Pretty Cure is one of the key works in 00s anime. The biggest magical girl franchise of the decade, this first series introduces something back to the genre that had really been missing for decades – shonen action direction.
Directing the show is Toei veteran Daisuke Nishio, the man behind the Dragonball anime adaptations and who had just come off 2003’s superb Airmaster adaptation. While the story is typical magical girl fare, the action choreography has a physicality you’d associate with the Nishio’s shonen shows. These are magical girls who will punch a monster rather than cast a spell on them or throw a mechanisable trinket. I’m sure it’s no coincidence that the tomboyish Cure Black’s costume resembles a pro-wrestler’s rather than a traditional magical girl’s outfit (specifically it resembles one belonging to LCO’s Mima Shimoda), a choice that feels like a throwback to Cutey Honey, rather than just aping the sweetness of Doremi or magical drama of a Sailor Moon.
While that action choreography element was lost in later, Nishio-less, sequels, it was carried on in later magical girl shows that courted the adult male otaku audience that this show had attracted. I’m not sure if the idea with Pretty Cure was to court a male audience (adult or otherwise) with Nishio’s involvement. Certainly there’d been a male audience for this genre decades already, so I’m not sure why they’d alter the formula to court them.
However, when they did the 2005 TV Asahi anime survey the biggest fans of the show were divided equally between little girls and university age men. I do wonder if the shift towards a more traditional magical girl show in later seasons was cast off some of those adult fans. The ratings have dropped a little from the first season, but then again pretty much everything that’s run that long now seems down from what they were mid-decade, with a few exceptions like the noitaminA slot and a few other late night shows (Golgo 13, Mazinger) that have over-performed for their time slots.
The show itself generated one direct sequel, and additional sequels that were variations on the theme. The strength of the franchise meant that TV Asahi has owned the 8:30 am slot on Sunday morning for the remainder of the decade.
The show was another that 4kids licensed and really didn’t know what to do with, even more than Tokyo Mew Mew. They never actually got around to releasing it in any form, and I’m not sure that’s their fault or the networks they were with at the time. Though you’d think that as an action cartoon designed to appeal to girls was already a success (not to mention being a knock-off of anime), namely Totally Spies, a show as well made as Pretty Cure would have had some value to a TV station.
Maybe it was even Toei’s fault, as I see the show didn’t make it into European markets either. Did the rise of Winx Club in Italy in 2004 put the dampers on sales of Magical Girl shows?
Boy, that sure was a lot of writing about a show I’ve probably only seen four episodes of wasn’t it?