How was Magic Knight Rayearth created?
An editor asked for a hit. CLAMP answered with robots in a girls’ magazine.
CLAMP were celebrating the publication of the Sōryūden novels, which they had illustrated, when Hideki Yamaguchi, an editor at the shōjo magazine Nakayoshi, asked them to make a series for him. The editor-in-chief wanted a story that could appeal to elementary-school readers and older fans at the same time; CLAMP, for their part, wanted to pull younger readers in.
Nobody handed them a formula, so they built one from their own appetites: robots, because they loved robot anime; role-playing games, then at their peak in Japan; and fantasy, to soften the robots for the magazine’s audience. Writer Nanase Ohkawa has said that Nakayoshi’s success with Sailor Moon is what made it possible to pitch robots to its editors at all.
THE DESIGN DECISIONS
From Clamp no Kiseki and the Animerica interviewsThe borrowed title
The word “Rayearth” was coined by Takeshi Okazaki, a friend of the group and a fellow illustrator; Ohkawa supplied the rest of the title. It names Hikaru’s fire god, a wolf with a mane of flame, and through him the whole work.
Names from the showroom
Character names were drawn from car names, on the theory that they would be interesting and memorable for children who might struggle with a cast of katakana fantasy names. The habit stuck: a generation of fans can recite the Cephiro cast like a dealer’s lot.
The scale problem
Giant robots created an honest drawing problem: at true scale, the girls and their gods could not share a frame. CLAMP’s solution was to design the Rune-Gods as creatures rather than vehicles and to keep the compositions theatrical rather than measured.
No cockpits
The artists left the cockpits out of the robots entirely, so that the Knights’ faces could be shown in battle instead of a pilot’s compartment. It became the visual signature of the series, in the manga and every adaptation after it.
WRITING THE TRAP
Part I easy, Part II hard“It is not a simple world”
“Rayearth intentionally traces out an RPG world, but I don’t consider it an RPG world, myself,” Ohkawa said. The first arc is built as a rescue quest so that its ending can expose the rescue as the problem: the princess summoned her own executioners.
The corner they wrote into
CLAMP found the first adventures “really easy” to create, and admitted the second part was the difficult one, feeling they had written themselves into a corner. Ohkawa noted that with an older or male audience, they might simply have stopped at the end of Part I.
Fate, chosen
Ohkawa’s stated theme is that fate is caused by one’s actions and can therefore be chosen. Cephiro, where one person’s heart literally holds up the sky, is her exaggeration of Earth: the Pillar system is fate made visible, so that a fourteen-year-old can refuse it.