Posted on in anime, Let's Watch Healin' Good Precure

Let’s Livewatch Healin’ Good Precure – Episode 2

Healin’ Good‘s second episode gets a pretty standard “template” of Precure episode out of the way fairly early. One where the mascot(s) and Cure(s) have some kind of brief falling out before reconciling. It’s an easily-traced narrative arc so instead of just recapping the whole episode, I’d like to just zoom in on a few bits (this is also an excuse to write less overall, but you’ll have to excuse me there. It’s been a LONG week).

Firstly we get formally introduced to our villain trio. The designs stand out a bit less to me than last Precure’s, mostly boiling down to “twink, big guy, and This Girl”

Don’t get me wrong, she’s very important.

Our evil overlord appears to be made of some kind of evil magma-sludge stuff, which is an interesting direction if nothing else.

The main thrust of the episode here though is Rabbirin (Nodoka’s partner if you’ll recall, the rabbit) “breaking up” with her after she sees her fail at a bunch of basic sporting events. This is a pretty silly reason to do this of course but the show manages to sell it pretty well. Nodoka actually is clumsy

The reason, of course, is the illness alluded to in the last episode but explicitly mentioned here. We’re not told what it was (and given that this is a kids’ show we may never learn of it by name) but it clearly had her hospital-bound for a good chunk of her young life. We’re even shown that she had to use a wheelchair for sometime.

To Rabbirin’s credit, she’s just not being a jerk for no reason. Somewhat rarely for a magical girl anime, the mascot character is actually shown worrying about her partner’s safety. It’s a good point! One rarely made in this kind of show because it kind of runs counter to genre convention, but you can at least see where the rabbit fairy is coming from.

What changes Rabbirin’s mind is, of course, a tearful speech. The first of this installment, and a pretty damn good one. This is where Nodoka brings up her past, and we also just get some generally-great dramatic shots that just make you want to cry along with her.

It’s interesting to note that Nodoka’s primary motive for becoming a Precure seems to be gratitude. Which while the series has trafficked in dozens of motives over the course of its existence, I’m not sure about that one specifically. Certainly, it’s at least new to me.

It’s an interesting concept, and it actually makes her feel quite down to Earth (haha) in contrast to her immediate predecessor Hikaru from last year’s Star Twinkle. Healin’ Good has done a lot to endear me to it so far but Nodoka’s characterization–surprisingly strong given how we’re only two episodes in–is certainly up there.

To sidetrack for a bit: Aoi Yuuki brings a sort of even-toned performance to the role that is a bit more downbeat than what she’s most famous for, but no less optimistic and heartening. It works really well, and it’s honestly great to hear the woman finally get to play a “straight” magical girl after the long and winding road she took to get here. (If you’re not familiar, Aoi Yuuki’s starmaking role was that of Madoka Magica‘s titular lead. Later, she’d be equally known as Hibiki Tachibana in Symphogear. Two roles that are adjacent to the genre but have very different takes on it and are aimed at an adult audience. There’s even a little bit in here about how Nodoka “loved becoming a Precure” that certainly seems like it was written with some subtext in mind. Even if it’s pure coincidence, it’s still nice to hear her deliver it.

Oh, and Rabbirin actually apologizes for hurting Nodoka. Something that is again, pretty basic but not actually a given. It’s nice to see.

It should come as zero surprise that after reconciling, Nodoka and Rabbirin kick the Megapathogerm of the week’s noggin in with almost no effort (this ain’t an action episode, to say the least). This was a surprisingly solid one all around, when I saw the title card drop I was expecting to tolerate it at best. These tend to be among my least favorite kinds of Precure episode, since the conflict often feels a bit artificial. Here, I believed it entirely and I think it was resolved well, if briskly.

Elsewhere in the episode, Nodoka went to school for the first time. We get a bit of exposition here (“being Precure is a secret!” For whatever reason, as usual!)

Well I wouldn’t turn the opportunity down.

Most impressive to me though was the sheer economy in this little exchange. Formally introducing Nodoka’s two co-leads (gal-ish Hinata and responsible, athletic Chiyu) and setting up their dynamic as a trio almost instantly.

And at the episode’s tail end, we see that Chiyu actually saw the entire fight in this one go down. Surely, this will lead to long-running drama and is not just a way to segue into our next ‘Cure introduction (I snark, but I live for this stuff).

And lastly, I’m generalizing my whatsit I mentioned last week into just a Screenshot Of The Week. I think we’ll be going with this one today, where Nodoka is being scouted by various sports clubs. What it rather looks like is more like she’s about to walk into a yuri doujin.

No worry folks, she’s fine! But seriously everyone in this show blushes like a happy drunk at the slightest provocation. My assumption is it’s a stylistic quirk of the director. Look at me getting all analytical in a caption!

Until next time!

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch Healin' Good Precure

Let’s Watch Healin’ Good Precure – Episode 1

To lead with a simple truth; this project is the actual reason I created this WordPress blog in the first place. I’ve tried this once before, last year I tried liveblogging HeartCatch Precure on my now-defunct janesanimeblog site on good ol’ tumblr before life got in the way. I wanted to give it another shot, as doing just half an hour a week feels a lot more doable. Whether I have a ton to say or very little will vary week by week of course, but I do want to write at least a little bit about every single episode.

Why? Very simple; I love magical girls. That’s not rare among transwomen (or women in general honestly), but something about the pure-hearted straightforwardness of the genre speaks to me. Both in the rare show like Precure that is still actually for kids, and more adult-oriented things like Symphogear.

So what of Healin’ Good itself? Well, every Pretty Cure series has two raisons d’arte. The first is pretty obvious for any show marketed to kids. The second is usually an examination of some simple theme or group thereof. Last year’s Star Twinkle Precure (the first Precure I watched end to end!) examined aspirations, imagination, and, aesthetically, space. It’s a little too early to say much that’s definitive about Healin’ Good, but it’s obvious that taking care of yourself is a big part of it. I’m a little iffy on the “health food” tone some of this takes here in the first episode, but honestly, it’s a solid message for kids. Especially given that one of Precure‘s recurring sponsors is McDonald’s. The second seems to be taking care of the planet. There’s a little “Gaia theory” going on here, even this early on the show makes some implicit connections between keeping yourself healthy and keeping Earth healthy.

But enough about all that deep stuff. Let’s meet our protagonist. This is the memorably-named Nodoka. She is an extremely good girl.

Precure protagonists tend to come in a couple different moulds, and Nodoka definitely fits into the “diligent girl who likes to help people” archetype. Seiyuu fans will already know that Nodoka is voiced by the great Aoi Yuuki, who seems to have taken a circuitous path from voicing Madoka of Madoka Magica fame, to Hibiki of Symphogear, to finally a “no-frills” magical girl in the form of Nodoka. She brings a lot of palpable enthusiasm to the role, and it’s infectious.

Nodoka herself seems to have something of a sad backstory. We’re not given the details, but given her parents’ comments early in the episode and a very brief flashback we get later, it seems like Nodoka is or was sickly for much of her life. Her moving to the health resort(?) town is what opens the first episode, and seems to be the result of the old-fashioned “move to the mountains to get her some fresh air” diagnosis.

Well before we get to the actual magical part of the episode, Healin’ Good goes out of its way to establish the girl at the heart of it. She enjoys walking around town, helps an American couple take a picture, lounges on some grass to soak up the sun, helps an old lady carry some things, and of course, briefly runs into the two characters who she will doubtless eventually form a trio with. (Let’s pretend to be surprised by that when the time comes, hm? Makes the whole thing more fun.) She is accidentally bowled over by a chatty type with twintails, in what is one of several pretty strong physical comedy breaks.

The other girl she encounters running. I could say more, but I think I’ll just let these pictures speak for themselves.

Of course, this is Pretty Cure. So while all this is happening, a completely different half of the story is going down nearby. Meet this season’s mascots.

This is the first episode, so details are sparse, but these four (who I will be referring to simply by their respective animals for now, not sure what sub group I’ll end up watching long-term) are tasked with partnering with a human to save the world from evil pollution people. By their queen, who is one of those long-haired French dogs I forget the name of. Specifically, she phrases it this way:

Aaaaaatreeeeyuuuuuuu

To which our penguin-shaped friend has a pretty understandable reaction a few minutes down the line.

Penguin has no time for cryptic bullshit.

Also a petrified lady is just kind of…there, in the animal kingdom (itself implied to be underground). Just kind of hanging out. We’ll get back to her later in the show, I’m sure, but for the time being it’s just kind of an amusingly incongruous detail.

Of course, maybe there’s nothing wrong with her and her whole body just Did That.

The way they eventually cross paths with Nodoka is pretty standard, but I must shout out the bunny for using this absolutely impeccable piece of logic to figure out what kind of person they should be looking for.

The fact that the Rabbit and her eventual partner-in-fighting-evil seem to have the same taste in girls is not lost on this blogger.

Eventually, our baddies show up, created by corrupting tiny nature spirtis called Elements. These things are called Pathogerms, because this is Pretty Cure and Pretty Cure knows that subtlety is for cowards. Your average (Mega-)Pathogerm appears to look something like this.

This thing starts corrupting the park that Nodoka was hanging out in. It’s here that Precure and Sidekick cross paths for the first time.

You know what happens next.

Can I level with you? It’s hard to make a magical girl transformation sequence that I don’t love. I love how simple this one is, and the flower motif is lovely. Will we see it a billion times over the course of this show’s run? Absolutely. Is it ever going to lose its magic? If so, only a little, and by repetition alone.

The only quibble I have is, yes, the mascots do become part of the “healing stick” wands the Precures have. Yes, it’s kinda weird. It’s alright, we’ll get over it together, you and I.

Nodoka–now Cure Grace–promptly puts her priorities in the exact wrong order, proving again that all magical girls are required to have at least a small amount of Powerful Dumbass Energy.

I genuinely can’t get over this screencap. I love her so much, y’all.

Grace, in grand Precure tradition, then A) jumps real high by accident, and B) pounds the Megapathogerm into the dirt with nothing but a couple of kicks and throws. There’s a “magic bunny shield” thrown in there briefly as a block, but still.

This is the face of your new god.

Importantly we’re also introduced to this show’s version of the “wawawawawa” from HeartCatch, and it iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiis somethin’.

Press F?

Standing around vaguely during all this is this person, who, well, we don’t really know much about them yet, but hey! They’re here if you like androgynous demon folks.

I’m not wild about that particular visual trope to be honest (there’s a long history of giving villains stereotypically femme or gay traits), but it’s nothing over the top here so far and who knows, there might be way more to this character than meets the eye, so we’ll let it slide for the time being. Plus, if this sort of design is your thing, I doubt you’re much minding.

The episode kinda just ends there, honestly. Other than a genuinely hilarious bit where Nodoka finally registers that she’s been talking to a bunch of animals for the past 15 minutes.

But other than that, that’s the wrap for the first episode of the first Precure of the 2020s. Honestly? I loved it. I’m not that hard to please with this kind of thing though and I’m curious as to how more discerning / picky (choose whichever adjective you find more applicable) Precure fans will size up the show. Regardless, you can count on a blog post like this per week barring some kind of major personal problem. I hope to see y’all around, but before I truly end things on this post I wanted to just drop some random thoughts I had no place for elsewhere in it.

  • I believe this is the first Precure to start in the same season as a Madoka series since HeartCatch. This really doesn’t mean anything at all, but it’s kinda neat, trivia-wise. I like to think Nodoka and Iroha would be friends, vastly different settings aside.
  • The image I used for the banner has a similar scene that it cuts to immediately after. I like the juxtaposition of both Nodoka and the Rabbit about to start on their adventures with each other, but neither knows it yet.
  • Gonna try to do a Distance Shot Of The Week as I kinda love distance models and think they’re endlessly charming. Today’s entry is this extremely powerful shot of a waving Nodoka.

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Posted on in anime, Misc. Anime

765 Days Later: Late Night Idolm@ster Ramble

Finally, some actual original anime writing for my anime blog, eh? It’s nice to get into the swing of things of getting my ideas sorted without worrying too much about the formal aspect. So let’s cut to the chase.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been intermittently taking in turn-of-the-decade classic The Idolmaster in 2-4 episode chunks. I’m still only halfway through the series (I have episode 12, “Last Stop On A One-Way Road”, on pause as I write this, and will be finishing it before I write much of this post) but now felt like as good a time as any to jot down some thoughts on it.

For one thing, despite premiering only a year after Angel Beats! (a show that is on my mind solely because I recently watched it for the first time too), I’m struck by how sharply different they look. When I reviewed it in the waning days of last year, I was interested in how un-2010s AB! looked, and I remain convinced that, stylistically, it’s something of a capstone to the Haruhi Era. IM@S, by contrast, looks so 2010s that it seems like it could’ve come from almost any year of the decade. The main telltale sign that it’s an earlier, rather than later, period idol series is that the dance sequences are still hand-drawn, as opposed to defaulting to the CGI-aided approach that’d later become the norm. It does also occasionally suffer from spotty drawing quality, but, not everything can be perfect.

Idolmaster kind of gets sold by its diehards as “the one idol anime you have to see”, even if you don’t really like the genre (and speaking personally it’s kind of in the lower half for me, as far as anime genres that tend to have all- or mostly-female casts). I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect when I started it. I was confident it would at least be well-made, but that doesn’t of course guarantee that it’d vibe with me specifically. Especially since I’m not huge on the genre in general (though with Zombie Land Saga a few years ago and 22/7 this season I suppose that’s changing).

What genuinely surprised me, first and foremost, was how committed the show is to selling itself as an underdog story. 765 are not perfect queens who can do no wrong. There is no Beyonce and this is not Destiny’s Child. Both in the actual plot, and, to my surprise, the character writing especially, the series takes great pains to demonstrate that these are people. People who have their own hopes, dreams, and fears. And that “getting to the top”, glamorous as the idea might be, is both hard and sometimes kind of banal. One of the first episodes of this thing has our girls guest on a kind-of-demeaning local TV spot that is a cooking-themed gameshow hosted by a frog puppet. It’s not exactly glitzy.

I haven’t counted, but I’m reasonably certain that at least at the point of the show that I’m at, there are more scenes of our characters at practices and rehearsals than there are of them actually performing.

None of this is new ground for idol shows now, of course. I’m not sure how innovative the idea was in 2011, either. But it’s really the character writing aspect that makes all of this connect so well. Even the characters that at first seem like goofy one-note moe` archetypes eventually come into their own. Miki is the big example that comes to mind here. She’s introduced to us with no particular fanfare and for a while basically all we know about her is that she likes taking naps. If you’re the deep-reading type you might (correctly) intuit that she’s rather fickle, but not anything beyond that.

Episode 12 is mostly about Miki, after a misunderstanding where she mistakenly thought she’d be able to join sub-unit Ryuuguu Komachi, she skips out on practice for an upcoming concert and goes MIA. We learn more about Miki here than we have in the prior 11 episodes, and it’s a really strong example of how to do a lot of character-building in a very short time. We see what she does when she’s upset, things like spending time wandering around the city and ducking into and out of all sorts of shops.

Let she who has not stared longingly into a fish tank, wishing for the simple life of a betta, cast the first stone.

We see her reveling in attention she gets from what appears to be a group of model scouts, who she then briefly sings for.

Without explicitly spelling anything out, these sequences (which last maybe 15 minutes in total), convey that she’s a sort of “free spirit longing for an anchor” type. The show does cheat exactly once by explicitly giving us the cause of all this (parents who encourage her to do whatever she wants), but it’s still an impressively detailed character study to squeeze into a single half-hour episode. All the while, her fellow idols have to, in another case of the show being unexpectedly down to earth, seriously contemplate what might happen if she simply doesn’t return.

The Producer (who is himself surprisingly well-written given his role in the cast) does manage to convince her to come back, and the episode ends with a neat little bow of dialogue here:

Miki realizing what she really wants and acting on it is great, but it’d be meaningless without the buildup earlier in the episode. It’s quite a lot of heavy lifting done in just a short amount of time.

And all this is just for Miki, mind you. The show has slowly been building up similar stories with almost every other member of the cast.

I’ve found myself drawn to several different characters, honestly. Which is a great sign for something with this many. Some I expected to like–Takane’s weird sideways charisma and Chihaya’s stoicism, incredible singing voice (not to knock any of our other girls, but both in fiction and out, you do not really have to have an amazing voice to be a pop singer, you just have to know your instrument) and obvious, though so far largely unexplored, troubled past make them easy favorites. I also love Makoto despite her “cool girl who desperately wants to be seen as cute” card being a bit rote. Others, I was quite surprised by. I’ve really come to appreciate Haruka, who the OP seems to frame as the “main character” even if that’s kind of a silly concept with a cast this large. She has what is probably the simplest personality–she’s hardworking, kindhearted, and has always wanted to be an idol–but it’s just sold so well! Any time she’s upset or struggling I find it impossible not to root for her, I hope the show explores her character a bit more in its latter half.

There’s some other random details I really like too. On the obvious end, the fact that there’s so much music in each episode is just great. It’s not all entirely my thing (I like J-pop well enough but some of the songs in this series specifically lean a little too over on the twee side) but it does really make it feel at times like you’re watching some kind of narrative documentary about the group. On the more minor side, there’s lots of stuff big and small that goes in to making 765 feel like a bit of a ragtag operation, especially near the start of the show. Everything from long blocks of no gigs to the idols’ ages ranging pretty widely (the youngest two are 13, the oldest, 21). It’s not quite the indie idol anime I would love to watch some day–I find that particular subculture endlessly fascinating–but it feels earnest.

So yeah, that’s where I’m at with Idolmaster right now. I’m liking the show so far, I’m not sure if I’ll write about it again before I do my proper review, but either way, I hope you enjoyed this little ramble.

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Posted on in anime, Misc. Anime

Scrapped Maken-Ki Review

So, one kind of content I’m going to be trucking in here is stuff that I never actually finished for other places. There isn’t a ton of this, but it’s out there, and this pretty-much-finished review of shitty 2011 ecchi anime Maken-Ki is certainly one example of it!

The reason I never put this up on Anilist (where most of my full-length reviews go) is that I didn’t feel good reviewing something I had technically not finished. I dropped the series about halfway through the second season because, while the first one was bad in a kind-of-entertaining way, the second was just basically unwatchable. I was especially annoyed by it because it is possible to do this kind of show decently well (I’ve recently seen Senran Kagura Ninja Flash which I’d argue is much better than this by virtue of having a cast that are actually likable. Related point, I actually reviewed that one). This just ain’t that.

So here’s that original review, un-cut and un-censored! (Why would it be censored? I make no sense sometimes) For your reading uh….pleasure? Major NSFW warning here, by the way.

Maken-ki is no one’s idea of an artistic tour-de-force. One of the few solo productions from studio-within-a-studio Spirits of AiC before being handed off to Xebec a few years later, the harem/ecchi/action/comedy/drama/whatever dropped in 2011 (the followup, 2014) to the excitement of people who watch anime for gratuitous butt shots and not many other folks. Time has not exactly raised its profile, and while it was popular enough in its day to get that second season, and the manga it’s based on is, impressively, still running, Maken-Ki in general is the kind of thing that the layman is unlikely to have heard much about. They are even less likely to have strong opinions on it.

So why review it? Well, to paraphrase another critic, any art made honestly is worth engaging with on some level. To that end, I did go into Maken-Ki intending to give it a fair shake, and the question we have to start out asking is, for what it’s trying to do, does Maken-Ki succeed?

The good news first; the show does at least understand that it’s not going to make a grand statement about anything. Most of the series is content with being pretty low-stakes and you could, being charitable, call it unpretentious–this is not Darling in the FranXX.

But….well, it’s a harem series. Takeru, our protagonist, has some degree of character, which puts him a cut above the worst offenders in the “boring audience stand-in” category, but it’s not much of a character. Mostly, he swings wildly between trying (and usually failing) to play knight in shining armor for every woman he sees, and being brainlessly perverted. If those seem at odds with each other, they’re twice as jarring in the show itself as they may sound on paper. The less said about Usui, the only other male character of note, the better.

The girls by contrast are a bit better off. While they’re still definitely mostly pretty cliche character archetypes, they’re more colorful and likable ones. While there is a definite overtone of “pick your favorite and pre-order the figure, Otaku-san” to the proceedings, there is still a good amount of variety here. The female lead, Haruko, is the doting sisterly childhood friend type. There’s the enthusiastically lovestruck Inaho, a twintailed tsundere (Himegami), a redheaded tomboy (Azuki), and on and on. The sheer size of the cast means you’re going to find someone you at least like seeing on-screen. Personally, I enjoyed Inaho’s particular combination of “extremely sincere” and “dumb enough to be fooled into thinking a stuffed doll is the object of her affections”.

Their character designs are distinctive and colorful too, if definitely indicative of their origins in a manga from 2007.

Tonally, Maken-Ki is definitely at its best when it’s operating in dolty comedy mode. The laughs here are hardly fresh jokes, but they’re mostly the sort of low-stakes fun a show like this can specialize in without ever feeling too stale. The main misfires here are when the series fails to respect the conventions of its own genre–there’s a little Slapstick Karma going on here; a character can act like an ass to another if they’re immediately punished, but sometimes the show will just have the victim break down crying instead, which is no fun for either the character or the audience.

You may imagine this is me, speaking to the series.

There’s also the show making the mistake of thinking that pointing out its own use of cliches constitutes doing something interesting with them, which simply isn’t true, partially neutering even this relatively modest strength.

Its greatest asset though is probably actually its action scenes. As a rule; they’re fun, flashy, well-animated, and competently-directed. It’s a shame then that they don’t constitute much of the series.

When Maken-Ki is not at its best, it sometimes has the arrogance to assume it can pull off any sort of seriousness, which it absolutely can’t. Attempts at the sort of dramatic gravitas that defines other action shows come across as comical because of their close proximity to the gags. Attempts at relationship drama; be it bittersweet longing or direct heart-to-heart-ness are downright offputting. Maken-Ki just does not have those sorts of chops. Likewise, when it tries to establish some broader lore and history for its setting, it’s hard to care and very easy to just tune out. These elements aren’t things that inherently can’t work together, it’s just that Maken-Ki is not well-written enough to let them.

Some episodes, especially in the second season, abandon all of this pretense entirely, basically reducing the show to softcore porn with a comedic or action-y backdrop tone. This development makes the show feel more honest, certainly, but it’s not really any better for it. Some episodes later in the show’s run truly seem like little more than an effort to see how many harem cliches you can cram in a single 12-episode cour. 

At what point is something “beyond parody”?

The show, depressingly, seems to actually understand that something is off about all this, but not what. Several minor villains are grody, gropey otaku stereotypes who use their powers to inflict perverted situations on the female cast. It’s not clear if Maken-Ki thinks this framing is somehow clever or if it excuses what it’s doing fanservice-wise, but it’s largely just dull and gross all around.

Yeah, why?

These all belie a bigger problem, which is that Maken-Ki does not seem to have a good grasp on who, other than maybe its original author, any of this is actually for. Its limited strengths actively work against each other. If you’re here for lighthearted fun, the plot gets in the way. If you actually care about the stabs at deeper storytelling going on, the Plot gets in the way. If you’re just here for the cheesecake, everything else gets in the way. The series has one of the archetypal problems of a mediocre anime–it tries to have something for everyone, and, consequently, pleases nobody.

At the end of the day there really just isn’t much to this series. If all you need to get you through twelve hours is female nudity and the occasional bit of nice animation, you’ll be fully satisfied. Otherwise? There wasn’t a ton of reason to watch Maken-Ki when it was new, and there certainly isn’t much of one nowadays.

Posted on in Other Posts

and now, this.

Making a WordPress blog in 2020 feels so incongruous that it’s almost funny. Yet, here I am, adding a third Writing Thing to my plate.

If you’re reading this, you already know who I am (if you don’t, how on Earth did you find this place? No seriously, tell me, it’ll be great for my SEO) and what I’m about. But just to reiterate: I talk too much about anime. Sometimes, I even get paid for it. Right here on WordPress though I’m mostly going to be posting stray thoughts and stuff I never quite finished from elsewhere. I do plan to liveblog the new Pretty Cure when it launches in a week though, that’ll be chill, right? Regardless, this is going to be more relaxed and casual than most of my writing. I like thinking of my anime-related writing as documenting a personal journey, and I think returning to my roots a little bit will help in that regard.

Hope y’all choose to stick around. Don’t be afraid to subscribe if you like what you see ✌