2023: My Third Quarter in Anime
Oct. 1st, 2023 01:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerWith an almost month-long vacation booked right in the middle of a more familiar “anime season,” I did some thinking in advance about how two of the things I was getting away from were Blu-Ray players and broadband connections. I have to admit I was also sometimes dwelling on previous long vacations (and even Christmas holidays, too) where, stuck brooding how far a good many other opinions run into had already soured on series then streaming, I would end up “dropping” those shows and be left dispirited. Since then I may not run into quite as many other opinions, but I still decided to get through some short series in full during the month before I left, try the same thing in the month after, and not pick up anything new streaming. It all seemed to work pretty well, even as I noticed complaints about how thin on well-done shows the season I was sitting out seemed.
Discotek “license rescuing” Gunbuster for a Blu-Ray release would seem another fine feather in that company’s cap. Unfortunate memories snuck up on me, though, of how the now-antique DVD set from Bandai Visual USA had vaporized most of the initial goodwill other fans might have accepted that company’s premium pricing strategy with when it was discovered a particular music cue during an early training sequence had been changed from something “too much like Chariots of Fire.” No official statement from Discotek as to whether this would be enforced on them as well was made, but enough gloomy expectation of it gathered among other fans that my own anticipation slumped into “am I actually going to watch this Blu-Ray now that I’ve got it?”
Then, I happened to consider a way I could at least give myself more significant differences to deal with. After years of comments that Gunbuster’s “music and effects track” that would allow an English dub to be made didn’t exist any more, Discotek announced it would be able to produce one after all. I keep admitting I only dare to experience dubs in exceptional circumstances, offering the contrived comment “it’s not that I dislike them; it’s just that I fear somehow coming to the sudden point of sharing in the inescapable contempt for them that suffused that over-dedicated slice of fandom I dropped straight into over twenty-five years ago.” Since then, of course, the skills anime-releasing companies can access do seem to have improved; the first comments I ran into about Discotek’s new Gunbuster dub did appear quite positive. It seemed to work for me too. I found the assorted characters quite appealing, although I was just a little conscious of impressions some comments had amounted to “the performances of the main characters, or main character herself, help carry everyone else.” Although I have wondered whether I’ve managed to train myself over the years to take in more than just the words at the bottom of most frames (a common comment made by “dub fans”), I did have occasional impressions of the glowing cockpit gauges in the first episodes looking kind of interesting. One other thing I have to admit to thinking, anyway, was that I’d already experienced a “parody fandub” making use of Gunbuster...
In any case, I’d started off telling myself “like all ‘moving pictures,’ this is a collaborative work; you can’t just make a big deal of ‘Hideaki Anno directing,’” only to get to thinking in the back (and “epic” to “grandiose”) half of the series certain compositions brought Anno’s later anime to mind. On getting back from vacation, I managed to notice an announcement the commentary track from Jonathan Clements that hadn’t been fit onto the Blu-Ray after all had at least been made available. While I didn’t go to the lengths of “synchronising the audio with the animation,” it was interesting enough to listen to by itself during a long drive. Comments the late-1980s OVA just happened to burnish Japan and refight World War II were familiar; explanations of its mechanical designs referencing live-action Japanese science fiction movies and shows reminded me of my own unbalanced interests; a comment its “time dilation” was a sort of reflection on “staying a fan while everyone else you know moves on” was very much something to think about. As for one more thing to think about, I had been amused by a recent comment, responding to “Enough with ‘starter series’; what anime would prove you can move on to stranger, stronger stuff?”, that proposed Gunbuster as a good example of that.
Back when I finished the last of the Love Live! anime featuring that franchise’s original group of singing “school idols,” a certain reluctance to just say goodbye to them then and there led me on to starting to play a mobile game featuring their songs. As another mobile game in the franchise came to an end, the sudden thought came to me to wrap back around to the original TV anime. I knew I’d liked it when I’d first watched it on Blu-Ray a certain number of years ago. With the anime being ten years and three months old when I returned to it, though, I was wondering a bit about those old impressions of the computer animation used whenever more than three characters were dancing on screen in close-up just not looking right. As it turned out, while even the computer animation of the now-discontinued game (which used fixed choreographies but changed depending on what characters had been cast and what costumes they were wearing) seemed better at fitting the pieces of their faces together (and didn’t have to deal with “drawn animation” also being squeezed into the performances), I was now struck by the impression some of the “drawn animation” didn’t look that impressive either when showing characters from a distance in less grand moments. For all of that, though, the story did manage to win me over again. The initial “let’s put on a show and save our school from closing!” motivation might have helped attract a wider audience to start with, but I was conscious now of the “it’s when I perform that I’m really living” angle that soon sets in. I was quite willing now to enjoy the humorous side of the series too, even if I might have amused myself asking a question perhaps not meant to be asked, namely how the amiable fantasy of school idols being “amateurs” and doing everything themselves encompassed going from one girl playing the piano to full backing tracks. As well, however, starting off I did wonder if a few of the characters had quite developed their distinctive yet somewhat peculiar voices, particularly Kotori, who has many traits but perhaps no grand defining one (beyond, maybe, “she’s nice”) the way her fellow characters do. Those voices did set in after a while, and there was a moment where Kotori herself says she doesn’t seem to stand out the way her friends do, even if her solution might have been just one more trait among many. I just might have been more interested in noticing things like that than in the apparent hints for some of the more popular slash pairings that do seem an enduring part of the “fandom.” At the same time, I’ve got to admit I did pick up on moments that might be elaborated into more unconventional pairings, and already being aware of those possibilities might mean I’m not altogether blithely detached from the topic.
I’d thought about squeezing one more series into the first month of this quarter, but on taking a closer look at my first choice I was surprised to see it was longer than “most series are these days,” too long to seem to fit among everything else. Trying to think of something shorter to watch instead was tricky for all of the anime I have waiting. Then, I happened to remember City Hunter 3 was much shorter than the two series preceding it. That had me wondering a bit about “things winding down,” but it didn’t seem to suffer too much in terms of production values, even varying the regular outfit of the armed troubleshooter Ryo a bit at last and seeming to make his assistant Kaori appear a little different too. Jokes about Kaori looking kind of boyish had also faded away; now, some of the attractive female clients Ryo keeps being hired to assist were making knowing comments to Kaori about just who Ryo is really interested in for all of his overenthusiastic reactions to them, with Kaori getting a bit nervous. This didn’t quite finish off the City Hunter anime, but there’s not that much left to see now.
I did at least continue a few titles I was already watching streaming. With Mix working into another high school baseball tournament I’d been ready to hope the series would pick up a bit, and it did seem to. A coy bit of the story involving an amnesiac middle-aged man who’d drifted into town to hang around did begin to meter out explanations he’d been in high school during Touch, the previous story by Mitsuru Adachi Mix is a loose sequel to. Some of the other middle-aged men in Mix, including a rival baseball player from Touch who’s now coaching a high school team that happens to include his son (who happens to look just like his father did), might have added a bit of interesting texture even if it was also a little tempting to invoke that lazy crack about “peaking in high school.” Then, just as the story was getting to the point where the second climb up the greasy pole seemed almost expected to falter in the final showdown and I was thinking maybe whatever was between Touma and Otomi was in fact a more wholesome kind of “sibling love” regardless of “they’re not related by blood,” some of the sudden tragedy familiar enough in Mitsuru Adachi’s stories that I’d thought had already been taken care of here in the backstory crashed in. It was affecting both despite and because of “it isn’t fair” reactions, but I did get left wondering whether I’d ever get to see the story continued and concluded for all that I’d wondered that before.
Wanting to take in more of another series I’d sampled a single episode from during the first sixty days of this year, I turned the calendar back fifty-five years and a few months to the black and white Cyborg 009. Its second episode, like its first, had the lone female cyborg of the team, Cyborg 003, held hostage by bad guys, but after that things improved a bit there. I grew willing to think of this series as “a superhero show,” where anything could happen but things were put back together the way they’d been afterwards. Some of the “cyborg powers” did seem a bit beyond what “machinery concealed within a person” might bring to mind, such as the shapeshifting of the flippant little kid with a Charlie Brown-like lack of visible hair, Cyborg 007. (He did indeed make a blatant James Bond reference after a while, if also after I’d impressed on myself how the code numbers were spoken as “zero-zero,” not “double-oh.”) With those points noted, however, I then considered how there were no recurring villains or built-in and seemingly insurmountable agonies for the heroes. I did start half-daydreaming about now-antique memories of seeing reruns of the 1960s Spider-Man cartoon even as I supposed the ray gun battles and tragic fates of this anime marked Japanese TV animation diverging from American cartoons towards the end of that decade. Then, though, I ran across a claim (from the person I’d depended on for “fansubs”) that this Cyborg 009 had pushed a bit too far like certain other titles in the decade following it and been cut short as a result. (That did mean I’ve now managed to watch more than half of this series.) As for one of my first reactions to the show being that it hadn’t bothered with an “origin story” or formal introduction, in glancing into a recurring blind spot through looking up a Wikipedia article on a live-action tokusatsu series I happened to find it linked by its creator Shotaro Ishinomori to Cyborg 009, and saw two theatrical animated movies had preceded the TV show. That suggestion there hadn’t been quite as much of a gulf between “well-animated and respectable theatrical features” and “churned-out cartoons for TV drawing on manga” for quite as long as I’d supposed was intriguing.
As I caught up at the end of from my vacation, I happened to think this was the chance to take in a work of “indie anime” I’d heard about called Volicia of Pluto. I knew it was an undeniable “girls’ love” piece, something I take an interest in that’s rather distinct from my relaxed reactions to winking, plausibly deniable insinuations in works where I instead just focus on the “cover story” with perfect satisfaction. It was also supposed to have a fantastic edge. Starting off, though, I did have the impression “this was made by a few people” meant less “ultra-limited animation” than “crude character drawings,” and the jumps in the plot just might be a counter against insistences from some fans that “the story ought to be the easy part.” On the other hand, it did just happen to stand against other complaints about a lack of giant robots in recent anime, even if it ended on a cliffhanger staked on a crowdfunding campaign.
Even if Summer Time Rendering had turned out too long to watch in a single month at the height of summer, I still wanted to get started on it before the official season ended, accepting that this meant offering comments on it here at a mere midway point. As I started it I realised I didn’t remember much about it from a first mixture from others of enthusiasm for the show and indignation it had streamed on a service only just getting into anime, perhaps even “one more service to have to subscribe to” for some. All I seemed to remember was a bit of promotional art with an ordinary teenaged guy (if with hair just long enough to tie into a ball at the back of his head) and a blonde-haired teenaged girl wearing a reasonably sedate one-piece swimsuit. That, I suppose, leads me to that ever-nagging thought that to say too much about “pleasant surprises” is to deny those surprises to anyone who happens on these comments first.
If a paragraph break is any safety at all against that, I guess I can say that starting into the series I did remember old comments about “jumping back in time over and over, but not to the same ‘Groundhog Day moment,’ such that there’s more tension and drive.” There have been twists, turns, and shocking revelations about the full horror to be avoided. I did wonder a bit early on about “a guy trying to rescue a girl” with a few thoughts about a real “middleman” getting in the way of a different sort of story, but those thoughts have faded as the cast has expanded. The production values do seem decent, and there’s a greasy edge of “fanservice” every so often too. I did make it to the point where the opening theme changes, if from something I’d toss the comment “stylish” towards in the mere hope others wouldn’t disagree to a more conventional “action series” opening.
On getting back from vacation I moved on to the second half of the original Love Live series, which meant taking the shrinkwrap off at last from the boxed set I’d ordered only to jump into the streaming episodes in advance of the concluding movie coming to a theatre near me. I had recollections the production was starting to look a bit better in general and the amused assumption this had something to do with the very first series having been a success, but there were still moments where the long shots looked a bit diffident. I’d supposed from the beginning the still illustrations of the mobile games would have spoiled me, anyway. There were a few bits about the story I hadn’t quite remembered among more familiar moments where the characters filled in further; I might have contrasted them to the enduring situations in the mobile games before a still more vivid sense of “just as this story began, it’s going to end” set in. (That previous sense of beginning, as contrasted to the second mobile game making these characters established veterans, had also interested me.) In any case I also got to thinking the pieces of Love Live seem to come together for me into something more than a rigid sum might suggest, and then I had the even more peculiar thought that total carries back to make the pieces more impressive and enduring.
Still somewhat behind those who watch Soaring Sky Pretty Cure as it streams, I was intrigued to see comments that “a ‘magical boy’ may be something, but a magical ‘girl’ who’s old enough to legally drive is something else!” Even after getting back to the fantasy world the strange magical baby who grants the Pretty Cures their powers in this iteration of the franchise had been spirited out of at the beginning of this series, a way was found to keep her with the main characters as the creator of “monsters of the week” changed to a more conventional sort of villain. Once that storyline had played out over a dozen episodes, it found a different way to keep the baby with everyone else as a new antagonist showed up, different again in his own way. The adventures remain uncomplicated yet appealing, bearing positive messages for an appropriate audience. I’ve been taking slight interest in how some of the computer-animated Pretty Cures who introduce the computer-animated end credits each week now represent the preceding series of the franchise; going back to try and take some of them in alongside a current instalment still feels like a bit much for me, though.
Discotek “license rescuing” Gunbuster for a Blu-Ray release would seem another fine feather in that company’s cap. Unfortunate memories snuck up on me, though, of how the now-antique DVD set from Bandai Visual USA had vaporized most of the initial goodwill other fans might have accepted that company’s premium pricing strategy with when it was discovered a particular music cue during an early training sequence had been changed from something “too much like Chariots of Fire.” No official statement from Discotek as to whether this would be enforced on them as well was made, but enough gloomy expectation of it gathered among other fans that my own anticipation slumped into “am I actually going to watch this Blu-Ray now that I’ve got it?”
Then, I happened to consider a way I could at least give myself more significant differences to deal with. After years of comments that Gunbuster’s “music and effects track” that would allow an English dub to be made didn’t exist any more, Discotek announced it would be able to produce one after all. I keep admitting I only dare to experience dubs in exceptional circumstances, offering the contrived comment “it’s not that I dislike them; it’s just that I fear somehow coming to the sudden point of sharing in the inescapable contempt for them that suffused that over-dedicated slice of fandom I dropped straight into over twenty-five years ago.” Since then, of course, the skills anime-releasing companies can access do seem to have improved; the first comments I ran into about Discotek’s new Gunbuster dub did appear quite positive. It seemed to work for me too. I found the assorted characters quite appealing, although I was just a little conscious of impressions some comments had amounted to “the performances of the main characters, or main character herself, help carry everyone else.” Although I have wondered whether I’ve managed to train myself over the years to take in more than just the words at the bottom of most frames (a common comment made by “dub fans”), I did have occasional impressions of the glowing cockpit gauges in the first episodes looking kind of interesting. One other thing I have to admit to thinking, anyway, was that I’d already experienced a “parody fandub” making use of Gunbuster...
In any case, I’d started off telling myself “like all ‘moving pictures,’ this is a collaborative work; you can’t just make a big deal of ‘Hideaki Anno directing,’” only to get to thinking in the back (and “epic” to “grandiose”) half of the series certain compositions brought Anno’s later anime to mind. On getting back from vacation, I managed to notice an announcement the commentary track from Jonathan Clements that hadn’t been fit onto the Blu-Ray after all had at least been made available. While I didn’t go to the lengths of “synchronising the audio with the animation,” it was interesting enough to listen to by itself during a long drive. Comments the late-1980s OVA just happened to burnish Japan and refight World War II were familiar; explanations of its mechanical designs referencing live-action Japanese science fiction movies and shows reminded me of my own unbalanced interests; a comment its “time dilation” was a sort of reflection on “staying a fan while everyone else you know moves on” was very much something to think about. As for one more thing to think about, I had been amused by a recent comment, responding to “Enough with ‘starter series’; what anime would prove you can move on to stranger, stronger stuff?”, that proposed Gunbuster as a good example of that.
Back when I finished the last of the Love Live! anime featuring that franchise’s original group of singing “school idols,” a certain reluctance to just say goodbye to them then and there led me on to starting to play a mobile game featuring their songs. As another mobile game in the franchise came to an end, the sudden thought came to me to wrap back around to the original TV anime. I knew I’d liked it when I’d first watched it on Blu-Ray a certain number of years ago. With the anime being ten years and three months old when I returned to it, though, I was wondering a bit about those old impressions of the computer animation used whenever more than three characters were dancing on screen in close-up just not looking right. As it turned out, while even the computer animation of the now-discontinued game (which used fixed choreographies but changed depending on what characters had been cast and what costumes they were wearing) seemed better at fitting the pieces of their faces together (and didn’t have to deal with “drawn animation” also being squeezed into the performances), I was now struck by the impression some of the “drawn animation” didn’t look that impressive either when showing characters from a distance in less grand moments. For all of that, though, the story did manage to win me over again. The initial “let’s put on a show and save our school from closing!” motivation might have helped attract a wider audience to start with, but I was conscious now of the “it’s when I perform that I’m really living” angle that soon sets in. I was quite willing now to enjoy the humorous side of the series too, even if I might have amused myself asking a question perhaps not meant to be asked, namely how the amiable fantasy of school idols being “amateurs” and doing everything themselves encompassed going from one girl playing the piano to full backing tracks. As well, however, starting off I did wonder if a few of the characters had quite developed their distinctive yet somewhat peculiar voices, particularly Kotori, who has many traits but perhaps no grand defining one (beyond, maybe, “she’s nice”) the way her fellow characters do. Those voices did set in after a while, and there was a moment where Kotori herself says she doesn’t seem to stand out the way her friends do, even if her solution might have been just one more trait among many. I just might have been more interested in noticing things like that than in the apparent hints for some of the more popular slash pairings that do seem an enduring part of the “fandom.” At the same time, I’ve got to admit I did pick up on moments that might be elaborated into more unconventional pairings, and already being aware of those possibilities might mean I’m not altogether blithely detached from the topic.
I’d thought about squeezing one more series into the first month of this quarter, but on taking a closer look at my first choice I was surprised to see it was longer than “most series are these days,” too long to seem to fit among everything else. Trying to think of something shorter to watch instead was tricky for all of the anime I have waiting. Then, I happened to remember City Hunter 3 was much shorter than the two series preceding it. That had me wondering a bit about “things winding down,” but it didn’t seem to suffer too much in terms of production values, even varying the regular outfit of the armed troubleshooter Ryo a bit at last and seeming to make his assistant Kaori appear a little different too. Jokes about Kaori looking kind of boyish had also faded away; now, some of the attractive female clients Ryo keeps being hired to assist were making knowing comments to Kaori about just who Ryo is really interested in for all of his overenthusiastic reactions to them, with Kaori getting a bit nervous. This didn’t quite finish off the City Hunter anime, but there’s not that much left to see now.
I did at least continue a few titles I was already watching streaming. With Mix working into another high school baseball tournament I’d been ready to hope the series would pick up a bit, and it did seem to. A coy bit of the story involving an amnesiac middle-aged man who’d drifted into town to hang around did begin to meter out explanations he’d been in high school during Touch, the previous story by Mitsuru Adachi Mix is a loose sequel to. Some of the other middle-aged men in Mix, including a rival baseball player from Touch who’s now coaching a high school team that happens to include his son (who happens to look just like his father did), might have added a bit of interesting texture even if it was also a little tempting to invoke that lazy crack about “peaking in high school.” Then, just as the story was getting to the point where the second climb up the greasy pole seemed almost expected to falter in the final showdown and I was thinking maybe whatever was between Touma and Otomi was in fact a more wholesome kind of “sibling love” regardless of “they’re not related by blood,” some of the sudden tragedy familiar enough in Mitsuru Adachi’s stories that I’d thought had already been taken care of here in the backstory crashed in. It was affecting both despite and because of “it isn’t fair” reactions, but I did get left wondering whether I’d ever get to see the story continued and concluded for all that I’d wondered that before.
Wanting to take in more of another series I’d sampled a single episode from during the first sixty days of this year, I turned the calendar back fifty-five years and a few months to the black and white Cyborg 009. Its second episode, like its first, had the lone female cyborg of the team, Cyborg 003, held hostage by bad guys, but after that things improved a bit there. I grew willing to think of this series as “a superhero show,” where anything could happen but things were put back together the way they’d been afterwards. Some of the “cyborg powers” did seem a bit beyond what “machinery concealed within a person” might bring to mind, such as the shapeshifting of the flippant little kid with a Charlie Brown-like lack of visible hair, Cyborg 007. (He did indeed make a blatant James Bond reference after a while, if also after I’d impressed on myself how the code numbers were spoken as “zero-zero,” not “double-oh.”) With those points noted, however, I then considered how there were no recurring villains or built-in and seemingly insurmountable agonies for the heroes. I did start half-daydreaming about now-antique memories of seeing reruns of the 1960s Spider-Man cartoon even as I supposed the ray gun battles and tragic fates of this anime marked Japanese TV animation diverging from American cartoons towards the end of that decade. Then, though, I ran across a claim (from the person I’d depended on for “fansubs”) that this Cyborg 009 had pushed a bit too far like certain other titles in the decade following it and been cut short as a result. (That did mean I’ve now managed to watch more than half of this series.) As for one of my first reactions to the show being that it hadn’t bothered with an “origin story” or formal introduction, in glancing into a recurring blind spot through looking up a Wikipedia article on a live-action tokusatsu series I happened to find it linked by its creator Shotaro Ishinomori to Cyborg 009, and saw two theatrical animated movies had preceded the TV show. That suggestion there hadn’t been quite as much of a gulf between “well-animated and respectable theatrical features” and “churned-out cartoons for TV drawing on manga” for quite as long as I’d supposed was intriguing.
As I caught up at the end of from my vacation, I happened to think this was the chance to take in a work of “indie anime” I’d heard about called Volicia of Pluto. I knew it was an undeniable “girls’ love” piece, something I take an interest in that’s rather distinct from my relaxed reactions to winking, plausibly deniable insinuations in works where I instead just focus on the “cover story” with perfect satisfaction. It was also supposed to have a fantastic edge. Starting off, though, I did have the impression “this was made by a few people” meant less “ultra-limited animation” than “crude character drawings,” and the jumps in the plot just might be a counter against insistences from some fans that “the story ought to be the easy part.” On the other hand, it did just happen to stand against other complaints about a lack of giant robots in recent anime, even if it ended on a cliffhanger staked on a crowdfunding campaign.
Even if Summer Time Rendering had turned out too long to watch in a single month at the height of summer, I still wanted to get started on it before the official season ended, accepting that this meant offering comments on it here at a mere midway point. As I started it I realised I didn’t remember much about it from a first mixture from others of enthusiasm for the show and indignation it had streamed on a service only just getting into anime, perhaps even “one more service to have to subscribe to” for some. All I seemed to remember was a bit of promotional art with an ordinary teenaged guy (if with hair just long enough to tie into a ball at the back of his head) and a blonde-haired teenaged girl wearing a reasonably sedate one-piece swimsuit. That, I suppose, leads me to that ever-nagging thought that to say too much about “pleasant surprises” is to deny those surprises to anyone who happens on these comments first.
If a paragraph break is any safety at all against that, I guess I can say that starting into the series I did remember old comments about “jumping back in time over and over, but not to the same ‘Groundhog Day moment,’ such that there’s more tension and drive.” There have been twists, turns, and shocking revelations about the full horror to be avoided. I did wonder a bit early on about “a guy trying to rescue a girl” with a few thoughts about a real “middleman” getting in the way of a different sort of story, but those thoughts have faded as the cast has expanded. The production values do seem decent, and there’s a greasy edge of “fanservice” every so often too. I did make it to the point where the opening theme changes, if from something I’d toss the comment “stylish” towards in the mere hope others wouldn’t disagree to a more conventional “action series” opening.
On getting back from vacation I moved on to the second half of the original Love Live series, which meant taking the shrinkwrap off at last from the boxed set I’d ordered only to jump into the streaming episodes in advance of the concluding movie coming to a theatre near me. I had recollections the production was starting to look a bit better in general and the amused assumption this had something to do with the very first series having been a success, but there were still moments where the long shots looked a bit diffident. I’d supposed from the beginning the still illustrations of the mobile games would have spoiled me, anyway. There were a few bits about the story I hadn’t quite remembered among more familiar moments where the characters filled in further; I might have contrasted them to the enduring situations in the mobile games before a still more vivid sense of “just as this story began, it’s going to end” set in. (That previous sense of beginning, as contrasted to the second mobile game making these characters established veterans, had also interested me.) In any case I also got to thinking the pieces of Love Live seem to come together for me into something more than a rigid sum might suggest, and then I had the even more peculiar thought that total carries back to make the pieces more impressive and enduring.
Still somewhat behind those who watch Soaring Sky Pretty Cure as it streams, I was intrigued to see comments that “a ‘magical boy’ may be something, but a magical ‘girl’ who’s old enough to legally drive is something else!” Even after getting back to the fantasy world the strange magical baby who grants the Pretty Cures their powers in this iteration of the franchise had been spirited out of at the beginning of this series, a way was found to keep her with the main characters as the creator of “monsters of the week” changed to a more conventional sort of villain. Once that storyline had played out over a dozen episodes, it found a different way to keep the baby with everyone else as a new antagonist showed up, different again in his own way. The adventures remain uncomplicated yet appealing, bearing positive messages for an appropriate audience. I’ve been taking slight interest in how some of the computer-animated Pretty Cures who introduce the computer-animated end credits each week now represent the preceding series of the franchise; going back to try and take some of them in alongside a current instalment still feels like a bit much for me, though.