Okay, I confess. I'm a fan of magical girl anime. No, I don't like Sailor Moon. Yes, I am, in fact, a guy. No, I'm not some kind of pervert. And no, I'm not gay.
Now that all that's out of the way, let me explain. I actually got my start researching the genre so that I could mock the crap out of it in a parody story I was writing. The protagonist would be sassy, intelligent, and genre savvy, and sidestep every major folly and foible that her predecessors fell for. This research gave birth to 12 Rules to Magical Girl Anime, which poked enormous amounts of fun at all the cliche BS that happens over the course of one episode. Cute assistants? Check. Stupidly long transformation sequences? Check. Unobtainable love interests? Check. Mysterious knights in shining armor to save the day? Double check.
It was through this research that I discovered three gems by pure accident: The first was Tokyo Mew Mew, which I knew had aired here under the name Mew Mew Power. My sister was a big fan of it, then, especially Zakuro, whom she modeled an OC after. I was only vaguely curious; she'd told me things, and while I wasn't willing to put forth the effort to watch it myself, I tended to listen for the sake of satisfying my own curiosities about what I was missing by staying in bed until 11AM. When I watched a few episodes (of the original Japanese dub), I found the writing genuinely funny and the comedy well-timed. The first enemy actually impressed me because it was... well, actually kinda creepy. Kids watched this! My mind was drunk on surprise at the revelation that I was actually enjoying the experience. Holy crap!
The second was Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha, which blew me away, totally and completely. I had started the project under the assumption that everything I was going to dig into was going to be like Sailor Moon, and here was a girl who not only worked completely alone (with the exception of her Cute Thing), the animation was smooth and crisp, the story was well-told and very interesting, and the fight scenes? Oh, God, the fight scenes! The fights weren't that horrid monster-of-the-week crap that everybody else was doing, oh, no, the fights had purpose within the plot, and the attacks were more like the energy blasts and lasers of doom I had come to so enjoy from shounen anime like Dragonball Z and Yu Yu Hakusho. Nanoha sealed the deal for me, but that's not what I'm here to talk about.
The third show I picked up during this time was something called Pretty Cure. Like Nanoha, it was very different, not entirely the horrible mess I'd assumed it was going to be. It revolved around two girls- not five, not eight, but two- Nagisa, a sporty, tomboyish girl, and Honoka, a bright future scientist. Being so different, they weren't friends, may have looked at each other all of twice in the course of their academic careers, and had an entirely different set of interests and goals. It's by sheer dumb luck that the two are drawn together to save the world, and at first, they don't even work together as well as they could, because the situation they're in is kinda awkward.
What stood out about Pretty Cure, to me, was not just that it tended to poke fun at itself ("Aah! I just said something weird!"), but in order to do anything, the two had to work together. They couldn't just fling magical spells around everywhere until their enemy was beaten, they had to join hands to fire off their trademark finishing move- and that required planning or luck, because once the enemies caught on, they could use it against them. And the fights? Everything came down to physical force. Since they couldn't use magical attacks without joining as one, the majority of the fights were spent beating the holy crap out of the monster of the week with flying kicks and flurries of punches reminiscent of DBZ. And that was awesome.
I put Pretty Cure and TMM down for a while to focus on writing my story, which turned out to be its own creation, based on the magical girl format, but not adhering to it directly. I returned to both years later, finishing Mew Mew late last year and PreCure just before that. By the end of the first half of the series, their idea of MotW was a bit formulaic; knock the monster down just long enough to join in a combo attack, then fire and solve all the episode's problems in the last few minutes. Not that it was a bad show; the fight against Poisonny had a particularly AWESOME ending to it, and watching them taking down Jyaku-King was simply amazing.
And then they made Pollun a major part of the show.
Pollun was a Cute Thing child from the Field of Light, which PreCure was trying to liberate, and their respective guardian Cute Things hailed from. He was the prince, actually. And accordingly to his age combined with his upbringing, he was a spoiled crybaby. Pollun was tolerable at first (as he didn't get much screentime, what with it being the endgame for the first half of the show), but when the first arc ended and he showed up on Nagisa's doorstep, I felt an indescribable sense of dread. The feeling was right; although Pollun brought with him the ability to power up Pretty Cure to absurd levels (which they needed in the second half, as their power in the first just wasn't going to cut it against the new minions of darkness), every interaction with him in the rest of the show inevitably turned out to be annoying. He got some character development that made him more tolerable (as he learned to live outside the lap of luxury and got used to the idea that there were people counting on him to cowboy up and stop being a scared child in the face of danger), and by the end of the second half, I actually felt a bit sorry for the little guy- Not enough to take back my frequent statements of annoyance, but enough that I sort of pitied him.
I took a breather for a bit, then returned for the sequel series, Pretty Cure: Max Heart!, which featured an all new Cure. Apparently, at the very end of the last show, Jyaku-King dealt the Queen of Light a near-fatal blow as she helped Pretty Cure give the final push against him, forcing her to separate into three parts, the Heart, the Will, and the Life of the Queen. While I was initially jazzed at the return of Nagisa and Honoka, and some intriguing plot developments kept me going, eventually I found myself keeping track by what mile marker I'd hit in the series. The Heart of the Queen was divided into 12 sprites called "Heartiels", which were all different aspects of her personality, like Curiosity, Intelligence, Bravery, Love, and so on. The new Cure that joined them, was interesting from a conceptual standpoint- Shiny Luminous was the Life of the Queen, and only had supportive abilities, giving the team a new "offensive and defensive" dynamic. She could stun enemies to give her teammates the chance to attack, or give Pretty Cure a huge boost in their attack power, or all three could join for a seriously powerful finishing blow, but she couldn't (or wouldn't?) fight herself. Unfortunately, this failed utterly in its execution.
I hated Shiny Luminous. Not because she ruined a good thing, but because, for the most part, she was an absolutely useless Mary Sue. Two protagonists who previously spent an entire 49-episode series kicking ass and taking names pretty much by themselves suddenly couldn't do anything without somebody else's powers to help them in battle against the forces of Darkness. There were some fights where she simply wouldn't do anything until the end, or if she was doing something constructive towards ending the fight, it didn't show it. Excuses for getting the three in one place were often shaky at best and usually boiled down to "It's a convenient coincidence she was nearby, go with it". At least Nagisa and Honoka were in the same class; if they needed to duck out to save the world, they could coordinate it. And if not, "it's a coincidence they were in the same place" felt like it worked a lot better, because there were only two people, not three, to be included in the "coincidence". Hikari never had this excuse, and I can think of at least one time where she showed up from absolutely freaking nowhere at all, with no plausible way of knowing that the girls were in danger, or any plausible explanation as to how she even got to where they were, to transform and help them chase away the bad guys.
What the hell!
To make matters worse, Pollun was back, and his little sister joined the fight halfway through, which meant that there were now two spoiled Cute Things instead of just one. While his powers were geared toward predicting the future and superpowering Pretty Cure, her powers were mostly geared towards superpowering Luminous, which... gave her an energy shield ability, and that's about it. She couldn't even apply the shield to her teammates, so what was the point of having Lulun around, anyway (besides being intolerably cute)? She acted a lot like Pollun did in the first series, and suddenly I understood why he was so ready to come back and help PreCure: even Pollun himself couldn't stand her (possibly, because he saw himself in her). The point is, there were a lot of scenes where he was trying to get her to leave him alone, and failing miserably.
Somehow, though, the ending managed to salvage itself, with all of the intriguing bait the creators dropped over the course of the series coming into play. Unfortunately, the end fight still wasn't as fantastic as the first two, and it was a 47-episode slog through one story arc, instead of two, which helped the first series greatly.
At that time, I decided I'd swear off Pretty Cure for a while; most of the fights, at that point, were disappointingly formulaic, and the final fight of that entire continuity ended in a complete and utter anticlimax. Needless to say, I wasn't impressed, and while the original Pretty Cure had scored an eight of ten in my book, its sequel series was decidedly less fantastic, at a 6 of 10.
During the interim, as I was deciding what next to watch, I next set my sights on Pretty Cure Splash Star, which... admittedly, having just come off of Max Heart, I really didn't have any interest in. The character designs for the two protagonists reminded me a little too much of the first series; spunky orange haired girl and kinder, gentler black haired girl, both wearing similar costumes to their predecessors. I decided I'd just watch the first and last episodes and be done with it.
...Yeah, I'll be returning to that one eventually. The final fight was actually pretty cool and I've read enough of the tvtropes page to want to go back and watch it for its plot value, because it looks all kiiiinds of fun.
As of right now, my current dig is Heartcatch Precure!. Where the previous two series, Yes! and Fresh Precure, seem to have dropped into the same pit of cliches that absolutely drove me nuts about Sailor Moon, Heartcatch swings everything back around to "yes, we are in fact trying to be different" territory. The show, while sugary sweet at some points (and stupid to the point of hilarity at some others), manages to hold itself up by the strength of the concepts supporting it: For the first time, the lead isn't an outgoing energetic girl (that's her partner), and is actually kinda a geek when it all begins. Both Cures can unleash special attacks without need of the other, and have more than just specialized abilities or finishing blows, which makes fighting enemies more freeform, flexible, and keeps things from getting too terribly predictable. There are multiple generations of Cures, and in fact Cure Blossom and Marine are the weakest Pretty Cure team in history. There's a Dark Precure, who is capable of absolutely laying the heroines out flat with minimal effort. The minions are a refreshing change in pace from previous series- Sasorina is a bumbling egotist, Kumojacky is sworn to an oath of MANLINESS, and Cobraja is a hilariously narcissistic pretty boy who might or might not actually be gay. Oh, and the first scene of the show does a fantastic job of convincing the audience that they've just seen the death of the previous Cure in charge of protecting the world. It happens on-screen.
Aside from the sequences where the heroines acquire a new Heart Seed, I really have nothing to complain about. The OST, while it does have a tendency to get drowned out by the show, is well-orchestrated, characters are interesting and expressive (in fact, their expressiveness leads to a lot of visual gags), each episode focuses on the problems of someone different (making it as much Victim of the Week as Monster of the Week, and providing an acceptable excuse for where the bad guys get all their monsters), and the fact that it only takes one Cure to down a monster (but two doubles their efficiency and chances of succeeding) are all very nice. The introduction of Dark Precure so early on makes it clear that unlike most series, they're most certainly not going to win every battle they fight; in fact, trying might end up killing them, and a tactical retreat may be necessary. And through it all, there's this indescribable sense of fun. Tsubomi and Erika have a certain unique chemistry that's hard to pin down, and the OP and ED are both stupidly catchy earworms (regardless of the fact that they're theme tunes and therefore repeat the show's title umpteen times). Though the transformation sequences of Pretty Cure and Max Heart bugged me a little, Heartcatch's is actually interesting, not just filler you know they threw in to fill time. They look, despite the fact that they're powering up to kick outrageous amounts of tail, like they're having a blast. The OP is watchable. The ED is more embarrassing than the OP, and it's still watchable, if only for the gigantic CGI mosh pit and Tsubomi's spontaneous transformation (which looks really, really cool, IMO). And while they do eventually introduce a third Cure and another childish Cute Thing to the mix, the big difference is, Potpourri isn't annoying and Sunshine isn't a useless Canon Sue. Heartcatch PreCure is what Max Heart was supposed to be. Which is to say, it has improved on everything I griped about in the first two series. If I absolutely had to find something to dislike? I'd still say the Heart Seed GET scenes, because they fall under "stupid to the point of hilarity", and... when you think about them for more than a second, they're actually kinda gross.
BUT I DIGRESS
Pretty Cure, as a franchise, has made itself on being different. That's probably why I keep coming back to it. For every hot-blooded shounen hero out there looking to change the world with nothing but his fists and THE POWER OF FRIENDSHIP, it's good to know that the girls can keep up too, instead of standing on the sidelines wringing their hands or merely offering a support role. It's a refreshing change of pace, and nobody's going to convince me otherwise.
This review has omitted the brand spanking new Suite Precure, which has thus far only hit episode two. It's not that I've forgotten about it, it's that I refuse to form an official opinion based on something that has just begun, no matter how generic and disappointing its first episode strikes me as.
...And the above comment doesn't count, either, because Splash Star's first ep struck me as a ripoff of the original Pretty Cure, while the last episode was freaking amazing, so I can't judge based solely on first impressions.
Now that all that's out of the way, let me explain. I actually got my start researching the genre so that I could mock the crap out of it in a parody story I was writing. The protagonist would be sassy, intelligent, and genre savvy, and sidestep every major folly and foible that her predecessors fell for. This research gave birth to 12 Rules to Magical Girl Anime, which poked enormous amounts of fun at all the cliche BS that happens over the course of one episode. Cute assistants? Check. Stupidly long transformation sequences? Check. Unobtainable love interests? Check. Mysterious knights in shining armor to save the day? Double check.
It was through this research that I discovered three gems by pure accident: The first was Tokyo Mew Mew, which I knew had aired here under the name Mew Mew Power. My sister was a big fan of it, then, especially Zakuro, whom she modeled an OC after. I was only vaguely curious; she'd told me things, and while I wasn't willing to put forth the effort to watch it myself, I tended to listen for the sake of satisfying my own curiosities about what I was missing by staying in bed until 11AM. When I watched a few episodes (of the original Japanese dub), I found the writing genuinely funny and the comedy well-timed. The first enemy actually impressed me because it was... well, actually kinda creepy. Kids watched this! My mind was drunk on surprise at the revelation that I was actually enjoying the experience. Holy crap!
The second was Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha, which blew me away, totally and completely. I had started the project under the assumption that everything I was going to dig into was going to be like Sailor Moon, and here was a girl who not only worked completely alone (with the exception of her Cute Thing), the animation was smooth and crisp, the story was well-told and very interesting, and the fight scenes? Oh, God, the fight scenes! The fights weren't that horrid monster-of-the-week crap that everybody else was doing, oh, no, the fights had purpose within the plot, and the attacks were more like the energy blasts and lasers of doom I had come to so enjoy from shounen anime like Dragonball Z and Yu Yu Hakusho. Nanoha sealed the deal for me, but that's not what I'm here to talk about.
The third show I picked up during this time was something called Pretty Cure. Like Nanoha, it was very different, not entirely the horrible mess I'd assumed it was going to be. It revolved around two girls- not five, not eight, but two- Nagisa, a sporty, tomboyish girl, and Honoka, a bright future scientist. Being so different, they weren't friends, may have looked at each other all of twice in the course of their academic careers, and had an entirely different set of interests and goals. It's by sheer dumb luck that the two are drawn together to save the world, and at first, they don't even work together as well as they could, because the situation they're in is kinda awkward.
What stood out about Pretty Cure, to me, was not just that it tended to poke fun at itself ("Aah! I just said something weird!"), but in order to do anything, the two had to work together. They couldn't just fling magical spells around everywhere until their enemy was beaten, they had to join hands to fire off their trademark finishing move- and that required planning or luck, because once the enemies caught on, they could use it against them. And the fights? Everything came down to physical force. Since they couldn't use magical attacks without joining as one, the majority of the fights were spent beating the holy crap out of the monster of the week with flying kicks and flurries of punches reminiscent of DBZ. And that was awesome.
I put Pretty Cure and TMM down for a while to focus on writing my story, which turned out to be its own creation, based on the magical girl format, but not adhering to it directly. I returned to both years later, finishing Mew Mew late last year and PreCure just before that. By the end of the first half of the series, their idea of MotW was a bit formulaic; knock the monster down just long enough to join in a combo attack, then fire and solve all the episode's problems in the last few minutes. Not that it was a bad show; the fight against Poisonny had a particularly AWESOME ending to it, and watching them taking down Jyaku-King was simply amazing.
And then they made Pollun a major part of the show.
Pollun was a Cute Thing child from the Field of Light, which PreCure was trying to liberate, and their respective guardian Cute Things hailed from. He was the prince, actually. And accordingly to his age combined with his upbringing, he was a spoiled crybaby. Pollun was tolerable at first (as he didn't get much screentime, what with it being the endgame for the first half of the show), but when the first arc ended and he showed up on Nagisa's doorstep, I felt an indescribable sense of dread. The feeling was right; although Pollun brought with him the ability to power up Pretty Cure to absurd levels (which they needed in the second half, as their power in the first just wasn't going to cut it against the new minions of darkness), every interaction with him in the rest of the show inevitably turned out to be annoying. He got some character development that made him more tolerable (as he learned to live outside the lap of luxury and got used to the idea that there were people counting on him to cowboy up and stop being a scared child in the face of danger), and by the end of the second half, I actually felt a bit sorry for the little guy- Not enough to take back my frequent statements of annoyance, but enough that I sort of pitied him.
I took a breather for a bit, then returned for the sequel series, Pretty Cure: Max Heart!, which featured an all new Cure. Apparently, at the very end of the last show, Jyaku-King dealt the Queen of Light a near-fatal blow as she helped Pretty Cure give the final push against him, forcing her to separate into three parts, the Heart, the Will, and the Life of the Queen. While I was initially jazzed at the return of Nagisa and Honoka, and some intriguing plot developments kept me going, eventually I found myself keeping track by what mile marker I'd hit in the series. The Heart of the Queen was divided into 12 sprites called "Heartiels", which were all different aspects of her personality, like Curiosity, Intelligence, Bravery, Love, and so on. The new Cure that joined them, was interesting from a conceptual standpoint- Shiny Luminous was the Life of the Queen, and only had supportive abilities, giving the team a new "offensive and defensive" dynamic. She could stun enemies to give her teammates the chance to attack, or give Pretty Cure a huge boost in their attack power, or all three could join for a seriously powerful finishing blow, but she couldn't (or wouldn't?) fight herself. Unfortunately, this failed utterly in its execution.
I hated Shiny Luminous. Not because she ruined a good thing, but because, for the most part, she was an absolutely useless Mary Sue. Two protagonists who previously spent an entire 49-episode series kicking ass and taking names pretty much by themselves suddenly couldn't do anything without somebody else's powers to help them in battle against the forces of Darkness. There were some fights where she simply wouldn't do anything until the end, or if she was doing something constructive towards ending the fight, it didn't show it. Excuses for getting the three in one place were often shaky at best and usually boiled down to "It's a convenient coincidence she was nearby, go with it". At least Nagisa and Honoka were in the same class; if they needed to duck out to save the world, they could coordinate it. And if not, "it's a coincidence they were in the same place" felt like it worked a lot better, because there were only two people, not three, to be included in the "coincidence". Hikari never had this excuse, and I can think of at least one time where she showed up from absolutely freaking nowhere at all, with no plausible way of knowing that the girls were in danger, or any plausible explanation as to how she even got to where they were, to transform and help them chase away the bad guys.
What the hell!
To make matters worse, Pollun was back, and his little sister joined the fight halfway through, which meant that there were now two spoiled Cute Things instead of just one. While his powers were geared toward predicting the future and superpowering Pretty Cure, her powers were mostly geared towards superpowering Luminous, which... gave her an energy shield ability, and that's about it. She couldn't even apply the shield to her teammates, so what was the point of having Lulun around, anyway (besides being intolerably cute)? She acted a lot like Pollun did in the first series, and suddenly I understood why he was so ready to come back and help PreCure: even Pollun himself couldn't stand her (possibly, because he saw himself in her). The point is, there were a lot of scenes where he was trying to get her to leave him alone, and failing miserably.
Somehow, though, the ending managed to salvage itself, with all of the intriguing bait the creators dropped over the course of the series coming into play. Unfortunately, the end fight still wasn't as fantastic as the first two, and it was a 47-episode slog through one story arc, instead of two, which helped the first series greatly.
At that time, I decided I'd swear off Pretty Cure for a while; most of the fights, at that point, were disappointingly formulaic, and the final fight of that entire continuity ended in a complete and utter anticlimax. Needless to say, I wasn't impressed, and while the original Pretty Cure had scored an eight of ten in my book, its sequel series was decidedly less fantastic, at a 6 of 10.
During the interim, as I was deciding what next to watch, I next set my sights on Pretty Cure Splash Star, which... admittedly, having just come off of Max Heart, I really didn't have any interest in. The character designs for the two protagonists reminded me a little too much of the first series; spunky orange haired girl and kinder, gentler black haired girl, both wearing similar costumes to their predecessors. I decided I'd just watch the first and last episodes and be done with it.
...Yeah, I'll be returning to that one eventually. The final fight was actually pretty cool and I've read enough of the tvtropes page to want to go back and watch it for its plot value, because it looks all kiiiinds of fun.
As of right now, my current dig is Heartcatch Precure!. Where the previous two series, Yes! and Fresh Precure, seem to have dropped into the same pit of cliches that absolutely drove me nuts about Sailor Moon, Heartcatch swings everything back around to "yes, we are in fact trying to be different" territory. The show, while sugary sweet at some points (and stupid to the point of hilarity at some others), manages to hold itself up by the strength of the concepts supporting it: For the first time, the lead isn't an outgoing energetic girl (that's her partner), and is actually kinda a geek when it all begins. Both Cures can unleash special attacks without need of the other, and have more than just specialized abilities or finishing blows, which makes fighting enemies more freeform, flexible, and keeps things from getting too terribly predictable. There are multiple generations of Cures, and in fact Cure Blossom and Marine are the weakest Pretty Cure team in history. There's a Dark Precure, who is capable of absolutely laying the heroines out flat with minimal effort. The minions are a refreshing change in pace from previous series- Sasorina is a bumbling egotist, Kumojacky is sworn to an oath of MANLINESS, and Cobraja is a hilariously narcissistic pretty boy who might or might not actually be gay. Oh, and the first scene of the show does a fantastic job of convincing the audience that they've just seen the death of the previous Cure in charge of protecting the world. It happens on-screen.
Aside from the sequences where the heroines acquire a new Heart Seed, I really have nothing to complain about. The OST, while it does have a tendency to get drowned out by the show, is well-orchestrated, characters are interesting and expressive (in fact, their expressiveness leads to a lot of visual gags), each episode focuses on the problems of someone different (making it as much Victim of the Week as Monster of the Week, and providing an acceptable excuse for where the bad guys get all their monsters), and the fact that it only takes one Cure to down a monster (but two doubles their efficiency and chances of succeeding) are all very nice. The introduction of Dark Precure so early on makes it clear that unlike most series, they're most certainly not going to win every battle they fight; in fact, trying might end up killing them, and a tactical retreat may be necessary. And through it all, there's this indescribable sense of fun. Tsubomi and Erika have a certain unique chemistry that's hard to pin down, and the OP and ED are both stupidly catchy earworms (regardless of the fact that they're theme tunes and therefore repeat the show's title umpteen times). Though the transformation sequences of Pretty Cure and Max Heart bugged me a little, Heartcatch's is actually interesting, not just filler you know they threw in to fill time. They look, despite the fact that they're powering up to kick outrageous amounts of tail, like they're having a blast. The OP is watchable. The ED is more embarrassing than the OP, and it's still watchable, if only for the gigantic CGI mosh pit and Tsubomi's spontaneous transformation (which looks really, really cool, IMO). And while they do eventually introduce a third Cure and another childish Cute Thing to the mix, the big difference is, Potpourri isn't annoying and Sunshine isn't a useless Canon Sue. Heartcatch PreCure is what Max Heart was supposed to be. Which is to say, it has improved on everything I griped about in the first two series. If I absolutely had to find something to dislike? I'd still say the Heart Seed GET scenes, because they fall under "stupid to the point of hilarity", and... when you think about them for more than a second, they're actually kinda gross.
BUT I DIGRESS
Pretty Cure, as a franchise, has made itself on being different. That's probably why I keep coming back to it. For every hot-blooded shounen hero out there looking to change the world with nothing but his fists and THE POWER OF FRIENDSHIP, it's good to know that the girls can keep up too, instead of standing on the sidelines wringing their hands or merely offering a support role. It's a refreshing change of pace, and nobody's going to convince me otherwise.
This review has omitted the brand spanking new Suite Precure, which has thus far only hit episode two. It's not that I've forgotten about it, it's that I refuse to form an official opinion based on something that has just begun, no matter how generic and disappointing its first episode strikes me as.
...And the above comment doesn't count, either, because Splash Star's first ep struck me as a ripoff of the original Pretty Cure, while the last episode was freaking amazing, so I can't judge based solely on first impressions.
Comments
Post a Comment