Ranked #1602

Yes! Precure 5

Yes Pre­cure 5 is not as lazy as Splash Star, although an 18 year old cat on Ketam­ine can’t even reach the pin­nacle of lazi­ness the pro­duc­tion staff on Splash Star achieved. At the very least, Yes Pre­cure 5 at least tries to do some­thing mildly dif­fer­ent from the ori­ginal. The main char­ac­ter has a dif­fer­ent per­son­al­ity at the very least (even if orange-haired friend in this ver­sion is pretty much a car­bon copy of the same girl from the ori­ginal Pre­cure). There’s also 5 Pre­cures instead of 2. Even the magical pet looks slightly dif­fer­ent, and is really a trans­form­ing bishie, Fruits Bas­ket style. Otherwise, they’ve kept most of the rest of the standard Precure scen­ario. Pre­cures have to stop evil organ­isa­tion of dreadful vil­lains from an altern­ate world, using the powah of friend­ship, all while col­lect­ing these magical saus­ages or whatever ran­dom arte­fact it is they have to travel across the coun­try to find. That’s not neces­sar­ily a bad thing, because powah of friend­ship to defeat bad­dies is a decent for­mula. How­ever, it appears that’s about the point the pro­duc­tion staff decided to call it a day.

"We’ve changed the for­mula enough from the ori­ginal, now lets use the rest of our budget to hire some strip­pers! Anim­a­tion? Script writ­ing? Fuck that, give it to the intern. Actu­ally no, scratch that, give it to the mon­keys in Toei’s basement."

The writ­ing in this is hor­rendous to quite extraordin­ary levels. What par­tic­u­larly bugged me was how stu­pid it assumed its audi­ence was. Yes, I know the audience are girls with only one digit in their age, but the ori­ginal Pre­cure didn’t talk down to them this much. If we see a shot with a bunch of super excited girls hoard­ing around the stu­dent coun­cil pres­id­ent, it’s pretty obvi­ous that’s she’s pop­u­lar. We don’t need our brain­dead main char­ac­ter and her carbon-copy-from-original-Precure-friend point­ing out to the audi­ence how pop­u­lar she is.

There are other instances where they simply stop try­ing to give char­ac­ters reasons for what they do. I know a reg­u­lar occur­rence in Pre­cure is how shit the vil­lains are, but it’s some­thing I’m going to rag on yet again. When someone fires a weak beam at you that totally misses, what sort of excuse is that to then run away? Or the vil­lain catch­ing one of the magical muffins the Pre­cures are try­ing to hoard, then giv­ing it back to them for no adequately explored reason. And this guy was appar­ently the leader of the vil­lain­ous group. I’m guess­ing the aptitude test for enter­ing this vil­lain­ous group involves a high-hanging banana and a stick, and if they get the banana in under a minute then they’re not allowed join the group.

Even worse than the writ­ing is the anim­a­tion. This is a frig­gen Pre­cure series! These things rely on a com­bin­a­tion of advert­ising toys and pretty visu­als. This series got the advert­ising toys aspect down, for bet­ter or for worse. Well, no, just for worse. But the visu­als are awful. An large amount of this series is incredibly lazy pan­ning shots. You know, the ones where the char­ac­ters don’t actu­ally do any move­ment of their body. They’re just held up on a stick and waved about by one of the base­ment mon­keys at Toei just below the bot­tom of the screen. The back­grounds were prob­ably going for that water­col­our look from the likes of Honey and Clover and Nodame Can­tabile, but instead just looks like child­ish scribbles.

But you know what’s the worst part of all? The very reason I decided to watch these blas­ted Pre­cure series in the first place? The bitchin’ trans­form­a­tion sequences, that even Splash Star man­aged to get off their back­sides and pro­ducing some­thing visu­ally spec­tac­u­lar for. Yes Pre­cure 5’s trans­form­a­tion sequences aren’t bitchin’ in the slight­est. I was look­ing for­ward to the pro­spect of 5 dif­fer­ent trans­form­a­tion sequences for each Pre­cure. What nor­mally character­ises a Pre­cure bitchin’ trans­form­a­tion sequence is how the cos­tume bil­lows out ins some sort of crazy way, com­bines with epic music and swoop­ing cam­era angles.

Yes Pre­cure 5’s didn’t bother with some­thing as cool as swoop­ing cam­eras, instead simply opt­ing to pan down to the next seg­ment of the char­ac­ters body that would spout new cloth­ing. Worse still, each Pre­cure would go through this same pro­cess with little vari­ation. The one inter­est­ing bit of trans­form­ing was Cure Lemonade’s swirly hair-pieces, but even that trans­form­a­tion sequence has the same unin­spired music the rest of them had. Plus, it cycles through each and every trans­form­a­tion sequence in the epis­ode, so by the time we had all 5 Pre­cures, we had to sit through that same lame trans­form­a­tion sequence 5 fuck­ing times. You think it’s all over BUT NO! Then they all have to go through their sig­na­ture moves, all of which look the same and have the same damn music all over again.

You know you’re a shit Pre­cure if you don’t even have good trans­form­a­tion sequences. read more