Everything You Should Know About KING OF PRISM And Pretty Series in 90 Seconds

Everyone and their cat knows how Shinkai Makoto’s Your Name revolutionized anime cinema in 2016, breaking through Spirited Away‘s records. What few know, however, is that another movie made anime history the same year: KING OF PRISM by PrettyRhythm.

As you may know, the KING OF PRISM movies are spin-offs of the Pretty Rhythm franchise. The first movie, KING OF PRISM by PrettyRhythm (shortened as Kinpri) was initially released in 14 theaters on January 9th 2016. Three weeks after release, it was only screening in 9 cinemas, and the staff was preparing for the worst. However, the movie ended up earning more than 800 million yen, and by May 2016 it was in over 100 cinemas across Japan. All thanks to dedicated fans’ word to mouth and the movie’s “Cheer Screenings” (応援上映 in Japanese), screenings where you can come in cosplay, use glowsticks, scream and sing along during the movie, or dub lines during subtitled scenes specifically made for it. The movie had a 9 months run in cinemas, and its final screening was at Shinjuku Wald 9, on September 2nd 2016, even though the movie was already out on DVD/BD since June 17th. KING OF PRISM was a huge success in South Korea as well. The first movie released there on August 11th 2016, and broke the record of longest screening period for an anime film, a record previously held by Love Live! The School Idol Movie!
The sequel movie, KING OF PRISM -PRIDE the HERO-, ended up releasing simultaneously in Japan and South Korea on June 10th 2017.

However, the Kinpri movies have a hidden history unrecorded even on Japanese anime sites. In the first place, how did a kids franchise spawn movies geared towards adults? Why are the movies gayer than actual Boys Love anime? Why does what seems to be a Yuri on Ice! ripoff with Shinji and Kaworu clones is a big enough deal to be screened at Los Angeles Anime Film Festival???

Note: While similar, I’ve added a lot of things compared to the French version of this article I published back in May 2018.  This is basically the XX+ Reloaded Definitive edition of the “Pretty Series History”.

Edit: I fixed the post’s layout, as it got screwed up after I changed the blog’s theme, even though it was fine beforehand during preview.

Aikatsu! is joining Super Robot Taisen Cross Omega

#スパクロ　公式サイトにてシルエットが登場！こ、この作品はもしや！続報は9月6日にアップ予定！https://t.co/MpXMLPfmIT　#スパクロ #スパロボ pic.twitter.com/fXpIZ9tKFf

— スーパーロボット大戦X-Ω公式 (@srw_xomg) September 4, 2018

A silhouette that should be Ozorotteron and Akari was teased. Official announcement will be during the stream on September 6th so I wonder if other characters will appear too. Probably everyone who appeared in that episode. I hope Shion and Mizuki are in.

Well, this was only a matter of time. I still haven’t watched past Aikatsu! s1, so while I’ve seen screenshots of this episode when it aired, I haven’t seen it myself yet. But seeing that episode always made me think they could use it in Cross Omega. Seeing all the more random things that managed to get in, Aikatsu was obvious as it’s a Bamco property too.

I’m really excited. Now I only hope they negotiate with Takara Tomy and actually bring in Pretty Series with Pretty Rhythm. Pretty Series and especially Pretty Rhythm getting into a console Super Robot Wars is one of my biggest dreams.It has much more mecha elements than Aikatsu, which only has them during these “let’s film a drama/movie “episodes. Many of the Prism Jumps are on par or greatly superior than mecha attacks too, and multiple actual mechas appear in Pretty Rhythm as well.  If Aikatsu gets in Cross Omega, I really hope Pretty Rhythm will be next, and further down the line appear in a console SRW one day.

Aikatsu Stars! announced

(This is more a joke post than anything, don’t expect me to keep up with the news, though I did edit in the pv)

Staff A, voiced by Shinichiro Miki: Boss! PriPara is murdering us and is everywhere!!
Staff B, voiced by Nakamura Yuichi: At this rate Aikatsu! will die off! What are we gonna do?!
Staff C, voiced by Sugita Tomokazu: Let’s just copy PriPara!
Staff D, voiced by Nakata Jouji: TAWAKE! We already copied Pretty Rhythm with Aikatsu, the same trick won’t work twice!
Staff E, voiced by Furuya Toru: True, a Saint level aidoru never falls for the same attack a second time…
Staff F, voiced by Hayami Show: You don’t need to be a Jenius to know this.
Staff G, voiced by Tsuda Kenjiro: I told you guys we should have stopped Aikatsu after s1 and made it into a little girls card game but you didn’t listen. By now we’d have stuff like BURU AIZU ICHIGO DORAGON!!!
Boss Staff, voiced by Takehito Koyasu: Everyone shut up!!  So what if this puny PriPara rules the market now? I’ll tell you what we’re gonna do. Aikatsu worked and was more popular than this stupid rhythm prism show. Aikatsu is eternal!! Aikatsu is MUGEN NO KANOSEI!! Thus, for the new Aikatsu, we will COPY AIKATSU!!

All staff: NAAAANIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII

LITERALLY NOTAOI, NOTICHIGO, NOTRAN AND NOTKII. THIS IS THE IDEA OF THE CENTURY.

Edit: They released a bid the 27th. pv starts at 9:30

They even recycled the seiyuus too. Tadokoro Azusa/Aoi is voicing Notkii. Morohoshi Sumire/Ichigo is voicing NotAoi. AND OHASHI AYAKA/RAN IS VOICING NOTRAN. They aren’t even trying to hide the recyclage for her. It’s like they have no shame.
I wonder if the seiyuus voices and singing voice will be the same for Aikatsu Stars. Not that I care anyway.

This is so hilarious. When I first saw this pic I genuinely though it was grown up Aoi Ichigo and Ran, and that they’re doing a timeskip. It was very low res pics so you couldn’t see the eye colors etc are different. And I guess I just thought Ichigo’s hair got lighter. But nope, they actually just recycled and mixed designs together. Blue hair horns got Seira’s ponytail and Aoi’s hair color, etc.

I wonder how this will turn out. I stopped watching Aikatsu! after s1 and I don’t think I’ll watch Aikatsu Stars! either. So I’m kind of indifferent to these news.  I don’t decide whether to watch a series or not based on character design, but I guess if I had to comment, I’m not fond of this new chara design. It’s trying too hard to be cute, something I reproach to many things these days. It’s the same thing I don’t like about Melua’s new face for OGMD.

One of the things I liked about Aikatsu! is the character design. The characters don’t have ultra pale skin like stuff like Wake Up Girls, don’t have blush on every joints and cheeks like if they’re polishing their skin every morning like in Love Live, and they have noses. Even though I stopped watching Aikatsu, I slightly kept in touch with it, so I saw all the new characters are always super cute, like the Flamenco girl or Miyabi.

It’s a real shame they changed the chara design.

I’m not saying stuff like “Aikatsu is copying Pretty Rhythm again and doing stuff like adding a boys unit”, because while the pv says there’s a boys unit, we don’t know yet if they’ll be actual main characters like in Pretty Rhythm, or only appear every 10 episodes. Same with the S4 being potential rivals, we don’t know yet if there will be actual rivalry. And as this point, since they already copied Pretty Rhythm once anyway, you could just argue that instead of copying Pretty Rhythm, they’re just copying older shoujo shows like Pretty Rhythm did.

They did copy stuff from PriPara for the game. In Aikatsu Stars’ arcade game you’ll now be able to make your own character like in PriPara, and get customized cards.

I always wanted to do a collage of everything Aikatsu copied from Pretty Rhythm, to complete this “Aikatsu S1 Appeals copied from Prism Jumps” collage that someone once made:

Then, to make it fun and so little girls don’t get angry, I’d also add coincidences and things that actually haven’t been copied like this:

But I’ve always been reluctant of making some little girls angry and ruin their day. Maybe I’ll just put “this is a joke” on the collage. Or I should do a reverse psychology joke and say the collage is how Pretty Rhythm copied things from Aikatsu.

Daily remainder that the CG feathers in Love Live things are from Pretty Rhythm

http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2016-01-11/love-live-sunshine-idol-project-gets-tv-anime-this-summer/.97449

Also today 1/11 is Shion’s birthday

Also David Bowie dying finally made me check whether Crystal Boy/Bowie in Cobra is a reference to him and it is. I’m not into music but it’s things important to know to understand Japanese culture more.

Pretty Rhythm After Party event info

Sources:
Otoha
Wakana
Bell one of my favorite irua san
Naru MMM37 san, veteran drawing puririzu fanart since Aurora Dream.
Ann 江ノ内愛 san, another favorite.
Ito chan
『Coo san?! いや、あれわ。。。 KUROKAWA REI!!』
Kazuki senpai
JUNÉ SAMAAA 赤坂 択 san, another artist who’s been doing great fanart since AD
Rinne chan
HIRO SAMAAA
Kouji kun
Pair tomo
Penguin sensei&Tanaka:じろ様, no Pixiv account

Fanart poster made by artists fans of Pretty Rhythm. It was displayed at the event along other fan creations.

Pretty Rhythm’s anime is over. Arcade game machines too will start to be replaced by Pri Para machines this July. It’s way more abrupt than I predicted. When they announced Pri Para in March I thought they would remove them progressively. Like the article says, some Prism Stone shops will keep the game though, but they’ll stop selling memory passes, (so if I ever go back to Japan and want to play it I’ll probably have to buy one from someone)
Pretty Rhythm is done, completed, dead. So there was this event to commemorate it’s three years of service (four if you count from when the arcade game was launched)

I’m not living in Japan, so I didn’t attend.  I really wanted to go though, and am really interested about what happened there, so just like with the xmas event, I looked around 2ch about it. Someone nice wrote a report of the talk show part, and they also published something about the event on Animate.
Been a while I wrote a long post like that. I read it because I’m interested in it myself and I know no one gonna translate it anytime soon. As it takes me some time to translate, writing things down is easier, so posts like these just come in naturally sorta. I’m reading and writing this first for myself. And more importantly, it’s fun.

Needless to say there’s spoilers for all three seasons so I wouldn’t recommend reading if you haven’t seen them all. It doesn’t spoil things too major, so I guess it’s still safe to read even if you haven’t seen Dear My Future as it’s not fully subbed yet. (Besides the horrible quality ones on youtube. I wonder if they’re still online)

Pretty Rhythm Rainbow Live among the most watched cartoons two weeks ago. Also 1/14 is Kouji’s birthday

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The show rated pretty higher than usual in the vicinity of Tokyo.(Aikatsu! too) It was the week when episode 39 aired. It’s the first time I see the show in this ranking. Must be cuz of the live xmas event. And since it was xmas more kids watched TV. I guess there’s also the fact that kids with strict Japanese parents who usually won’t let them watch stupid cartoons on TV exceptionally let them do so for xmas. Tons of families watched cartoons together for the occasion.
It probably dropped to the usual the week after.
I don’t really care about anime TV ratings myself, especially since it’s used in trolling, and in many stupid internet arguments over anime these days. But still felt like talking about it this once since it seems they’re unusually high.

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Also it’s Kouji’s birthday. One of the biggest strength of Rainbow Live is the boys. I really like Kouji. Just like Hiro, he’s pretty different from the usual love interests in girls sports shows. While he can do Prism Shows, he doesn’t perform any (I’m pretty sure he will before the end though). He only does a backstage job of writing songs. While he’s slightly older than the girls, like Kazuki and Hiro, and gives them some advice from time to time, he isn’t their coach. These two points, about not performing, and about not teaching, makes him very different from the love interests of the classic sports shows I love, like Ace Wo Nerae! or Attacker You! (I wonder how many times I brought those two in a Pretty Rhythm related argument now. If you love Pretty Rhythm you should definitely check them out someday.)

Speaking of those, one of the things a typical girls sports show have that Rainbow Live lacks, is a DEMON COACH. A coach character who gives hellish training, but who’s actually nice in the inside, and does this only so his students can become the perfect athletes. Kei did the job perfectly in Aurora Dream, so it means they do know about the idea, but decided not to include the stereotype in Rainbow Live. I guess Norizuki Jin could be considered as one, except he’s genuinely evil. And instead of throwing balls at your face, he’ll only throw some rose petals and expel you from Edel Rose. There’s still one cour left though so maybe we’ll get to see one.

Now if we limit ourselves to Pretty Rhythm, I guess the character Kouji reminds me the most of is Shou. Shou used to design clothes for the girls. Kouji writes songs for the girls. Shou too had some serious issues in his romance with Aira, but in the end everything was their own faults. Sure, Yun Su complicated things in Dear My Future, but it stayed their problem and theirs only.  In Rainbow Live, Ito and Kouji’s problems are their families problems. Their love is obstructed by things independent of them.

2nd season of Aikatsu! announced

http://www.aikatsu.com/newseries/newseries01.html

All the characters will still be present, plus two new characters and rivals. They’ll probably add a few more later.

Happy birthday Ran!

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My favorite character in Aikatsu! There’s ton of new pics on her pixiv so today is a good day.

A TV anime’s length

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Mondaiji already ended last week. It was so short. Way too short. I know I keep saying that you shouldn’t judge shows without watching them first, but there’s one thing I always keep track of before a show starts: I believe the longer a show is, the stronger chances it’ll have to be good. You need time to make a good show, in order to develop the stories and characters. The shorter the series, the harder it is.

I’m always surprised to hear someone tell me they stopped watching Aikatsu simply because they learned that it’s 50 episodes and that they don’t have the courage to stick with it until the end, while I’m thoroughly delighted each time I remember this fact, thinking about all the fun I’ll be having. There’s very few 10~13 episode anime that are all time favorites of mine. It needs to be at least be 25~26 episodes. And even 26 episodes feels short to me at times.

As an example, Madoka Magica aired two years ago. I think it was a good show, but I certainly don’t like it as much as some people who would call it a masterpiece. There’s a good chance I would’ve liked it more if it was 26 episodes. Of course, OVAs and movies are a whole different story.

Aikatsu! episode 20: Scandals are necessary for idols

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Seriously, by the time Aikatsu! ends, I think there will be actually less little girls wanting to become idols.

Everyone knows that scandals are also a perfect way to boost an idol popularity. She will be the subject of gossip thanks to it. The surprise in this week’s Aikatsu is that they actually said it: “A scandal… It’s the mark of an idol. Having one or two scandals exposed makes you a true idol!”. The realism in Aikatsu! is something else.

In other news, they improved the CG. It doesn’t look as bad as in the first episodes. The girls look less skinny, less out of place. It’s just better. It’s still not as good as Pretty Rhythm’s though.