Smile Precure – 39 Released

what a fine selection of waifus

HD Torrent | SD Torrent | Script

so uh

was about to do the post for 40+41, guess who just realized they never did the release work for 39

WHOOPS.

WHOOPS.

Anyway I have a lot to say about this ep after the jump, which is maybe why I never got around to it at the time. gg me.

So the last time I really went :words: on this show was in ep 5 where I was worried about the structure the show was gonna take. This is gonna be more along that kind of :words: than my usual fare, so, uh, fair warning I guess.

This ep was good. I mean, it wasn’t like, mindblowingly good Precure or anything, but it was decent. But it does raise an interesting point in the form of the format by which it tells its story. The idea of going into a fairytale and having wacky adventures within the context of that story is one that very much uses the theme and lore of Smile in interesting ways, and really begs the question “Why the fuck wasn’t this the default setup for episodes of this show?”

I mean, Smile is not astounding by any means, but what it really suffers from is a lack of cohesion – the plot is completely lacking in intrigue, I’m not invested in the characters on either side (I enjoy them, but I don’t care about their ‘stories’ or development because any effects of them are always contained to the episode in which they occur) and the format of the episodes is thematically all over the fucking place. This makes the show super episodic, and in turn means the show only really seems in ones memory to be as good as its last episode, IMO – and that becomes a problem when the vast majority of your episodes have been… average at best.

But this format, it works! You can put the villains into different situations and shake up their mannerisms and focus based on the story you’re telling, you can introduce the audience to new fairytales each episode in the same way that, say, HeartCatch introduced a flower of the week, or a sentai like Magiranger would introduce a mythological creature of the week. The best and most sensible part of this approach is that most fairytales come with their own moral attached – which means the format is already incredibly suitable for use by a heavily moralistic show like Precure (and I mean that in a good way – the “standing up for what’s right” moments in Precure are often the most powerful).

Instead we get a bunch of 90s comedy movie plots and “oh look candy did a dumb thing” shenanigans – without any kind of thematic relevance. Smile has a really interesting lore, and it baffles me that this late into the show they actually point out they could have bothered using it at times rather than doing some of the dire eps they’ve done so far.

Argh.