10-year-old Sakura Kinomoto returns home from a typical day at school, after having a mysterious dream about a book that morning, and hears strange noises coming from her basement, where her father's library is. Upon investigating, Sakura stumbles upon the magical book of The Clow, and breaks its magical seal. Inside of the book, she finds a stack of cards, known as Clow cards. She accidentally scatters the cards after she says the word "windy", the name of the first card she picks up.

When the wind dies down, a small yellow creature named Kerberos rises from the book. He introduces himself as the guardian of the Clow cards, and Sakura, upon scattering them, has woken him up. He tells Sakura that she must now gather all of the Clow cards to prevent something terrible from happening. The story begins here, and with the help of Kero-chan (as he becomes known), and Sakura's best friend Tomoyo Daidouji (who videotapes all of Sakura's adventures and makes all of her costumes), Sakura sets out on her journey to collect all the Clow cards. Along her way she meets new friends, new enemies, and many challenges.

Okay quite the number of issues to discuss. First area I like to cover is the length of the series and how episodic it really was. Now it seems like each episode connects right after another, but thats only true to an extent. It only connects when its running a current plotline that takes more than one episode. Aside from that its very episodic and it doesn't connect at all, especially when they're chasing Clow Cards for the first 20-something episodes. It didn't work well with this series that needed some constant reminders of what the plot was really about, not this consistent off-trackness it had going.

Second issue was the fact that the writers were looking for the theme to be love but they didn't quite make it clear enough until the second season.