Kiniro Mosaic: Pretty Days

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.