Servant of the darkness...
... return to the shadows!
The first series in (what would become) the
Pretty Cure franchise,
Futari wa Pretty Cure (literally, "The two of us are Pretty Cure") is
Magical Girls done with a low-key kind of
Buffy The Vampire Slayer approach, postmodern and self-aware.
Yukishiro Honoka and Misumi Nagisa are two eighth-grade girls who normally would have never become more than passing acquaintances. Honoka is the class brain, the class president, and chased by all the boys; Nagisa is an unrepentant jock and secret romantic who has a crush on an older boy but gets unwanted love letters from other girls. After receiving strange cell-phone like devices that house a pair of bizarre living creatures, though, they discover that they can transform into a duo of
Magical Girls — Cure Black and Cure White, together known as Pretty Cure! Caught up in a battle against a world-spanning evil, Honoka and Nagisa find that they have a destiny to fulfill — one that will save worlds and just incidentally make them friends along the way.
Despite being aimed at the 10-to-13-year-old girl demographic,
Pretty Cure is made with a very grown-up awareness of the
Magical Girl genre, its history, and the basic silliness of some of its cliches — and it shows. There are sly references to other
mahou shoujo shows throughout, and the characters themselves — particularly Nagisa — seem to not quite believe what they're doing at times. (For example, after her first transformation, pose and speech, Nagisa stops cold and blurts, "What am I
saying?") Because it is aimed at the younger set, it doesn't get as much out of its
po-mo sensibilities as it could, but it still manages to work in a wink and a nod here and there.
Pretty Cure bucks the usual formula in other ways. Firstly, the girls are very physical when fighting — leaping, punching and kicking their foes and reserving magical attacks for the
coup de grace. Both girls seem to be Spider-Man-level in strength and agility, making them far more formidable in hand-to-hand combat than the usual magical girl. It's worth noting at this point that the director of
Pretty Cure was Daisuke Nishio, whose resume also includes
Dragonball Z.
Secondly, all their magical abilities
seem to come from teamwork; they have no solo attacks and cannot even transform into their powered forms unless they are acting in unison. Combined with the
Buffy-like genre awareness the characters show (not to mention the first villain, who's a dead ringer for David Bowie in
Labyrinth), and this makes for one of the more unusual
Magical Girl programs to come along.
YTV have signed a deal with Toei to air the show in Canada in 2009. And if you live in American, you can legally watch the subtitled version
right here
, right now.
Alternate Continuities came in later seasons with
Futari Wa Pretty Cure Splash Star,
Yes! Precure 5 and
Fresh Pretty Cure.
For an even more subversive
postmodern take on the
Magical Girl genre, see
Mai-HiME and its successor,
Mai-Otome.
This program provides examples of:
- Action Girl
- All Your Colors Combined
- Alternate Continuity (at least 3 so far)
- Alternate Reality Game
- Americanitis (takoyaki are referred to as donuts in the dub again...)
- Androcles Lion
- Anime First
- Because Destiny Says So
- Berserk Button (Nagisa's friends and her brother serve as her buttons: harm them, and your life is forfeit, as Gekidrago learned the hard way in episode 11)
- Big Bad (The Dark King)
- Big Eater (Nagisa)
- Big Fancy House
- Brand X
- Bishounen (Several)
- Calling Your Attacks
- Catch Phrase (Arienai!)
- Clark Kenting
- Conspicuous CG (The Queen of Light and the beginning of the Transformation Sequences)
- Crossdresser (Nagisa in at least two episodes)
- Cross Popping Veins
- Dancing Theme
- Demonic Invaders
- Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu (the Dark King loses THREE times to the girls.)
- Downer Ending (the first season)
- Dragon (Ilkbo in the first arc)
- The End Of The World As We Know It
- Every Car Is A Pinto (When she was pissed in episode 42, Cure Black's Battle Aura was the bolt in the differential necessary to destroy an entire subway car, making this one Every Subway Car Is A Pinto)
- Evil Minions
- Evil Counterpart (Two of the heroines' classmates were used to make 'evil' Precures, but they were no better than zombies, having no superpowers.)
- Expy (their Alternate Continuity successors)
- Extraordinarily Empowered Girl
- Fourth Wall (Subversion — not quite enough to qualify for No Fourth Wall, but it's there)
- Fleeting Demographic (young girls)
- Fridge Brilliance (Hikari, coming back from the dead, makes a lot more sense when you realize her In The Name Of The Moon speech refers to the heart and wills of light (i.e. the Heartiels) becoming one, but makes no mention of the life of light (i.e. Hikari herself.)
- Frills Of Justice
- Genki Girl
- Genre Blindness (Subverted)
- Good Old Fisticuffs (Well, before they start raining hell on their opponents)
- Gotta Catch Them All (Used differently then in most series as Pretty Cure makes no real effort to collect the Heartiels near the end of the series its revealed they never intended to revive The Queen and are in fact offended by the idea that they would be willingly to sacrifice anyone)
- Gratuitous English
- Heterosexual Life Partners
- In The Name Of The Moon (mildly subverted at times)
- Invisible To Normals
- I Have The High Ground
- Lolicon (A demographic report released to the Net revealed that the show's expected audience is composed of both girls 4-9 and men 19-30...)
- Lonely Rich Kid (Honoka)
- Love Letter Lunacy (Nagisa and her female admirers)
- Lovely Angels (Look at this picture, now look at this one.. Note, jock and brain, note hair colors hmm..)
- Magical Girl
- Magic Realism (hints of it, for instance the art gallery episode)
- Malaproper (Nagisa)
- Merchandise Driven (rumoured, unconfirmed)
- Meta Guy
- Monster Of The Aesop
- Monster Of The Week
- Motor Mouth (Shiho, who punctuates her verbal barrages with a stutter-like triple repeat of the occasional word.)
- Multiple Demographic Appeal (See note under Lolicon, above)
- Name That Tune
- Never Say Die ("returning to the darkness"; Mipple and Mepple assure Honoka that they haven't really killed their enemies, but later on, the villains treat it as punishment and Kiriya once mentions it in a context that sounds like committing honourable suicide.)
- Non Human Sidekick (Mipple and Mepple)
- Odd Couple (Honoka is a tidy, feminine intellectual from a rich family; Nagisa is a rough-and-tumble middle-class tomboy)
- Ojou
- Periphery Demographic (adult males)
- Pillar Of Light
- Post Episode Trailer
- The Power Of Friendship
- Puppy Dog Eyes
- Quirky Miniboss Squad
- Red Oni Blue Oni (Nagisa and Honoka respectively)
- Repeat Cut
- Rope Bridge
- School Play
- Schoolgirl Lesbians (implied: Nagisa's admirers)
- Shipping (Nagisa and Honoka are the undeniable postergirls for friends shipped together by yuri fanboys. The Romantic Two Girl Friendship cultural view may have something to do with this.)
- Shoujo
- Shorttank (Nagisa)
- Shout Out (Sailor Moon and other mahou shoujo references, both straight and satirical)
- Sixth Ranger (Hikari's a Third Ranger)
- Slow Motion Pass By
- Snot Bubble
- So Last Season
- Verbal Tic (the mascots)
- Stock Footage
- The Sweat Drop
- Team Spirit
- Teen Genius (Honoka)
- This Is Unforgivable (Honoka, every single week)
- The Thing That Goes Doink
- Tomboy And Girly Girl
- Tomboyish Name
- Transformation Sequence
- Visible Sigh
- Wave Motion Gun (Their signature attack, "Precure Marble Screw" (or "Pretty Cure Marble Twister"), greatly resembles one.)
- Weasel Mascot (Mepple)
- What Measure Is A Non Human (see Never Say Die, above)
