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.

Controversy on Pretty All Friends official “big cushion covers”, “Taisho Roman style” outfits

Note: I wrote this article in a hurry, so there’s a lot of typos and sentences I need to rewrite properly when I have the time.
The Pretty Series history article explaining everything from Pretty Rhythm to Prichan is finished now. You can read it here. It explains the series relationships with Oshamajo, Love Live, Aikatsu, and the KING OF PRISM spin-offs. It’s quite a long read, but I strongly recommend reading it first to get a much better understanding of this controversy.

On August 3rd 2018, the official Prichan twitter RTed how there’s swimsuit dakimakura among the Pretty All Friends(PAF) official goods to be sold by Icrea at C94 (August 10-12 2018). It created a controversy among the Pretty Series fans. This is natural as the fan community is pretty massive now after PriPara and Kinpri’s successes, and includes people from different countries (mostly Japan and South Korea) so obviously everyone has different opinions and sensibilities. There’s people saying the dakimakuras are bad because they’re sexualizing underage characters from children oriented anime, and making hashtags protesting about it.

On August 3-4, the Japanese tags for PriPara and Pretty Series were trending.  The Korean tags for “dakimakura” , “children anime” and “pripara” were trending too. There’s also a currently trending tag with thousands of tweets used by people to protest against the goods: #プリティーシリーズ_女の子キャラクター_性商品化_もいい加減にしろ, meaning “Stop making official goods sexualizing the Pretty Series girls characters”
And a korean equivalent: #프리티_시리즈_여아캐릭터_성상품화_작작해라

I’m not making this post to repost some of the tweets in those tags, and write/translate things like
“look how low the Pretty Series franchise has fallen”
“wow Japan is so cool and redpilled, they NEVER PUT POLITICS IN ANIME, those Koreans complaining about the swimsuit dakis are just dumb SJW!!”
and get views like the crap Yaraon already did. (I’ll explain later why I mention Korea. Not linking the yaraon post on purpose to not give them views. And I hope ANN won’t write a post on this issue with yaraon as only source, because unlike what they said it’s not only Korean fans that are displeased about it)
I’m not interested either in trying to figure out if there’s a consensus, or counting the heads on each multiple sides of the argument. Rather, I wanna try to talk about the incident as a whole and explain what led to this. And in case it a becomes an even bigger controversy, it would be good to have a post for future reference to know what happened.

Also, I’m not going to voice my own opinion much. My opinion being that i don’t believe the daki are a very good thing, but for a very personal reason I don’t wanna talk about on the net. However, I disagree with most of the arguments against the dakis I’ve seen. Explaining my opinion would require me to write about things too personal and I don’t feel like it nowadays. Usually, I always voice my opinion because I don’t believe 100% objectivity is a good thing. (Like how most people saying they’re apolitical or don’t care about politics and don’t want to see politics in cultural works pretty much means they voluntarily support the wrong politics by not caring, and have never been forced to care because they’re rich or white or never experienced stuff like racism)

Kiratto Pri☆chan 5-9

Watched 5&6 soon after they aired, but then stuff happened like PC dying. Gonna try to catch up soon. And yeah I saw who appears at the end of episode 13.

La franchise Pretty Rhythm et le phénomène KING OF PRISM

Edit: Si vous comprenez l’Anglais, je vous conseille plutot de lire la version anglaise, plus complète, sortie quelques mois plus tard.

Edit: Aux Sama Awards 2018, l’article a remporté le prix de la passion. Merci beaucoup!!

Tout le monde connait Your Name de Shinkai Makoto, mais il existe un autre film entré dans l’histoire en 2016: KING OF PRISM by PrettyRhythm. Pretty Rhythm étant mon anime préféré de cette décennie, il fallait bien que j’y consacre un article en Français un jour. Et quitte à le faire, autant le faire bien et tout expliquer, tout en divulgâchant le moins possible. En espérant un jour une sortie Française ou au moins une projection des films lors d’une convention.

KING OF PRISM by PrettyRhythm (officiellement abrégé en Kinpri), est un film issu de la franchise Pretty Rhythm, sorti au Japon le 10 Janvier 2016 avec une programmation dans 14 cinémas seulement. Bien que la franchise Pretty Rhythm vise pour audience les petites filles, Kinpri cible les personnes plus âgées et les aficionados de BL. Le film n’a pas eu beaucoup de succès à sa sortie, et au bout de 3 semaine il  n’était plus que dans 9 cinémas. Le staff s’attendait au pire. Pourtant, il a fini par vendre plus de 800 million de yen de tickets, en Mai 2016 le film était programmé dans plus de 100 cinémas à travers le Japon, et il est resté dans les salles de cinémas pendant 9 mois. Tout ça grâce au bouche à oreille des fans de Pretty Rhythm extrêmement motivés sur Twitter, et les 応援上映/ouenjouei/Cheer Screenings/Séances à encouragements: des séances où il est possible de venir en cosplay, d’utiliser des glowstick, de chanter ou encore répondre aux répliques des personnages, parfois à certains moments sous-titrés spécialement faits pour. La dernière diffusion dans le cinéma où le film avait fait sa première, le Shinjuku Wald Nine, fut le 2 Septembre 2016, sachant que le film était déjà sorti en disque depuis le 17 juin. Le film est aussi sorti en Corée du Sud le 11 Août 2016,  et a battu le record Sud Coréen du film d’animation resté le plus longtemps programmé au cinéma, record détenu précédemment par le film Love Live! The School Idol Movie!.
Une suite, KING OF PRISM –PRIDE the HERO-(Kinpri2 ou Kinpra) fut annoncé le 11 Septembre 2016 et est sortie au cinéma le 10 Juin 2017, simultanément au Japon et en Corée du Sud.

Tout ça, c’est les uniques infos que l’on peut lire sur Kinpri sur la majorité des sites d’anime, même japonais(MantanWeb, etc). La franchise Pretty Rhythm n’ayant pas eu de grand succès avant Kinpri, la plupart des sites n’ont jamais vraiment suivit son actualité avant ça, à part les grosses annonces du genre l’annonce d’une nouvelle saison. Cependant, le film a un background beaucoup plus complexe qu’il n’y parait, et a connu une production extrêmement difficile. L’audience cible a t’elle réellement changée entre Pretty Rhythm et Kinpri?  Qu’est ce qui s’est passé pour que le film rencontre un tel succès au fil du temps? Y’a des skates sur le visuel, du coup c’est pas juste Yuri on Ice mais avec des idols et des clones de Shinji & Kaworu?

Kiratto Pri☆chan 3-4

Time goes too fast, we’re already at episode 4. Also I get the feeling I spent too much time on this, will try to make next posts shorter. Need to make choices to do other things too. Like that Pretty Series history thing that I started in September 2017 and still haven’t finished lol. Still haven’t translated anything related to Kinpri 2 too.

Kiratto Pri☆chan 1-2

It’s the first episodes of a new series so there’s tons of new info and it’s really fun to write about it. Next posts will probably be shorter, unless the series turn out really good and there’s things to write about every week. If it becomes bad or better to watch in batches like PriPara, I’ll try to keep blogging it in batches of episodes.

As you should already know, Prichan is the new thing succeeding Pripara, so you don’t need to have seen Pretty Rhythm or PriPara to watch Prichan.

Akaii Meganee confirmed to be in Kiratto Pri☆Chan

They show her in the new CM

オーロラのILLUSIONを破り、溢れる未来を駆け抜けた、七つの色で輝くSTARを繋ぐ橋を降臨せ、IDOLを持つ無限な可能性と尽きぬ友情を支えた。そして最後に時の涙を見守っていた。しかし!!最初から万物はあのお方のめがねの中で踊っていた・・・多元な電子の河流を支配し新たな伝説を刻む!!その名をっ！！ pic.twitter.com/Rbc2wJk3Kl

— Kasama [M]ari (@mari_kasama) March 20, 2018

Tweeted a Jun like story about it to show my excitement