Reviews

Suite Pre­cure had two things going for it. The bitchin’ trans­form­a­tion sequences and the CGI dan­cing in the end­ing song. Ser­i­ously, those things are so god­dam pretty and col­our­ful. Com­bined with the epic musical score, the bitchin’ trans­form­a­tion sequences were the high­lights of the epis­ode. The CGI dan­cing end­ing was pos­sibly even more awe­some. Anime always needs more dan­cing, but those I’ve gen­er­ally been presen­ted with haven’t been up to scratch. I can under­stand that the obses­sion with the Haruhi end­ing dance is pre­cisely because it’s so easy, but you can hardly call that a proper dance. That’s just a bit of hand wav­ing. Suite Pre­cure is a proper dance. Anime still hasn’t quite got the hang of CGI mecha, but they’ve man­aged to get dan­cing magical girls look pretty damn awesome.

Prob­lem is, these two scenes made up about 4 minutes of a typ­ical epis­ode. I was often temp­ted to simply fast-forward to them and call it a day. The series star­ted off fairly well, albeit in an utterly bizarre sort of way. The open­ing 8 minutes of the first epis­ode were like some bas­tard child of Rain­bow Gate, Mazinka­izer and Jew­el­pet Twinkle. The altern­ate magical musical land and the pre­pos­ter­ously ridicu­lous bad guys, I laughed the entire way through the scene. But nope, can’t be hav­ing that. This is a magical girl series. We need to have human teen­age girls for the young female view­ers to con­nect with and for the dirty otaku to pen dirtier doujins of. Which is a shame, because I would have so watched a series of that magical musical land, provid­ing it too had CGI dan­cing end­ing songs and bitchin’ trans­form­a­tion sequences.

The main prob­lem is the incred­ibly lame attempts at cre­at­ing con­flict between the main two char­ac­ters. Hibiki and Kanade are our two heroines tasked with the respons­ib­il­ity of defeat­ing massive cakes and viol­ins who have been infec­ted by ebul musical notes. To do this they have to dress in pre­pos­ter­ously fanci­ful dresses and hair­dos as Pre­Cures and com­bine their powers as fight­ing machines. How­ever to suc­cess­fully com­bine their powers, they have to be as good friends as pos­sible, to teach young girls about the import­ance of friend­ship and to give smelly middle-aged males a chance to don their yuri goggles. This would be fine and all if the meth­ods they used to cre­ate con­flict between the two weren’t so dumb. The reason the two had fallen out of friend­ship in the first place was because one of them stood under the wrong tree by acci­dent. Which, while face­palm worthy in itself, the lead up to the reveal with two other little girls in the exact same pos­i­tion simply amp­li­fied the retarded­ness of the situ­ation. The next few epis­odes all revolve around cre­at­ing equally con­veni­ent obstacles for them becom­ing proper friends. None of them felt in the remotest way genu­ine and simply felt like Hibiki and Kanade being massive idiots.

Besides, I have a massive prob­lem with the entire plot of the show. I can handle a cat from a magical musical dimen­sion turn­ing two unsus­pect­ing teen­age girls into fight­ing machines. I can equally handle the vil­lains being a cat and a trio of goons who sing their responses, although I do believe the show missed a massive trick by not hav­ing them being a barber­shop quar­tet. Nah, my main prob­lem is the whole good music vs ebul music thing. What hap­pens in the plot is the ebul bad guys sing sad songs that make every­body all depressed. The good guys only cre­ate happy music so every­one is joy­ful all the time. The show even goes out of its way to say quite blatantly that music is only there to make people feel happy. I can’t be the only one who has a prob­lem with this, right? Sad music has every right to exist and has a highly import­ant place in soci­ety. It’s a strange thing to com­plain about, and maybe the show changes its tune (har har har) later on in the show to reflect a more even opin­ion, but the entire show centres around music. So blatantly say­ing that sad music is ebul grates on my nerves. Sad music needs love too!