Star☆Twinkle Precure

Hikaru Hoshina is an energetic middle school student with a love for space and the occult. As she draws constellations in her notebook, a small and fluffy creature suddenly appears from it! The creature, which she names Fuwa, turns out to be an alien with the ability to create warp holes.

When Fuwa's companions, the aliens Lala Hagoromo and Prunce, arrive on Earth, they declare that they are searching for the Precure, legendary warriors who will save the universe. But an organization known as the Notraiders soon follows and attacks, intending to capture Fuwa and its power. Overcome by a desire to protect Fuwa, Hikaru finds herself transforming into "Cure Star," one of the Precure that Lala and the others have been searching for!

It is now up to Hikaru and the rest to fend off the Notraiders' onslaught, discover the rest of the Precure, and find the Star Color Pens, artifacts that will awaken the 12 Star Princess who keep the universe in balance.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Hagoromo, Lala Main

Kohara, Konomi Japanese

Hoshina, Hikaru Main

Naruse, Eimi Japanese

Yuni Main

Uesaka, Sumire Japanese

Amamiya, Elena Main

Yasuno, Kiyono Japanese

Kaguya, Madoka Main

Komatsu, Mikako Japanese

Fuwa Supporting

Kino, Hina Japanese

Prunce Supporting

Yoshino, Hiroyuki Japanese

Garuouga Supporting

Tsuruoka, Satoshi Japanese

Aiwarn Supporting

Murakawa, Rie Japanese

Himenojou, Sakurako Supporting

Taichi, You Japanese

Yanagawa, Akari Producer

Yazaki, Fumi Producer

Hasegawa, Yuri Assistant Producer

Miyamoto, Hiroaki Director, Episode Director, Storyboard

Reviews

Jan 25, 2020

CURE_WAVY

Recommended

Star Twinkle Precure delivers a beautiful collage of art, music, and emotions that comes together to form something really special!

The show follows the main girls on a galaxy spanning adventure, effortlessly switching between whimsical exploration, and slice of life comedy on one hand; and relatively dark and emotional stories involving loss, anger, and isolation on the other. All without missing a beat.

The art is superb. The science-fiction designs feel fresh while comfortable, and the diverse settings of interstellar space are exploited well. But the standout is the character designs, especially Lala (who i'll return to) . The transformation sequences are STUNNING, amazingly cute and ... graceful and the girls also sing while transforming which is beautiful and releases so much pent up emotion after a tense or dramatic episode. Hearing the precure's break out into song after 20 minutes of building emotional weight is an incredible catharsis, and enough to make me tear up.

Personally the girls other than Hikaru and Lala fall into the background for me. But it's a testament to how great this show is that Madoka, Elena, and even Blue-cat had scenes that excited, and moved me.

Hikaru's enthusiasm and curiosity is easy to take for granted at first, but by the end of the show I started to realize how serious she actually was, and she really started to make me feel something. Combined with her really cute character design, and lynch pin position on the shows cast, and character-dynamics she's a solid and important character that's executed well. I thought I had Hikaru's stereotypical character all figured out when I first saw her, but in the end she had me in tears on more than one occasion...

Lala had me from the start. Her character design is simply perfect, perfect color scheme, cute alien feelers, and her really cute outfits with her iconic loose yellow socks. Lala makes cute alien expressions like 'Lun~' and 'oyo~' which is very cute and charming. Her voice is really cute and expressive. There's about 100 different way's for Lala to say 'oyo' or 'lun' and they all make perfect sense, its amazing.

While Hikaru is right at home on earth, the whole time Lala is making a concerted effort to fit in, learn about human culture, and explore. She even enrolls in the school just for the experience. It's easy to forget and let Hikaru's enthusiasm and excitement outshine her, but Lala is a long way from home.

Lala's story is a great one, and her personality is also wonderful and inspiring. I don't think I'm really capable of expressing my love for Lala in this review, and it would be out of place to try lol.

Star twinkle precure is one of the only animes I can think of that can make me Laugh and Cry in the space of a single episode. And one of the only animes that managed to catapult one of its characters so deeply into my heart (LALA!!!!!). It's great and you should watch it.

ALso Kappard is sick and his arc is awesome, and his design is cool.

Reviewer’s Rating: 10

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Jan 26, 2020

ZettaiRyouiki

Mixed Feelings

Warning: Spoilers!

Why is this franchise still around? I’m not being facetious here, I genuinely want to know this. This was a franchise built on friendship and cool fights, and now the cool fights are gone, the friendship thing has less weight each time for some reason, and the quality of the previous two seasons was nonexistent. Meanwhile Aikatsu is on its last legs, despite being a far better franchise. How unfair.

But this isn’t the topic for that. Welcome to the Star Twinkle review by everyone’s favorite caustic reviewer.

Star Twinkle is a step on the right direction compared to KiraKira and Hugtto, but only because when ... you hit the bottom there’s nowhere to go but up. The plotline is simple enough: the universe is gonna be destroyed unless our plucky heroines gather 12 Star Pens and revive the Star Princesses to fix this mess. Seems Toei realized the more “intricate” storylines of DokiDoki/GoPri/Hugtto were terrible and decided to keep things simple which frankly is a wise move. There are a few twists and surprises during the way but that’s basically it. It works, there’s no big plotholes nor issues, good so far.

The characters are… mixed bag. Most are alright, but the pink Cure and the baby mascot are terrible. Did I mention they hog much of the screentime? Why do you keep doing this, Toei?

Anyway. Hikaru is the pink Cure and she’s plain terrible. Loud, obnoxious, childish, and utterly annoying, Hikaru encapsulates the worst traits of pink Cures in a twintailed package. Her catchphrase is dumb and forced and gets thrown in all the time, to ear-shattering points. Her plotline is also barely touched on, and while it shows she could’ve been a better character… She’s not. Lala is the GREEN Cure who doesn’t look green because for whatever reason Toei hates green. She’s an alien and has cute verbal tics and is serious but earnest and overall one of the best girls in the show. She deserves being the most popular Cure this season. Shame after the plot featuring her home planet she becomes background noise, aside from the movie. Erena with R is the yellow Cure and she’s basically Nao from Smile but with dark skin. She spends most of the season being a walking prop though once they remember to give her focus her storyline isn’t too bad and is linked to the main plot even. I still don’t get why they did 3 plots about discrimination in 4 episodes but sure. Madoka is the purple Cure and much like Erena is Nao then Madoka is Reika because the season about imagination lacks any. Seriously, change the strict grandpa for a strict dad and you get Madoka. Both even have the same plotline which just screams lazy and shows how little Toei cares about her. Finally there’s Yuni the blue Cure that joins “halfway”, more like 40% in now, and she’s a weird one. Not her personality, which is fine and dandy, but rather she appears somewhat late and then joins in a rather shoehorned way and barely gets focus outside her spotlight episodes. It’s almost like Murayama had the plot outline done and his editor said “Dude, you forgot the mid-season Cure” and he then just went “Oh shi-“ and shoved her in rather haphazardly. But no way is Toei that incompetent, right?

For other characters, we have Prunce and Fuwa the two mascots. Prunce is cool and thus gets treated like dirt. Fuwa is annoying and she gets put on a pedestal. Yeah. The various family members and friends of the Cures are all fine, except Hikaru’s dad who is basically just as annoying and obnoxious as his daughter down to the stupid catchphrase. Luckily he’s only in two episodes. The villains are cool though, and they even make good points about things which is either really good writing or really bad one. The jury’s out on this one. Still, all in all it’s not a bad cast.

The sound is fine. I could do without Hikaru screaming “KIRAYABAAAAAA” every five seconds and the OP and ED all feel identical to previous ones. But if it ain’t broken don’t fix it.

As for the art, the designs of the characters are good. The main girls are all cute and easily recognizable, the villains have a youkai patter which is pretty neat, and there’s no real issue here. However the fights are subpar and among the worst in the franchise. Too much beamspam, not enough physical contact. Even the final battles are 90% beamspam. It’s not even COOL beamspam, since they reuse stock animation all the time. Boring!

All in all, Star Twinkle is not one of the strongest entries in the franchise. It’s a decent entry point, and if you wanna watch everything PreCure it won’t be the worst part of that, but the glory days of Splash Star and Fresh and Heartcatch are long gone. A pity about that.

PD: Haircuts are the worst.

Reviewer’s Rating: 6

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Jan 26, 2020

Miguling

Not Recommended

(This review is spoiler-free!)

Ahh, Star Twinkle. The anime that could, but didn't.

After the ambitious Hugtto, Star Twinkle certainly had a tough act to follow. However, with the theme of imagination being advertised, one could expect something incredibly grand coming out of it. However, it... Just didn't happen as expected.

Unlike Hugtto which pushed limits of its own genre by virtue of celebrating the fifteenth anniversary of the PreCure franchise, it appears that Star Twinkle has decided falling back to the tradition. While tradition's a safe bet and makes Star Twinkle fulfill the role it was meant to play, there's little that's outstanding, here, which makes it ... doubly ironic when the overarching theme of the season makes it imply otherwise.

Let's crack down on the details.


Story: 3/10

The plotline is basic: Notrayders are an evil faction who want to take over the universe, in particular a small little fluffy creature that the main protagonist, Hikaru, names Fuwa. Then, the cures gather up one by one and begin a space adventure to retrieve the lost Princess Star Color Pens and save the universe!

And that's it! It's a mostly linear storyline, really. It occasionally attempts to be compounded by character development moments, but they fall flat most of the time, as the vast expanse of the universe truly invited to great and epic adventures, which Star Twinkle does manage to do, but in an awkward, very awkward pacing. Some moments might catch someone off-guard, but otherwise it's a very, very basic plotline with little surprises to be had; And those that the anime attempts end up falling flat.

The ending doesn't help things either, unfortunately; As you get closer to the end, everything feels all over the place and rushed. It seems like they tried to cram what would've been better as a season's worth of development into less than 10 episodes, which is really less than ideal for an anime that spans over an entire year.

For a series all about imagination, this is particularly hurtful.


Art: 7/10

The art certainly doesn't disappoint. Fantastic cure outfits this season around, and incredible visuals for attacks. One of the attacks of the season, in fact, is currently my favorite visually! The transformation scenes are also very artistically appealing, and the background art is incredibly tasteful! The space theme is truly the sparkly goodness they wanted to convey.

However, there's one major downfall - Stock footage. It's used in borderline excess, here! Even towards the final fights, you'll find stock footage there, and tons of it! It's just time-wasting, and furthermore, the fluidity of the transformation and special attack scenes looks plain odd when put against the standard style of animation in normal fight scenes or day-to-day life. Even with the quality of the art, this flaw is really crippling.


Sound: 6/10

First in PreCure: The cures sing during their transformation theme! This time around, the song was designed for them to sing around it, and soon enough, the quartet forms and the full song is made! While this is truly an original twist, it might take some time for a veteran of PreCure transformation scenes to get used to, but trust me - you'll catch yourself humming along at some point.

Otherwise, my personal opinion is that the rest of the soundtrack fails to be as impressive. There's a clear attempt to use electronic instruments to convey the futuristic theme of space, but it tends to clash with the occasional use of more classic instruments, and not in the best of ways, unfortunately.


Character: 2/10

When it takes nearly 40 episodes for one of the leads to get actual development, there's a problem.

It was Hugtto's strong point, but Star Twinkle utterly failed here in my opinion. Now, characters being undeveloped wouldn't have been a complicated issue if they'd willingly kept it that way, making it that characterization would have been irrelevant in scoring the anime; However, they fatally attempted to toss characterization moments in some episodes to try and get more involved in the cast. However, it just turns out to be extremely off-schedule, and this characterization tends to be reverted back to its initial state later on, which makes you wonder what was the point in the first place.

When the cures are pushed into corners, there's borderline an echo chamber forming where they simply re-state their resolve with little variation. When there's no character development to be had, the cures, instead, work as the typical adventure team - which, in my opinion, fits the mood of the anime better.

The rating wouldn't be that low if they hadn't tried to cram a season's worth of development into a pocketful of ending episodes - At some point, you just want them to get on with it already and settle on how they want to handle their characters!


Enjoyment: 3/10

Yeah, the anime had me yawning towards the final episodes. It was fun on the first ones, but as it went on and it cemented its own personal characteristics, the cake ended up tasting surprisingly weird underneath the fancy coating. It does its job, though - but it's certainly not enough for a demanding person like me.

Let's hope Healin' Good will bring some NOVELTY! Some SUSPENSE! Some things that WEREN'T ATTEMPTED BEFORE! Hey, the lead cure is adorable, though, that's a good start.

Reviewer’s Rating: 4

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	Poll: Star☆Twinkle Precure Episode 1 Discussion Dalek-baka - Feb 3, 2019	45 replies	by celluceta »» Sep 1, 12:24 AM
	For those that have seen the whole anime Shy - Aug 1	4 replies	by LinetteFox »» Aug 1, 4:31 PM
	Poll: Star☆Twinkle Precure Episode 48 Discussion Ashhk - Jan 19, 2020	12 replies	by Cozye »» Mar 27, 3:59 PM
	Poll: Star☆Twinkle Precure Episode 41 Discussion Ashhk - Nov 24, 2019	12 replies	by Cozye »» Mar 27, 3:32 PM
	Poll: Star☆Twinkle Precure Episode 16 Discussion aria__chan - May 18, 2019	14 replies	by Cozye »» Feb 29, 5:34 AM