Premiere Review | Delicious Party Pretty Cure

What’s it about? Yui loves food: she helps out in her family’s diner, enjoys living in her city’s delicious restaurant district, and cherishes the memories of her grandmother who was always ready with a meal to cheer her up. When mysterious, magical figures appear in town and start stealing away the deliciousness of local meals, she simply must intervene! For her courage and dedication to food and flavor, she is chosen to become a legendary Pretty Cure.

It’s PreCure season once again, the most magical time of year! It’s always fun seeing what they do with the formula and the new theme, adding new ingredients and flavors to their tried-and-tested recipe. To a certain extent, what can I say? It’s PreCure. It’s adorable. It’s charming. It’s some colorful easy fun for tired adults and energetic children alike. But hang tight, reader, because there are a couple of aspects to this series that I want to talk about in more detail.

Read the full review on AniFem!

Premiere Review | Tropical Rouge! Precure

What’s it about? The wicked Witch of Delays and her minions have laid waste to the mermaid kingdom beneath the sea, and now have their sights set on conquering the human world. Laura is sent to the surface by the mermaid queen, on a mission to find the legendary Pretty Cures—magical warriors with the strength and shining spirit needed to defeat evil! When she meets an energetic girl named Manatsu, she’s initially not impressed… but Manatsu might just be the motivated, big-hearted hero she’s looking for.

Usually, we don’t cover children’s programming here at AniFem, but the euphoria of Precure being legally available—and simulcast no less!—and the sheer vibrant joy of this premiere is just too great to ignore.

Read the full review on Anime Feminist!

The Pretty Cure for All This Gritty Nonsense

I’ve written a few posts on here about magical girls and how important they are, so it was with a bit of a shock that I realised, apart from my beloved W.I.T.C.H. comics, a few out-of-order chunks of Sailor Moon I caught on TV as a kid, and Puella Magic Madoka Magica, I hadn’t actually… watched that many. Of course, most of this is because my pre-and-early-teen self broke out in hives at even the implication that a show or book was girly (the dread scourge!!). Perhaps sitting down and periodically bingeing all 50 episodes of Go! Princess Precure with CP is a kind of retrospective remedy for that, but mostly, it’s just been ridiculous fun. And it’s made me think more about the genre, and balk a bit at  Madoka (specifically, the movie continuations) and how they take great pride in being deliberately gritty deconstructions that kind of… kick the breath out of the entire point of magical girls.

Go! Princess Precure is 2015’s instalment in the Precure (or Pretty Cure, or PreCure, or Cute Girls Save the World With Perfume All Year Every Year and Sell Millions of Toys in the Process) series; the story of three (later four) young girls who gain the powers of the Princess Precure to battle an evil kingdom of despair. They transform with the power of Princess Perfume and Dress Up Keys, gaining frilly skirts and Big Hair, and for their final attacks they go into Elegant Mode and earn themselves enormous ballgowns. They exhibit the true traits of princesses: beauty, inner strength, kindness, delicacy, and above all hope and love and determination to follow their dreams. It’s ridiculous, adorable, and genuinely engaging and well-put-together (kids’ shows can be like that—who knew?). Also strangely relaxing, which I realised was only strange to me because, again, the magical girl show I’m most familiar with is bloody Madoka Magica, where the most openly determined and hopeful magical girl warrior gets her head bitten off three episodes in.