Kiniro Mosaic: Pretty Days

After 2 seasons of these lovely group of friends and their daily lives in high school, full of fun and happy moments that made the viewers smile to no end, now we reach this short movie that continues the story and fleshes out some of the main characters of this simple, yet heartwarming story.

While there is a school festival moving the plot, this movie focuses in Aya(ya) and her memories with Shinobu and Youko when they were still in middle school, putting focus on how the three friends spent their days together preparing for the entrance exam for highschool.

Even though Karen and Alice took a ... minor role in this movie compared to the screentimes they got in the main series, they were still as loveable as always and had their shining moments, Not to mention, the way how the backstory of Aya was executed definitely compensated for the lack of the two blondies.

The art of the movie was similar to the main series, focusing like always in putting a lot of focus in showing the various expressions of the girls, in the sound department, like most slice of life shows, this movie provides solid background songs that add to the emotions of the different scenes, but in the end tend to not be that memorable, something that happens here as well, the opening and ending themes kept the happy and sweet feelings that the ones from the main series had.

As a Kiniro Mosaic fan, this movie was as good as I hoped it to be and I couldn't be more satisfied with the experience. I can't recommend it enough to any viewer that enjoyed the previous two seasons of this lovable series.

Do you need more Ayayas in your life? Have you been suffering from "Desu!" abstinence for the last two years? Would you like to charge up your blondie power meter? Then the solution is simple.

I will keep this brief since you should already know all about this show from the first two seasons of it. Pretty Days is essentially a 50-minute movie of Kiniro Mosaic taking place during a school festival. The film is divided into two parts: one which covers the events of the festival itself where Shino is tasked with scriptwriting and providing costumes for a stage play, and one which tells a ... lengthy backstory of how Aya, Youko and Shino managed to get into high school to begin with (I.E: before Alice and Karen came to Japan).

The backstory is definitely the highlight of the movie. For most of the TV-series' runtime, Karen has been the one taking the center stage of the show, but this time it is Aya who gets the main spotlight. Here, we get to see how she helps her two friends with less than stellar grades pass their entrance exams together, and also the conflicting emotions starting to take place within Aya herself regarding whether she should go to a better high school (as her grades are much better than Youko's and Shino's), or if she should pick the same one as her friends in order to be able to remain with them for a while longer. Naturally, we already know the outcome of this from the start, but the way it is presented is quite heartwarming and charming to see.

Regarding the school festival, it is perhaps a bit less impressive, but still enjoyable. It is more along the lines of what a typical episode of Kiniro Mosaic might look like in the TV-series. The girls have some light-hearted fun together whilst preparing for the stage play, and then we get to see the results of it at the end, and unsurprisingly things quickly turn chaotic and silly but all in good fun.

The art is perhaps a little bit underwhelming considering that movies generally have better visuals than TV-series do, but in this case it basically looks the same as I recall the last season doing. Of course that has always been more than enough for the show, but maybe it could have been a little bit more still this time around.

Overall, this is another one of those cases where if you have seen and liked the first two seasons of the TV-series, there is essentially no reason whatsoever not to watch Pretty Days too. If you liked one, you are basically guaranteed to like the other. While it may be considered unfortunate that Karen and Alice are largely irrelevant for large portions of the film, I also think it was about time the other girls got some more focus instead of the blondies for once. As a result, Pretty Days manages to be more than just cute and funny (though it still does that too of course), but momentarily also quite touching. And for what after all is nothing more than a simplistic moe comedy at heart, that is about all you could ever ask for.

I don’t think Kiniro Mosaic was ever going to be amazing. I watched two full seasons and this lengthy OVA because the series is entertaining and I get to hear Nao Touyama say “desu!” a lot. I wouldn’t bother sitting through much less than that, but I’m also wary of any promise of more.

Pretty Days would have fared better had it stuck to the usual formula of post-series OVAs and simply given us another beach episode or a series of amusing sketches that didn’t fit into the main show or something similar. The one-dimensional characters, lackadaisical storylines, repetitive gags, chalky backgrounds, and ... carefree mentality of Kiniro Mosaic can’t support much more than a series of loose comedic scenarios and adorable accented English, even when the last two episodes of the season roll around and it’s time to pretend that there are deeper things at stake. The problem with repeating the tried-and-true approach is that this OVA has 50 minutes to work with, which means stretching out across two episodes material that sometimes doesn’t suffice to keep abreast of one. Even if I can watch two episodes back-to-back, a double-length episode quickly becomes exhausting.

That leaves the other approach for a special post-series anime project: the feature film. Pretty Days isn’t quite long enough to pull that off either, but damned if it doesn’t try to be equally important. The way the story is framed, you’d think this OVA were ramping up to something significant; a film is, after all, the perfect opportunity to address more serious topics and develop a storyline with much greater depth than an individual episode of a show could afford. Similar shows have taken that chance to nail down some development and explore their premises in a way that the regular seasonal run was unable to replicate. Pretty Days makes the attempt, but can’t muster an ounce of maturity or substance to break orbit of regular Kinmoza fare, with the result that it completely misses its chance at creating an emotionally resonant storyline and comes off as a brooding, overlong rehash of jokes and story beats we’ve already gotten plenty of from the show.

Shino faces mild burnout while Aya, struck with ennui or depression or just boredom, questions the nature of their friendship and flashes back to her middle school days with Youko and Shino. Exploring the history behind how Aya became part of the group and how they all wound up going to the same high school might have made for a solid half of a regular episode, but it’s not a compelling enough tale (and not compellingly told) to carry a program of this length. The middle school storyline, aside from eating up most of the screen time with intermittent flashbacks, seemingly has nothing to do with the frame story of the gang (Shino in particular) preparing for the school festival. There should have been some thematic continuity or lesson to tie the two plots together – maybe not in a regular episode, but certainly in a production like this that pretends to greater significance.

Moreover, the plot lacks focus. Whatever troubles Aya is experiencing, they don’t seem to have a serious point of origin or solution. I watch her relive her memories expecting to find some indicator of what she’s feeling in the present, why she might be feeling that, how she can overcome it, how that relates to the events taking place around her in the present… I get none of that. Pretty Days is just Aya remembering things with no goal in sight and then a school festival that amounts to little more than the usual excuse to screw around with comical characters. This OVA sets itself up to have a plot and some manner of consequences, but it doesn’t follow through.

At its best, Pretty Days doesn’t deliver anything more than what we could get out of a regular episode of the show, but because it tries to coax a feature-length story out of its 50 minutes, the pacing feels completely wrong, the story drags, and the overall effect is to remind me that, as much as I might enjoy Kiniro Mosaic, it really is a mediocre series.