This interesting graphic from VirgoX shows searches for different magical girl titles on the YouTube platform over time.
It is not surprising that Sailor Moon consistently holds the top spot. Other titles switch places, but the graphic remains, on the whole, consistent across the twelve years it examines. I am surprised that Puella Magi Madoka Magica didn’t move up higher after it made its appearance. I would also have expected more searches for Pretty Cure.
Not clear, however, is how many titles were examined. There are quite a few that VirgoX presumably didn’t look at.
I am, against my better judgment, presently working my way through the anime adaptation of Chobits in order to write my long-promised essay on the same. In the process, however, I have inadvertently discovered that the campfest Cherry 2000, which I haven’t seen since I was a kid, is available free and legal on YouTube.
So I’m going to watch that, and I’ll put up a review when I’m finished. This will be relevant to my discussion of Chobits, since Cherry 2000 is about a man who goes looking for a replacement for his robot sex doll and finds a real woman instead—almost the opposite of Chobits’s plot.
I’m kind of excited in a silly sort of way. The last time I saw this movie, I was a little kid and came across it randomly while flipping channels in a motel room. My reaction was along the lines of, “What the hell is this?”
Unfortunately, I’m still so busy with work that I have had little time for anything else, which is why there hasn’t been much content here.
However, Rawle Nyanzi, who often plugs my stuff and whose stuff I often plug, has begun toying around with animation and has created an animated short entitled “Time to Smack a Witch!”
This short video looks like a cut scene from a side-scrolling beat-em-up video game from the mid-Eighties, complete with the beepy music. It has no dialogue, but it’s amusing and easy to follow. It’s only flaw, were I to offer criticism, is that is opening credits are way too long for something that looks like 8-bit Theater.
A vlogger calling herself MagicalGirlStarlight produces this handy video making a comparison between the original Smile Pretty Cure and its localisation Glitter Force, which was produced by Saban and Netflix. Most of the changes she discusses I was already aware of, but one I wasn’t—Glitter Force eliminates or heavily edits the show’s more emotionally fraught scenes and removes references to death.
She ends the video by asking the haters to please show some restraint. I generally agree with the sentiment, and I’m not one of those weebs who think the English language is an abomination that besmirches all Japanese media it touches, but I will say that I find heavy-handed localisations like Glitter Force to be wrongheaded. The show tried to eliminate Japanese references and change the setting to the United States, apparently to avoid confusing American children, but everything is so obviously Japanese, the alterations only make it more confusing.
For example, there is an episode in which the characters take a school trip to Kyoto. Glitter Force changes this to an Asian expo. But to get there, they ride in a train past Mount Fuji, and then they walk through a bamboo forest. So where the hell in America are they?
Glitter Force is intended for children, not weeaboos, so some changes are understandable. For example, I like the changed title; “Glitter Force” sounds like a sparkly team of action girls (which it is), whereas, to the English speaker, “Pretty Cure” is mere nonsense. (It’s actually a pun when pronounced by a Japanese speaker, but most non-Japanese people have no way of knowing that.)
I also don’t really mind the changes to the characters’ names. Japanese names can be a mouthful to small children who don’t speak Japanese.
But they should have kept the Japanese setting simply because they had to go to absurd lengths to hide it and it was futile in the end anyway.
Also, although I refuse to enter the sub vs. dub debate, the dialogue in Glitter Force frequently makes me grit my teeth. Watch the video above and wait for the scene comparison at the end, and I think you will see what I mean. The English lines are obviously wedged into a scene that wasn’t meant for them, and this is typical of the show as a whole. If you’re going to dub, fine, but try to respect the lip flaps.
Finally, the change to the show’s emotional tenor is unnecessary and even cowardly. I mean, it’s freaking Pretty Cure. It’s not exactly edgy. Agree with it or not, I can understand why they censored half of Sailor Moon back in the nineties, but Pretty Cure? What angry phone calls from parents were they anticipating over Pretty Cure? This is the network that green-lit Big Mouth for Pete’s sakes, but they think a little crying is too much for kids to handle.
So in the warped world of Netflix, you can masturbate in front of children but weeping in front of them is totally off-limits.
A fellow calling himself Exclamation Point, who makes pretty good videos analyzing anime, has recently uploaded one entitled “How to Suffer Well: Sympathetic Characterization in Madoka and Magical Girl Site.” From the title, I assumed he was going to use magical girl shows as a jumping-off point to discuss Stoical philosophy. I was wrong, but I think the video is still worth watching.
My opinion about “dark” magical girl shows is less positive than his, though, perhaps ironically, I think I enjoyed Magical Girl Site more than he did. His point in this video, which he makes very well (and then drives into the ground) is that the suffering in Puella Magi Madoka Magica stems directly from the characters’ decisions, and has consequences that fundamentally change their world, a world that is worth preserving. In Magical Girl Site, by contrast, life just sucks and then you die: The heroine is not at all responsible for all the bad things that happens to her, and she has no reason to preserve anything because everything is miserable.
He makes a good case, and I think what he says could apply not to Magical Girl Site only, but to the whole slew of “lesser” dark magical girl shows that have followed in Madoka’s wake without understanding why Madoka works. Magical Girl Site is just one particularly extreme example, one where the flaws especially stand out because it’s trying especially hard to be on the edge.
I basically agree with him, but I might point out that there is, at least, an improvement to the heroine’s life by the end: She’s got away from her abusers and found friendship, and has concluded, contrary to what she had been told and believed previously, that she is not in fact unfortunate.
Exclamation Point’s reply to me after I say that would no doubt be to point out that the heroine’s just going to die anyway within two years or less so her happiness is temporary and therefore pointless. I might then answer by way of rebuttal that all temporal happiness is temporary—and I might add that the story isn’t over yet by the time the first season ends, so it’s possible that the girls might find a way to foil the shortening of their lifespans.
I have some important things to discuss, but I spent this evening writing Jake and the Dynamo and listening to Rammstein instead, so I regret nothing.
But I am also at present making my way through the Korean magical girl series Flowering Heart, a simple and sweet show for kids that makes for a good palate cleanser after Magical Girl Site.
I’m watching Flowering Heart on Amazon Prime, but the entire show is also available on the official YouTube channel, so you can join me in watching it if you like.
There is both a Korean version and an English version available, but, alas, there appears to be no Korean version with English subtitles, so I’m watching the dub.
The story features a trio of fifth-grade girls who form an after-school club to help people with their problems. They get a magical boost from a flying, talking hamster who grants them magic rings that can turn them into adults. They have to do good deeds to gather “hopeful energy” to replenish the Heart Tree in the Flowering Kingdom, but nefarious forces are working to gather “hopeless energy” to make the tree wither.
It is reminiscent of LoliRock, probably because Flowering Heart and LoliRock both take their influence primarily from Minky Momo, though Flowering Heart appeared in 2016, so it may take influence from LoliRock as well. For reasons I can’t quite explain, however, I found LoliRock to be a slog, whereas Flowering Heart is quite pleasant.
I’ll deliver a full review when I finish the first season. For now, I’ll simply recommend it as entertaining yet undemanding—though keep in mind that it is very much a show aimed at little girls.
Now, to be up front about everything, I don’t know who this guy is. By his own admission, he doesn’t know a whole lot about anime. Nonetheless, I find his analysis of Crunchyroll’s trainwreck of a promotion for its new, original animated series to be largely insightful.
One of his lines here I absolutely love: “That’s what your whole career has been about? I thought you were an animator.”
Some of those opposing Crunchyroll’s project are, I think, wrong-headed. For example, I follow the account @animeoutsiders on Twitter; they claim to have insider knowledge (which they may or may not actually have) of Crunchyroll, and accuse the company of doing something ingenuous by creating its own animation studio and producing original animation, rather than throwing money at Japanese studios.
