Forum - View topicREVIEW: You and Idol Precure♪ Episodes 25 - 36 Anime Review
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MemoBookworm
 Posts: 49 |
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After thinking on it since the last review I feel like You and Idol Precure's big weakness is that its clearly shying away from any topics that are hard-hitting/challenging to address. To begin with it feels like a missed opportunity to do an anime focusing on the entertainment industry and not at least try to address some more of it's negative sides. You don't have to go full Oshi no Ko to address topics such as obsessive fans and bad work environments in child friendly ways. I mean they even make the villains a black company! Why not make them a black company in the entertainment industry, with the villains being rivals with the precures and trying to obtain fame in duplicitous ways?
Even when it dives into more emotional plotlines it feels like its rushing to get them over with and too easily. Purirun and Meroron's plotlines with the Heart Kirari Lock were both very good but it felt like the show resolved them too quickly and copped out of any actual dificulties. What if Purirun had never regained her memories, and instead they committed to making new ones? I'm also disappointed that the show teased us with the idea of a (temporary) dark precure in Meroron and didn't follow through. Boo! It particularly makes the show look bad when it comes after Wonderful Precure, which despite looking more "kiddy" at first glance was much more willing to go hard on difficult topics. Humans causing animal extinctions was a significant part of the show (and it never gave us an easy answer which I appreciated) and of course episode 44 addressing the shorter lifetimes pets have without pulling any punches. It's funny - I was highly disappointed by Wonderful Precure removing the fighting element, and looking forward to a return to form in You and Idol but Wonderful has much smarter writing. It's a shame. |
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EmeraldSaucer
 Posts: 936 |
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Going to echo much of the sentiment above. Obviously I'm not expecting a show made for 8 year old girls to be a hard hitting exposé on the darkness lurking beneath the surface of the idol industry. But you can feel the sharp contrast between Wonderful directly showing a wolf get shot as part of a then ongoing extinction of Japanese wolves to the best You and Idol can muster being Uta conflicted over what her signature should look like. And it all stems back to what I mentioned last review, the choice on Katou's part to approach this show as a Precure anime with an idol coat of paint rather than an Idol anime through the lens of Precure
There are still good things here, like I've loved how Nana has been handled (with the starting episode of this batch being my favorite of the season thanks to its excellent direction and multi-layered symbol of the handkerchief). But then I have to turn around and say yeah, Kokoro has kinda been weirdly lost in the shuffle despite being the MVP of the early episodes. For everything good I can find there's a lot more problems plaguing this season, which is a shame coming from so talented a director, though I do think a lot of those problems are beyond her control (she probably could not help that the last episode here is just a very dull ad for a live concert that was happening a week later) |
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power moon
Posts: 105 |
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I'll be honest, i feel like people are being too ahrd on this for not being wthey wanted. It's clear this wants to be a more light-hearted season with an Idol coat of paint and in my iopinion there's nothing wrong with that.
I guess maybe i'm being a bit defensive on people criticising something i'm enjoying but i kinda needed to get it out of my stomach, if that makes any sense. Nothing wrong with what others have said, just wanted to share my thoughs. |
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RobbiRobb
 Posts: 88 |
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Honestly, as much as I have been enjoying individual episodes of this show, this quarter has overall been pretty disappointing. It feels like the story has been stagnating for quite some time now, and while the first two episodes of the final quarter have already done a lot to rectify this issue, this quarter feels at times jarringly slow. There have been a lot of character-focused episodes that add a lot to individual characters but don't really help further the plot.
We have gotten a few good episodes surrounding Meroron and Nana, but the rest of those twelve episodes can be summarized in a single sentence. There are even multiple episodes that solely focus on the idol part of the show but still feel lacking. It's all just there. The girls transform, and bam, they're perfect idols. Who needs training if you're already perfect? Instead, we use a full episode to decide on the center of the group that had been clear for ten or so episodes as well as try to come up with a name for a concert, which is only decided on in the last minute, instead of long before the actual concert so it could be used as advertisement. I know this is just one oddly specific thing that bothers me, but it just feels so backwards, and there have been a lot of those cases where it just feels so contrary to what other shows with similar themes are doing. And no, I'm not asking it to be another generic idol show. But surely there is more to the genre than saying "and then they had a concert". I don't think we've ever even seen an actual concert where the characters performed. It's always just the finisher that shows them performing in front of a large group of lights and the single Makuranda/Kurayaminda. And that's just one of the problems. There are so many questions that are still open that I'm still waiting to get an answer for. And no, I'm not expecting to get an answer to everything immediately. I want some excitement. But half the plot has been stagnant, and there are so many open ends that feel like they have been started and then been forgotten. What about KirakiLand? Didn't we need to save everyone? Sure, that'll probably happen at some point, but it's been more than ten episodes since this has been in focus at all. What about those ribbons the girls have collected every time they defeat the monster of the day? spoiler[Yes, they get a little more important in the next arc, but] they are still just there and don't really do anything. There's also the whole thing about Darkiine, who hasn't even really appeared, even though there are only eleven episodes left. There are just still so many questions left to answer that I'm worried they'll either go unanswered or be answered in an unsatisfactory way. Aside from the plot, the music also feels like it's been stuck in the beginning. We've gotten a handful of new songs, but most of the time we're using songs that have been used multiple times already. We've at least gotten a completely new song as a group finisher for the entire group, but we've also continued using the solo songs and probably will until the end of the series, which is a little disappointing considering we could have gotten new solo songs or maybe even duo songs for all kinds of combinations... The only thing that's a positive constant is the characters. The main trio is still very likeable, and I've slowly gotten to like Nana at least somewhat. I'd still say she is the least interesting character, but she very much has her own strength. Purirun and Meroron still work very well as fairies. Sadly, my opinion about their human forms hasn't really changed from the second quarter. They still feel out of place, as their contrast with their fairy personalities is just too big. At least the rest of the main-cast-adjacent characters work quite well and are entertaining. In the end, I'm still somewhat new to Precure as a whole, but I've now at least seen eight different seasons, and while I like the idea of deviating from the standard formula to create a different experience, this just feels like it lost track of what it originally wanted to be, tried to be something different instead, and is now struggling to come to a satisfactory conclusion but is still carrying the weight of everything it started at the beginning. |
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JustMonika
Posts: 1567 |
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This is my second go around with Precure, the first being Delicious Precure. I've been enjoying it. Definitely want to check out Wonderful Precure. I watched this one because I love idol anime.
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InNeedOfAName
Posts: 279 |
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I agree. I have my criticisms with this entry but I rather enjoy how light hearted it is. Not every series with a focus on idols needs to show the dark side of the entertainment industry. |
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encrypted12345
Posts: 759 |
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I do think it's fair to criticize this season for how it incorporates the actual idol aspect, but that's personally not a sticking point for me. I'm generally apathetic to how well a season treats its theme as long as the season is otherwise solid, like how Smile didn't incorporate fairy tales all that well, but I can at least understand why someone more passionate about the concept of idols would be disappointed. Since the Cures work for a hyper-idealized version of an idol manager though, there's some logical reason why it doesn't really get into the dark side of the industry and goes more into the perspective of the fans instead. One could then argue that maybe Kimi to Idol could commentate on the existence of toxic fans, I suppose, but that's not too important to me.
Meroron's arc was executed really well. I'm pleasantly surprised they really stuck the landing on that arc since I did feel like the conclusion to Purirun's big arc was a little lacking even though it was otherwise solid. It's also surprising how much Nana improved in the second half of the season too. She ended up being a dark horse for sure. I can understand how people don't really like episodes 31-36, but I thought that the show did need to spend some time re-establishing the group dynamic after Meroron fully joined the team, which that batch of episodes did decently well at, and there was some development and build-up when it came to Kaito and Jogi at least, even before 37. About episode 37 spoiler[while I personally don't think a whole power-up was justified, I did think the episode did do a good job in showing why Kaito is in the season. His mentoring of Cure Idol, why he occasionally hangs out in Uta's cafe, and why he insists so hard that they value their friendships makes a lot of sense in the lens of "He misses Kazuma, whom he considers his best friend, and Uta/Cure Idol reminds Kaito of him".] |
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EmeraldSaucer
Posts: 936 |
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It doesn't even need to be dark, it just needed to be integrated better. We just came off a season where just about everything expertly ties into the broader theme of communication: how as humans we often fail to properly communicate, both with one another and our world, but in an ideal world we wish we had that perfect communication between ourselves and for example our pets. So I think it's more than fair to be critical when a season about idols seems to skirt around even the most basic facets of being an idol, to the point where they had an opportunity to have a big concert scene and instead skipped over it with the cures in the next episode going "boy that sure was a good concert huh" It's just a problem across various aspects of You and Idol, that it consistently fails to break out of the mold when the opportunity arises, and so ends up as a largely unremarkable season |
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power moon
Posts: 105 |
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What if it doesn't want to break the mold and just wants to have fun, Not everything NEEDS to beabout sending a big message or talk about society in some form. |
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EmeraldSaucer
Posts: 936 |
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You seem to be confusing "breaking the mold" with being socially conscious. Which from my provided example of actually showing the cures who are performers perform at a concert they revolved a whole episode around (as a blatant advertisement for a real life show), is pretty obviously not the conversation being had at all To give you another example to hopefully get the point across: Precure has not had consistently good fight scenes on TV since Hugtto, largely due to the circumstances surrounding Toei's allocation of staff. Wonderful found a creative solution around this limitation by coming up with a reason to have something other than fights as part of its formula, from which it then built a thematically resonant reason to espouse mutual understanding over destruction. And then You and Idol comes along with its theme being idols, clearly that's another opportunity to find ways to turn its disadvantage into a charm point, right? If not turn the typical Precure punching and kicking into a song/dance contest, then at least directly incorporate those elements into monster battles (thus once again taking the burden off the already strained crew to come up with captivating fight scenes)? But the solution they instead came up with was to do nothing other than make the finishers CG dance scenes, and so once again we get mostly mediocrely storyboarded and animated fights. Where they had the opportunity to break the Precure mold just a tiny bit and have some fun while doing so, they stayed entirely on the beaten path and so ended up with unremarkable results. Which has nothing to do with saying anything about a big message or society, it's about doing something cool and interesting within the 20 year old formula |
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power moon
Posts: 105 |
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So basically what you're saying is you don't want fight scenes in Precure anymore. And again, maybe they wanted a return to the original formula after the last series being the big break of the mold, just saying. You may find it unremarkable but others are still enjoying it and finding fun. Not saying you're wrong for not enjoying but maybe realize that not everyone wants every series to be so different. |
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Key
Moderator
 Posts: 19138 Location: Indianapolis, IN (formerly Mimiho Valley) |
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That's not what Emerald Saucer is saying at all. They're not saying that there's anything conceptually wrong with this approach; it just could have been executed more effectively. A series can be fun and still aim for something a bit more. That being said, I do also agree with your point that there's nothing wrong with a series aimed at kids not trying for anything more than just being fun. |
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EmeraldSaucer
Posts: 936 |
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No, I'm saying I want them to either bring on star talent that allowed for Precure to have incredible fights (unlikely in the current climate, however cool it would be to have Shingo Fujii suddenly reappear) or to take creative approaches to mitigate the inefficiencies in production. Which, by my estimation, is a whole lot more fun than just doing roughly the same thing that was done 20 years ago but worse looking. Because all that does is cause just about every fight to blend together into a bland slurry while turning the fights from a fun component of the monster-of-the-week formula to an obligation that often doesn't even fit with the intent of an episode (again, episode 36 would be a whole lot more impactful if it actually incorporated a concert as its climactic moment rather than throwing in a fight scene because a guy got mildly sad about lunches) And this issue extends across most aspects of You and Idol. Like Kokoro's whole deal was supposed to be how much she loves to dance, but we're only just now in November maybe circling back around to that, when it has more or less been a non-factor since we had a single digit episode count. In this show supposedly about idols who sing and dance we can't even get attention placed on a main character dancing, that's how weirdly divorced You and Idol is from its subject matter (because of how scared it seems to be to deviate even slightly from being bog-standard Precure). It's like if Star Twinkle was still about space but they never actually travelled to different planets, this is bare minimum stuff here. And could we still get something bog-standard but effective? Sure, but what we got in the case of this example is a character reduced to standing in the background saying "my heart's going kyun kyun" on repeat There's nothing wrong with enjoying this season, but at the end of the day these kinds of long-running enfranchised shows need something to stand out from the crowd, and if they don't you should be ready for people to criticize it |
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IronWish
 Posts: 233 Location: Ukraine |
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Well, to be just, Hirogaru Sky did have consistently good looking fights with some pretty high highs as far as animation quality goes, but it was mostly due to receiving star treatment as an anniversary season. Other than that, yeah, Precure is Toei's favorite child no more, and clearly is past its heyday as an action animation powerhouse. You and Idol tries its best with limited recourses, I specifically mean sudden shift to using Heart Garden as a recyclable background for action seemingly allowed it to breath a little. Not enough to sustain a full fight, but each episode now has at least one animation cut or piece of combat choreography which makes me go "oh, this looks nice". But it's clear they can't do any proper idol related stuff, cause it will be resource consuming, which sucks especially since Precure is kinda pioneer of whole modern 3d CG idol song and dance routine. Complete lack of music is also bad, even (ep 38 spoiler)spoiler[Cure Idol's powered-up form] uses same song as her previous attack did. I still enjoy it quite a bit, and feel like You and Idol more or less found its footing after Puririn's arc. Its character writing is strong enough to give the season sense of identity and makes even inconsequential weekly episodes fun to watch. What would likely make or break this season for me is whether they can deliver meaningful character arcs for Kokoro and especially Uta. Cause Kokoro's sense of inferiority to Idol and Wink has been kinda put on hold since cour 1, and seeds for Uta's internal conflict "I like to sing, but it's not like I want to make it my job, and I don't know what else to do with my life" has been sown, but since then she's kinda defaulted into "cheerful team leader" archetype.
This is the actual biggest problem for You and Idol, since crowd this year happens to be Princession Orchestra which is Precure-like Idol-themed magical girl show which does almost everything much, much better. |
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Jisu
Posts: 41 |
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I think the review was more saying "the series needs to use its theme better," something that's also been said for ages about other series like Smile (which barely integrated or even used the fairy tale theme at all) or Fresh (which started with a jumble of fruit, playing cards, and dance, but ended up awkwardly shuffling to mostly lean on the theme of clover symbolism).
The "so you want a grimdark deconstruction of the idol industry?" replies are understandable -- after all, that seems to be what a lot of people want from any idol anime, and dismiss happy and unironic titles as problematic slop for the lowest common denominator. Despite Love Live's success, its fans are seen as creepy or stupid. Every single award show out there, both industry-judged and popular vote, doesn't give the slightest nod to unironic idol anime but will reward the darker stuff that addresses the lows of the industry. And if you go by the popular reception to series like Oshi no Ko, Zombie Land Saga, or Wake Up, Girls!, these series are on thin ice, and the second the message shifts to "the industry has problems but the ideal of singing and dancing to foster the listeners' dreams is a good one," people will turn against them and either bury the show entirely (the follow-ups to the latter two were much less watched than the originals) or try to sink it with malicious rumours (the number of anime-onlys who think Aquruby was actually made canon after that one arc's editorially mandated incest bait that went nowhere...). So I think those responses to this article are a trained response to people saying something negative about an unironic and happy idol anime and specifically saying they should have done more with the idol theme. But I don't think that's what the article is saying at all. Re: Nana getting a lot more focus and Uta and Kokoro dropping off, that's likely an overcorrection by Toei because Nana's merch is not selling as well as the others'. She's reportedly shelfwarming in Japanese toy stores. |
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