation (2002–3).
Acquiring the license to Tokyo Mew Mew in 2004, 4Kids Entertainment’s CEO Al Kahn expressed his desire to use the property to attract ‘both sexes by providing girls with empowered female heroines and, at the same time, entertaining boys with “cute babes” and lots of action’ (Kahn, 2004). The desire Kahn expresses marks the shifting of Tokyo Mew Mew’s demographic as fundamental to its localisation. Specifically, Kahn’s marketing of mahō shōjo characters as ‘cute babes’ for male viewers, denotes the redressing of Ikumi and Yoshida’s shōjo property for a male gaze. This redressing manifests overtly in the narrative changes and visual censorship of Tokyo Mew Mew’s henshin sequences, offering a unique opportunity to read the poetics of bodily transformation in mahō shōjo media through both a female, Japanese (or shōjo) gaze, and a male, Western gaze.