Is art lost in translation?

According to the industry truism, what counts in a TV series is story, story, story. But what if the same story is told two ways?

The recent release of the 18th and final DVD (episodes 68 through 70) of the Japanese anime series “Cardcaptor Sakura” has reignited a debate over the 39-episode Americanized adaptation, “Cardcaptors,” which ran on the Kids’ WB during the 2000-01 and 2001-02 seasons and also is available on DVD.

It wasn’t the first time programmers had reworked Japanese animation for American audiences: Three unrelated series (“Super Dimension Fortress: Macross,” “Genesis Climber Mospeada” and “Super- dimensional Cavalry Southern Cross”) were cut together to create “Robotech” in 1985.

But as the popularity of anime has skyrocketed in the United States, fans have started objecting to changes in the original programs. In the case of “Cardcaptors,” they complain that WB altered the characters’ personalities and shifted the focus of the series to make it more appealing to boys.

A major issue in the ongoing discussion is that the American series stops abruptly at the beginning of the second major story arc. Viewers had to wait for the release of the last six discs of “Cardcaptor Sakura” to discover how the story plays out.

Title character Sakura Kinomoto would be amazed to learn she’s the subject of bitter arguments. When the series begins, she’s a cheerful fourth-grader who lives with her older brother, Toya, and her widowed father, a professor of archeology. Her favorite subjects are gym and music; she dislikes math, ghost stories and the way Toya teases her by calling her a monster (kaijuu). She shares secrets with her pretty best friend, Tomoyo, especially the crush she nurtures on Toya’s friend Yukito.

When she opens a mysterious book she finds in her father’s study, strange cards fly out and disappear. Kero, who looks like a plush version of the winged cat on the book’s cover, awakens and explains that she’s released a deck of magical cards created by the great sorcerer Clow Reed. Despite her protests, Kero insists that Sakura must become a Cardcaptor and retrieve the Clow Cards before they work mischief on the world.

Through her adventures, Sakura discovers untapped reserves of courage and resourcefulness. She aids Tomoyo when the Voice Card leaves her mute, prevents Sweet from spoiling a cooking lesson and saves Toya when Mist destroys the set of his class play. Shaoran Li, a descendant of Clow Reed from Hong Kong, begins as Sakura’s rival for the Cards, but he soon becomes her friend.

The original animated program involves complex romantic relationships: Near the end of the series, Sakura confesses her love to Yukito. He treats her declaration seriously but explains that she loves him as a family member, not a boyfriend.

She guesses correctly he’s already in love with someone: her brother, Toya. After this disappointment, Sakura realizes her true feelings for Shaoran and the story concludes with them becoming a couple at the end of junior high.

“Cardcaptor Sakura” began as a manga (graphic novel) from the female artists’ group Clamp and ran in Japan from June 1996 through July 2000; the animated series began in April 1998 and ended in March 2000. Both versions scored big hits, and the characters were extensively merchandised. The 18 subtitled DVDs have been big sellers for Geneon/Pioneer in the U.S.

“At first glance, ‘Sakura’ seems like a simple, formulaic story for a very young audience about collecting magical cards. But it has profound moments about love and relationships, which are handled in ways that work for children and older viewers,” says Jake Forbes, an editor at TokyoPop, the publisher of both the translation of original manga and the “Cardcaptors” books. “The series is about finding the person who’s your special someone, which is one of the central themes of all Clamp works.”

Representatives from Nelvana, the Canadian studio that prepared “Cardcaptors” for U.S. consumption, declined to be interviewed for this article. But John Hardman, senior vice president for Kids’ WB programming, insisted that the changes in bringing “Cardcaptors” to the American network were minor.

“We asked them to take the female hero’s name out of the title and turn it into a more gender-neutral title that wouldn’t turn away our core boy audience,” he said by telephone. “For the individual episodes, it was just broadcast standards and practices concerns and cuts for time. Most Japanese shows come in at around 26 minutes per episode, and we have 21-minute time periods. We did ask them to pull back a little on some of the romantic relationships.”

Fans complain bitterly about what they regard as major changes in both the characters and the story. In the Anime Encyclopedia, Helen McCarthy comments, “The inertia of network ‘demands’ ruined much of what made the series initially so interesting.” Fan sites fault Nelvana for combining episodes and starting “Cardcaptors” with the eighth chapter of the story.

In “Cardcaptors,” the names are Westernized: Sakura Kinomoto becomes Sakura Avalon; Toya is Tori; Yukito, Adrian; and Tomoyo, Madison. Some of the harshest online criticism is directed at the English voices, which don’t sound like their Japanese counterparts. The American actors even change the pronunciation of Clow: In Japanese, it rhymes with “glow”; they rhyme it with “plow.”

“People tend to have very strong opinions about dubbing anime,” Forbes explains. “The anime girl voice, which is high-pitched, innocent and very sincere, just isn’t heard on American television, where characters are very strong-willed and kind of dominant.”

Hardman responds, “This Sakura is feistier; she’s an empowered female, not only to attract girls but to make sure boys realize she’s someone they should aspire to befriend. We looked for an actress with an older voice to make sure we appealed to the upper end of our demographics. We never use the Japanese voices as benchmarks because we know the audiences are so different.”

Although both the manga and animated versions of “Cardcaptor Sakura” concluded in Japan three years ago, Sakura still ranks among the most popular female cartoon characters. In America, EBay lists hundreds of videos, toys and cels, but the best items don’t always cross the Pacific. Heather Skiera, president of the Japanese on-line auction site Rinkya (www.rinkya .com), says, “Probably 95% of the higher-end ‘Sakura’ cels go to Japanese buyers. The 5% that American buyers see are just the leftovers. We won’t see any really outstanding cels in the U.S. until someone in Japan needs money badly.”

Outside Japan, “Cardcaptor Sakura’s” fan base continues to grow, with scores of Web sites in English, Japanese, French, Spanish and Portuguese devoted to the series and its characters.