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.

Pretty Rhythm All Star Selection Anime Official Guide Book: Hishida Masakazu, Iuchi Shuji, Tsubota Fumi interview

Previous translations (These past weeks I reread my older translations a bit. IIRC the only thing I corrected is in Itou Kanae’s interview, I didn’t get at first that she says she was told Akaii Meganee is an AI. Not sure if it was about Pretty Rhythm’s Akaii Meganee or PriPara’s Akaii Meganee though, as the one in Pretty Rhythm doesn’t feel like an AI. While it’s true she never gets out of Prism World, she makes her own decisions like purposely avoiding telling Shou and Yun Su things about Symphonia designs in DMF, or getting angry at Momo for forgetting things in RL)

My one month late Eid present for everyone. I finished translating this some weeks ago, but I’m really busy these days so I didn’t have the time to finish proofreading and editing till now.

(It took me 10h40minutes to translate this interview. Plus 7h30 of editing,proofreading, googling information and watching episodes again to better remember what they’re talking about and take screenshots. It’s 8 pages and around 13 700 characters. I did a quick comparison with an example: Madan no Ou volume 13 got an average of 297 characters per page and is around 480 pages without counting the illustrations and titles. This means it has around 142 560 characters. Meaning it’d take me 104 hours to translate it all. Let’s say 70 hours because it won’t be as complicated as translating a dialogue between 3 people. I don’t feel like getting money by picking a new LN that’s popular and ask donations to translate it, but even if I wanted to, it’d still take me too much time. I still have a long way to go. I’m not saying all this to complain btw, the main reason I do these translations is for myself.)You should read Madan no Ou it’s very good.

This time Iuchi san is here too compared to the interview in the Rainbow Live Guidebook. So it’s a dialogue with 4 people if you count the interviewer. I had to reformulate a lot so it makes sense in English, as the Japanese way of speaking is different. And I needed to be careful to keep the original nuances, and to not make confusing sentences.

I wouldn’t have this problem if I just summarized things instead of translating the dialogue itself, but I think it’s much more fun reading a dialogue. And it has it’s advantages too, when they have fun chatting, I can just show it directly, instead of writing things like “then, when they talked about Rinne at this point, they laughed because xx said that, and xx answered that, and xx also said that”

I tried putting colors, thinking it may be easier to read that way. If it isn’t, I’m genuinely sorry. Copypaste it on word and remove formatting. I won’t spend time removing the colors now that I’ve added them. (I edited in colors in some of the old interviews posts too)
I put red for Tsubota Fumi because she’s the one who wrote most of Bell, and purple for Iuchi Shuji because he’s the one who wrote most of Ito and Kouji.

The big titles are the titles of each part of the interview. Those are in every interviews, but I usually don’t include them because they just paraphrase what they say. Here, I included them to indicate they will change subjects. Unlike other interviews, they change topics without the interviewer prompting them.

Staff presentation: (I’ve never been good with staff titles and such so sorry if I got something wrong. I checked multiple times so it should be alright though.)

Hishida Masakazu is Pretty Rhythm’s director.

Iuchi Shuji worked as scriptwriter on all three seasons, and on series composition in DMF and RL. Meaning he wrote the core of the story/scripts with the director, Akao Deko and Tsubota Fumi. Akao Deko was the main series compositor above Iuchi Shuji on Aurora Dream and Dear My Future. But for Rainbow Live, she only wrote the songs’ lyrics, and Tsubota Fumi did series composition with him instead.

Tsubota Fumi worked as scriptwriter on Aurora Dream and Dear My Future and as series composition on Rainbow Live. Tsubota Fumi used to be in a theater troupe, writing theater pieces before starting to work as an anime script writer. It’s thanks to her they got the idea to make Grateful Symphonia into a theater piece, and she wrote all the scripts of Dear My Future from episode 47 to 51. She still works on theater pieces, drama and live action shows from time to time.

I also included the small storyboard excerpts present in the interview, the photos of the trio, and the same episode screenshots as the ones in the interview,+ a few more. I tried to put them in the same locations as in the book too.

My own comments are under parenthesis.

List of magazines issues with Pretty Rhythm related content

Inexhaustive list of the magazines with Pretty Rhythm related content, just copypasted them from my news posts. It’s just so if I ever have the money to buy them I won’t have to read each one of my posts again to find which magazine had what. Then I thought I’d share it.I try to update this list whenever making a new Pretty Rhythm news post.