joyousmenma93
I give the best anime in the Precure franchise ever...a 92/100!
Back in 2010, I wasn't the biggest fan of the Precure franchise, and it's mostly because I hardly ever saw any of the shows back then. I remember watching the first episode of the first series long ago but I never went further than that because one fairy's voice annoyed the living heck out of me. But since about 2014, I've actually made an effort to watch a good majority of the shows for that franchise. So far, including this one, Heartcatch Pretty Cure, I've seen nine whole series in their entirety, though I did watch the first episodes of every series. Basically, Precure pretty much follows the same formula as Sailor Moon: a great evil and their minions try to take over the world, ditzy girls and their friends are given items that turn them into heroes by cute little animal creatures, and they defeat monsters of the week and save the world while learning more about themselves and getting along in the process. I never got around to watching the other shows, and I didn't think I'd have time to watch any of them considering how long the shows were...until I saw one of my favorite bloggers start blogging Heartcatch Precure. He really loved it and kept on praising it up the wazoo like crazy as it was airing, and I didn't have much else to watch, so why not? I saw the first episode and...wow! He really was right about it being awesome!
Long ago, a warrior named Cure Moonlight lost an arduous battle against an organization called the Desert Apostles, and before her defeat, she tells two fairies to find another girl who can take her place. That's a dream a shy young girl named Tsubomi Hanasaki has been having for some time. She and her family move to the town Kibougahana to be closer to their grandmother, and despite being sweet and loving flowers to death, she's cripplingly shy. She does, however, attract the attention of a rather loud and bossy girl named Erika Kurumi who wants to be her friend but Tsubomi doesn't like her forceful and invasive nature. Soon, she finds Erika's Heart Flower getting ripped out of her and turned into a monster called a Desertorian by some lady named Sasorina. The fairies, Chypre and Coffret, give Tsubomi an item which turns her into a magical superhero called Pretty Cure, just like in her dream, but she calls herself Cure Blossom. Soon, she's joined by Erika, who becomes Cure Marine. They have to save people's heart flowers and take on the mission to restore the Heart Tree back to normal so that the Desert Apostles can't destroy the world. But it's going to be a tough and perilous task, especially considering how high the stakes are for everyone.
Unlike the first few series, which had the exact same animation style, Heartcatch's animation and character designs are completely different and go into their own direction, and it's a very welcome and refreshing change. There's lots of varying facial expressions, the movement is more dynamic and fluid, the colors are more vibrant, and it conveys more emotion and life than the other series. There's hardly any wasted frames here. Not only that, the anime doesn't just make the characters look good, the animators actually go way out of their way to bring the characters to life in the best ways possible, which really shows in both the every day scenes and the transformation scenes, the 3rd Pretty Cure's sequence being the best animated, the most fluid, and the best looking out of all of them. For fans of Ojamajo Doremi out there, you may notice that the character designs here are very similar to those of Doremi's. That's because both series had the same character designer, Yoshihiko Umakoshi, who also directed the animation for both series. So the two shows have a lot of things in common, from the character designs, the overly cartoony facial expressions, and...well, being magical girl series made by Toei. Thankfully, both series are able to carve out their own identities so they don't come off as ripping off one another despite having a lot of similarities. Plus, Heartcatch's action scenes are also animated amazingly well, excelling in both long-range and hand-to-hand combat, and the battles are always dynamic and never get boring or repetitive, even with the repeated transformation sequences in every episode.
The soundtrack is where things start to get tricky. Pretty Cure is notorious for reusing pieces of background music in their shows, often starting from series where they switch to a new composer and then re-use their music every time they hire that composer back for whatever shows follow until they're done with them. I haven't seen the original Futari wa series, Yes Precure 5, or Fresh Pretty Cure, and from Fresh to Smile, Toei had Yasuharu Takanashi do the music for those four Pretty Cure seasons. Since Heartcatch came right after Fresh, I can imagine that this series reused music from Fresh. But again, I haven't seen Fresh, so I don't know specifically which pieces they used from that season in here. But on its own, I think Heartcatch's soundtrack is pretty nice. The opening and ending themes are standard cutesy J-pop fare, which is no surprise there. Yasuharu Takanashi has always had a good track record with his soundtracks, and Heartcatch Pretty Cure's music is no different and no less awesome for what it manages to do. Plus, the insert songs are great, with the one being sung by Cure Moonlight's seiyuu being the absolute best one.
Of all the seasons I've seen of Pretty Cure, Heartcatch has the absolute best, most three-dimensional characters in the entire franchise that I know of, bar none. Now, Pretty Cure has a bit of a reputation for sometimes giving too much screen time to certain characters at the expense of others, which is a flaw that's gone as far back as Futari wa Pretty Cure Max Heart. Later seasons such as Hugtto, Star Twinkle, and Tropical Rouge, are the biggest offenders in regards to this flaw. Thankfully, Heartcatch successfully manages to avoid this problem, as every single character, from the main ensemble to even some minor characters, like the girls' families and classmates, is wonderfully developed and fleshed out, right from the very start. They all have their own distinct personalities, strengths, weaknesses, idiosyncrasies, and flaws to overcome, and the series make sure to portray them all as down-to-earth kids whenever they're not busy fighting monsters and dealing with relatable problems. Even the minor characters and victims of the week are fleshed out surprisingly well and with subtlety...though if I had to name one problem with some of the victims of the week, it'd be that the series tries to make some of them come off as sympathetic, but their methods of doing so make said characters come off as the opposite. Of course, this is mainly restricted to some of the minor characters, and not all of them have this problem, thankfully.
That being said, there is one thing I've noticed in recent years: I've seen Erika get a lot of hate as a character in recent years, with some people I know of claiming that her actions border on being abusive or predatory, with some even going so far as to call her a bad person just because of a line she says about Tsubomi in one episode later in the series. While I can understand why some wouldn't like her, and I won't judge them for it, I feel like a lot of the hate she's gotten lately is overblown, and that some people ignore a lot of context from the series. For one, Erika does, in fact, get called out on a lot of her behavior throughout the series, even if a lot of it isn't explicit, and a lot of Erika's character arc is about learning to be more sensitive to other people's feelings and personal space. She even flat-out admits that she's very much aware of her flaws as early as episode 2 and understands that people do find her annoying and is trying to be more sensitive, even if her methods of rectifying her flaws don't always work. Plus, the one line that people have a problem with—in which Erika makes a jab at Tsubomi in the power-up episode—could be interpreted as her only saying it in jest. Besides, what group of friends DON'T occasionally rib each other or dunk on each other every now and again? If you don't like a certain character, that's fine, but deliberately ignoring a lot of context in regards to how a show depicts a character's flaws and deals with them really doesn't make you look good. I've seen far worse characters in other series whose flaws are not only completely ignored and not called out for what they are, but the series they star in really try to go out of their way to justify and encourage them (Examples of this include Hanasaku Iroha, Daimidaler, Aesthestica of a Rogue Hero, Rising of the Shield Hero, Mushoku Tensei, and...this awful book series called Elsie Dinsmore). Also, would you really like Erika any better if she were an overly perfect little Mary Sue who was always nice and could do no wrong? Characters are more interesting to follow if they have flaws to deal with! Nobody likes characters who are perfect because they're boring!
Honestly, the only real flaw I can say that Heartcatch has is that, in the end, it follows a pretty predictable formula, as do many magical girl anime. Any surprises it has are more in the smaller, finer details than in the main plot. But shows like Heartcatch show that you can do amazing things even with cliches and predictable formulas as long as you put in care, passion, and effort, and execute them well. For every trope Heartcatch Pretty Cure adheres to, it also excellently subverts others. Just recently, I watched Tropical Rouge Pretty Cure, and I found it to be utterly disappointing because of the following reasons: Its plot was extremely cliche and made no effort to have any real stakes, tension, or conflict, it actively ignored opportunities to develop and flesh out its characters, most of the episodes were pointless, comedic filler used to pad it out, and the characters it did bother to focus on never really changed or moved beyond their most basic character traits, remaining bland as hell. Having watched ten seasons of Precure so far, I still feel that Heartcatch is the best one I've seen, and the best season in the franchise, and so far, nothing has managed to take its place as my number one favorite Pretty Cure season. Healin Good Pretty Cure came close, but not quite. Seriously, there are reasons why Heartcatch Pretty Cure brought in a slew of new fans into the franchise, and had Fresh Pretty Cure not managed to save the franchise from certain death, we never would have gotten this season or any of the other ones that came after it.
I really have to thank the blogger I followed way back when for introducing me to this series, even if indirectly, because had I not decided to follow his recommendation, I wouldn't have bothered with Heartcatch Pretty Cure at all. If you want to get into the franchise in any way, or just want to watch a genuinely good magical girl show that takes a lot of risks and doesn't talk down to its audience, I'd highly recommend giving this season a watch. It has everything a good magical girl series could ever need and executes all of its ideas amazingly. Seriously, don't sit this one out. It's my favorite Pretty Cure season ever, and maybe it'll be a favorite of yours if you give it a chance, and even if it isn't, that's okay. I know I'll never stop loving Heartcatch.
