Crunchyroll on the History of Magical Girls

Yet another video on the history of the magical girl genre, this time from the YouTube channel of Crunchyroll, the streaming service.

Any of these are necessarily selective, though I find this one slightly more irritating than usual. When it comes to discussing Sailor Moon, it focuses on gayness while ignoring more sigificant accomplishments and also claims Sailor Moon basically introduced homosexuality to anime—a statement as ignorant as all the claims from a few years back that Black Panther was the first movie with black people in it. Crunchyroll also treats of Puella Magi Madoka Magica as the first self-aware or self-critical magical girl series, a claim so common yet erroenous that it’s produced a cottage industry of blowback.

The genre has always been self-aware and included some amount of self-mockery, so much so that self-awareness may be one of its central characteristics, but it has also seen deliberate deconstructions before Madoka. What Madoka accomplished that its predecessors didn’t is a complete reorienting of the genre toward uglier content and more nihilistic themes. Madoka, like Sailor Moon before it, turned the whole genre into its imitators.

Aside from that, well, whatever; a lot of commenters over on YouTube have complained that this video fails to mention some particular series or other, but since this is a half-hour, condensed discussion, a lot is necessarily going to get excluded.

In any case, collecting historical overviews of the genre is part of my schtick here, so I repost them as I find them.

It may or may not be coincidental that Crunchyroll has recently acquired the rights to Healin’ Good Pretty Cure, which I believe is the first Pretty Cure series—except the original—to get licensed in English (not counting the brutally localized Glitter Force adaptations on Netflix). To a magical girl fan, that’s significant, and I hope it means more Pretty Cure series will appear on the service in the future. Since I refuse to use pirate sites, I still haven’t been able to watch most of this magical girl mega-franchise.

At the time of writing, however, only episodes 13 to 17 of Healin’ Good are available, but a notice indicates that episodes 1 to 12 will appear later. This perhaps represents some problems with the licensing.

‘Pretty Cure’ Holds a World Record

This is kind of old, but it escaped my notice at the time. Apparently, the film Hug! Pretty Cure, Futari Wa Pretty Cure the Movie, now holds the Guinness World Record for most magical girl warriors in a single film, as reported on the Guinness site.

They accomplished this by stuffing every single Cure into the movie, a total of fifty-five. To acknowledge the record, Guinness arbitrarily required that each girl had to have dialogue and participate in combat.

This is such an oddball record, it’s unlikely that any other movie will beat it—unless it’s another Pretty Cure Film.

Update

In other news, I have decided I am going to make a more ambitious goal for the completion of the revision phase of Rag & Muffin. I believe it is possible to have it done by the end of this weekend.

I just finished revising chapter ten. There are twenty chapters. From here on, the book will need more work, but that’s still only five chapters a day.

Once I finish this, I can send it out the door to my editor and get to work on the research and outlining phase of Son of Hel, which I’m quite looking forward to.

Rag & Muffin
Phase:Revising
Due:5 years ago
54%

A Comparison of ‘Smile Pretty Cure’ and ‘Glitter Force’

Don’t you cry tonight.

A vlogger calling herself MagicalGirlStarlight produces this handy video making a comparison between the original Smile Pretty Cure and its localisation Glitter Force, which was produced by Saban and Netflix. Most of the changes she discusses I was already aware of, but one I wasn’t—Glitter Force eliminates or heavily edits the show’s more emotionally fraught scenes and removes references to death.


She ends the video by asking the haters to please show some restraint. I generally agree with the sentiment, and I’m not one of those weebs who think the English language is an abomination that besmirches all Japanese media it touches, but I will say that I find heavy-handed localisations like Glitter Force to be wrongheaded. The show tried to eliminate Japanese references and change the setting to the United States, apparently to avoid confusing American children, but everything is so obviously Japanese, the alterations only make it more confusing.

For example, there is an episode in which the characters take a school trip to Kyoto. Glitter Force changes this to an Asian expo. But to get there, they ride in a train past Mount Fuji, and then they walk through a bamboo forest. So where the hell in America are they?

Glitter Force is intended for children, not weeaboos, so some changes are understandable. For example, I like the changed title; “Glitter Force” sounds like a sparkly team of action girls (which it is), whereas, to the English speaker, “Pretty Cure” is mere nonsense. (It’s actually a pun when pronounced by a Japanese speaker, but most non-Japanese people have no way of knowing that.)

I also don’t really mind the changes to the characters’ names. Japanese names can be a mouthful to small children who don’t speak Japanese.

But they should have kept the Japanese setting simply because they had to go to absurd lengths to hide it and it was futile in the end anyway.

Also, although I refuse to enter the sub vs. dub debate, the dialogue in Glitter Force frequently makes me grit my teeth. Watch the video above and wait for the scene comparison at the end, and I think you will see what I mean. The English lines are obviously wedged into a scene that wasn’t meant for them, and this is typical of the show as a whole. If you’re going to dub, fine, but try to respect the lip flaps.

Finally, the change to the show’s emotional tenor is unnecessary and even cowardly. I mean, it’s freaking Pretty Cure. It’s not exactly edgy. Agree with it or not, I can understand why they censored half of Sailor Moon back in the nineties, but Pretty Cure? What angry phone calls from parents were they anticipating over Pretty Cure? This is the network that green-lit Big Mouth for Pete’s sakes, but they think a little crying is too much for kids to handle.

So in the warped world of Netflix, you can masturbate in front of children but weeping in front of them is totally off-limits.

#memes

Rawle Nyanzi on ‘Pretty Cure’

Rawle Nyanzi, who blogs both on anime and on Appendix N (that is, those fantasy works that inspired Dungeons & Dragons), noticed that I was preparing to review Glitter Force, which I will seriously get to after I’ve cleared some other things off my plate, so he tried his hand at watching the original Futari wa Pretty Cure.

His comments are amusing. He writes, Continue reading “Rawle Nyanzi on ‘Pretty Cure’”

#WaifuWednesday on Thursday

Featuring Nagisa Misumi.

I’m currently neck-deep in Glitter Force, the English adaptation of Smile Pretty Cure!, the ninth Pretty Cure series, but only the second to get dubbed in English.

Although its writing is decidedly better, Smile PreCure doesn’t have the technically impressive action sequences of the original Futari wa Pretty Cure. So this week’s Waifu Wednesday goes out to one of the original cures, Nagisa Misumi, also known as Cure Black. In addition to starring in the original series, she reappears in the sequel Pretty Cure Max Heart and in multiple movies.

Continue reading “#WaifuWednesday on Thursday”

Now Starting ‘Glitter Force’

The year 2004 represents a sea change in the magical girl genre. In that year appeared two series that would give a new look and feel to mahou shoujo. One was Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, a series aimed primarily at the neckbearded adult male crowd, and the other was Futari Wa Pretty Cure, aimed at young girls. Both would produce spin-offs. Pretty Cure became a cash cow franchise for Toei Animation, with an impressive total of fourteen series to date, the most recent of which, KiraKira☆Pretty Cure a la Mode, began in February of 2017 and is still ongoing as of this writing. There are also several movies, including crossovers that bring together cures from different series.

Both of these franchises are notable for introducing to the genre a heavier emphasis on physical combat. Both series also completed the process of all but eliminating the previously omnipresent romantic subplots in favor of a focus on feminine camaraderie. Continue reading “Now Starting ‘Glitter Force’”

The Pretty Cure Double Shot

If sobriety is a disease, this is the cure

Shake ingredients together with ice until cold. Strain into double shot glass.

Strong shot with faint fruity notes. Pairs well with your best friend. Drink until you see rainbows and feel ready to fight.