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.
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.
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.
It was announced the 15th September, first day of TGS2016. Game is titled “VRフォトセッション from KING OF PRISM by PrettyRhythm” and a demo is currently playable at the VR game corner of TGS2016. It will release next spring (early 2017) on Playstation VR, and this winter(2016) on iOS and Android.
Seems it’s being developed by a company called CS-REPORTERS.INC.
The game’s story is about how a pro cameraman (the player) was commissioned by Edel Rose to take pictures of Over The Rainbow for a photo collection of the group. It’ll be released at the same time as a photo collection of Schwarz Rose, and you must help Edel Rose sell more than it’s rival. The Prism Star cadet Shin also joins in. You must guide Over The Rainbow to victory with your photography skills!
This is pretty funny and sounds like something PR director would write.
Currently confirmed characters in the game are Hiro Kouji Kazuki and Shin.
They also announced a handshake&photo meet event to celebrate the game’s announcement. The event is titled “握手会＆撮影会 from KING OF PRISM by PrettyRhythm” and this is the logo. Event will be this fall, they haven’t given out an actual date yet.
“Either Hiro, Kouji, Kazuki or Shin will gently escort you on stage, just the two of you, and do a Prism Jump! This is real?! You will also be able to take a photo together thanks to Chroma Key synthesis, it will be a handshake event of a new era”
Judging from this, seems they won’t add any other character but not loosing hope.
They’ll use the VR game and tech to try and do a handshake event with the characters themselves, the seiyuus won’t be present. I guess this will be another thing the Pretty Rhythm franchise is the 1st to do? Or at least to popularize. Ouenjoueis weren’t invented by Pretty Rhythm, and some of the staff said they may have been inspired by Nanoha movie screening concerts, but I’m sure tons of other movies will do ouenjoueis too after seeing how Kinpri became a social phenomenon partly thanks to them. If this VR handshake event is successful I’m sure other franchise will start doing it too.
Gotta say I definitely didn’t see this coming. I haven’t seen this in any english written news sites, so when I saw pics of it on twitter, I didn’t bother reading about it. Just thought it was some kind of VR tech demo collab with Kinpri at TGS. It’s an actual game project!!!
It’s kinda weird Crunchyroll or ANN haven’t reported about it yet. But I guess if PR related things were covered enough in English speaking media to satisfy me, I wouldn’t do these posts in the 1st place. Crunchyroll especially has been keeping good track of Pretty Rhythm news ever since Kinpri started and the franchise getting much more popular, so it’s weird. I kinda wish some English news site would report about it because I have trouble believing what I’m reading and wondering if I may be wrong. We’re getting an actual Pretty Rhythm console game!!! This is super big news!!! Even if it’ll probably turn out to be a take pictures game with minimal gameplay. If they add more characters, or even the girls too it’ll be really great. Really looking forward to how this will turn out.
I don’t think I’ll spend hundreds for a Playstation VR just for one game though. Kinpri VR is the only game I 100% want to try so far. There’s stuff like Summer Lesson and Argyle Shift that seems interesting to me, but I’m waiting to see how they’ll turn out at release. I don’t really believe in Playstation VR or Oculus Rift stuff, and everything I’ve seen of it so far doesn’t interest me. Waiting to see if it’ll get any genuinely interesting games and how the games will be gameplay wise etc.
Was announced at the end of the KING OF PRISM Over The Rainbow SPECIAL THANKS PARTY on September 11 2016. It’ scheduled for June 2017, no specified day yet. It’ll premiere in Wald 9, the same cinema Kinpri 1 debuted at.
I’m super happy and really hyped, but also kinda disappointed because I definitely thought they would first do a 1 cour late night TV anime for January 2017, and then a movie for June 2017. Guess I was too optimistic. And maybe director is too busy with Fairuru.
Because unless the movie is 2hours long I don’t think they’ll have the time to put in CG performances for each Edel Rose boy with their personal song, so that’s why I thought they’d make a TV anime at first to show them.
Every Pretty Rhythm series has their time based on real life time. They don’t necessarily happen in the same year, but time flows the same. For example, AD, DMF and RL each take place over a year, and they all aired for a year. Kinpri takes places one year and a half after the end of RL, and it was released one year and a half after RL ended.
So if they had made a tv series in January 2017, normally it should take place one year after Kinpri’s story ended. But by then it would be too far away and maybe Prism King Cup would have already happened since it’s supposed to be soon. So I thought the TV series could have been about flashbacks about what each character did since the end of Kinpri. It would have complemented all the various stories written by Director in magazines. That way they wouldn’t have had to worry about how each episode leads to the next too. It would have been episodic. Maybe we could have even got an episode about Kouji in America. But yeah that’s not happening sadly.
In any case, if the new movie still follow that rule, since it’s releasing in June 2017, one year and a half after Kinpri was released, it means the new movie’s story should also take place one year and a half after Kinpri ended. Which means that it would be even far away so maybe Prism King Cup would have happened already, so I guess they won’t make it happen that far away in time. Or maybe they’ll just say the Prism King Cup still haven’t happened then. If there is indeed a timeskip, maybe some of the characters will change designs again. Maybe they’ll skip the qualifications tournaments for the Prism King Cup and only show the cup itself. Maybe Kouji already came back by then etc. Lotsof different things can happen. Really excited.
In any case seeing the movie’s subtitle, seems Hiro will play a big part in the story. I still think he’ll sing Happy Naru since he won’t be able to sing Pride at first and want to sing a Kouji song at all costs. Still think Shin will play a big role in making Jin make up with hijiri too.
Event was at Tokyo International Forum, Hall C. They did it twice the same day so more people can go. First at 14:30, called “noon division”, then at 19:00, called “evening division”.
Even was in two halves. First half of the event was an ouenjouei. Second half was a talk show with Over The Rainbow’s seiyuus Kakihara Tetsuya, Maeno Tomoaki and Masuda Toshiki. The Kinpri sequel announcement was at the end of the “noon division”. They probably announced it again at night too. I’m not sure if they said the exact same things during the talk show at noon and at night.
The hall can hold 3000 people and was sold out. Furthermore it was streamed live in 82 cinemas across Japan, and 3 cinemas in Korea. What they call “live viewing”.
Around 20000 people watched the event in total.
Like all the different messages at the previous ouenjoueis, before the movie started there was a new message from the characters at the beginning.
Once the ouenjouei ended, the talk show started. During it they also showed scenes from the movie, with the seiyuus doing them on stage. For example they showed the Tokimeki Cycling jump and the seiyuus appeared on bicycle on stage as well.
In the corner “With love from Obare: cheering message” the 3 seiyuus acting as their characters, gave message of thanks to the audience for supporting them until now etc. It was particularly impressive when Masuda Toshiki screamed BURNING and all the audience screamed BURNING too.
There was also a message from some of the female main characters: Naru/Kato Emiri, An/Serizawa Yuu, Oto/Gotou Saori, Wakana/Uchida Maaya, Rinne/Sakura Ayane. They appeared on screen while the recorded conversation played.(Rinne momentarily came back or something?)
Edi: I found this fanart of their message. They were in their Kinpri designs, meaning the message in universe was during/after Kinpri, so yeah seems Rinne really did come back momentarily.
Kinpri seiyuus will appear the 10th only, during the “Rock stage”. The five participating seiyuus will be Terashima Junta/Shin, Hatanaka Tasuku/Taiga, Igarashi Masahi/Minato, Nagatsuka Takuma/Leo and Takeuchi Shunsuke/Alec.
Tickets for the event are on sale until 13th September at 23:59 (it kinda sucks for PR fans, they won’t have much time to buy them. It’s a bit weird they announced Kinpri will be at the event 2 days before the ticket sales ends. Maybe it was decided at the last minute.)
Kinpri will get its own web radio show. The podcasts will be published on Hibiki Radio. Further details like who the radio hosts are will be published later.
After these announcements, the seiyuus acted on stage a story written by PR director called “Over the Rainbow mune kyun Jump from backstage”. Basically a drama CD live.
After that they showed a message from Ito/Komatsu Mikako to Kouji. She appeared on screen while the recorded message played. Ito was acting shy and cute and there was warm cheers from the audience (That’s really nice they don’t care about insane fujoshis and did stuff like that. The only girl who didn’t appear is Bell. I guess they didn’t have enough money to pay Tomatsu Haruka too, or maybe she was simply too busy and didn’t have the time to record something.)
Then at the end Kakihara san said “Thank you for supporting Kinpri for such a long time. I hope you will keep cheering us. and they left the stage as if the event ended. But then when they left, a video started on the scren, showing scenes of Kouji Hiro Kazuki from the TV series and how they joined together and made OTR, and scenes from Kinpri and how they separated. And at the end of the movie it said “King Of Prism, New production decided!” KING OF PRISM -PRIDE the HERO-“! Debuts nationwide on June 2017.”
The video they showed got uploaded on Youtube by Avex.
EDIT: The article I translated described the video, so I didn’t actually watch the video until now. There’s some quotes at the end. Some were already in the preview at the end of Kinpri 1. Some are pretty interesting:
“I won’t be able to sing Kouji’s songs anymore?” Obviously said by Hiro.
“I thought he had statuses” The kanji used there is 格/Kaku, so this is definitely Jin speaking. My bet is that’s what he’ll say describing Louis when revealing to the characters he works with him. He’ll say Louis is a bishonene that reminds him of himself when younger and he’s a man of statuses, unlike commoners like Hijiri, Hiro or Kouji.
“This is Norizuki Jin’s way of doing things”. Probably Hiro or Hijiri, commenting on how Jin stole Pride for Louis to use.
“The way you are right now, I don’t want you to sing Pride!” The way the sentence is phrased makes me think this is Kouji speaking. Kouji ends his negative phrases like that. He’s probably speaking to Hiro. Meaning Hiro will do something bad? Maybe Kouji will say he’s disappointed that Hiro’s depressed for not singing Pride and that even if Hiro had the rights to sing it, Kouji wouldn’t like it.
“Hijiri! I have gotten hold of everything!” This is obviously Jin speaking to Hijiri.
“I respected my big brother. I wanted to become like my big brother one day” This is obviously Hijiri speaking about Jin. They’ll finally show a flashback of Hijiri and Jin’s childhood, when Maria died and Hijiri started living with Jin and Kou. This may mean Hijiri started doing Prism Shows competitively because Jin was doing it. This would mean Jin’s inferiority complex toward Hijiri is something he accidentally started up himself. Also this means Jin was nice toward Hijiri when they were kids.
Then OTR got back on stage with Athletic Core starting to play for the 1st time in the event. They sang together with the audience, doing calls to the audience to sing.
Then Kakihara san said “‘The next movie will be even more powered up, it’ll be a movie worth of even more encouragements, so please keep supporting us”
Maeno san said “Whether you’ve been supporting us since Pretty Rhythm, or whether you started with Kinpri, I will be happy if you keep supporting us”.
Masuda san said: “If I was to talk with Kazuki’s feelings, it would be that he has hot feelings about the new movie, and how he’ll definitely won’t loose, so please keep supporting us”
And the event ended.
After the event, the official site also announced a new Kinpri Fan Festival, similar to the one that happened some months ago. This time instead of a weekend, it’ll last 6 days, from October 5th to October 10th. It’s called “KING OF PRISM Kinpri Fan Fes Kansha sai in Autumn.”
KING OF PRISM イベント司会でした。 あっという間に終わっちゃった。 会場の皆さんもライブビューイングの皆さんも韓国の皆さんもありがとうございました(^^) pic.twitter.com/cpYI0H1Clx
Komatsu Mikako/Ito said she was very happy recording the message and Ito was super dere dere cute, and she wonders if Ito’s hair will get even longer in the new movie.
After the event, Director tweeted how they announced the 1st Kinpri movie last year in a room with 200 people and now they announced the sequel in a room with 20 000 people and a miracle really happened.
Also the pamphlet distributed at the event had him saying that if you like Kinpri please also watch the rest of Pretty Rhythm starting with Aurora Dream.
Remainder this book was released 31st of July 2014.
I finished translating this around 5 days ago, but some IRL things happened. I was also engrossed into Persona 5 things and translating people’s impressions from the demo events.
This is a design related interview, so I scanned all 4 pages of it so you can see the designs. Instead of directly uploading the pages here, I uploaded them on my puush to save space on this blog. Except for the 1st page.
My own comments or explanations are under parenthesis.
This post is unfinished and in a weird state because I wrote it as I was watching the event’s live stream. I have a recording of the event, but I haven’t got the time to get back to it and complete this post.
The KING OF PRISM by PrettyRhythm 3rd Prism Elite Meeting was the event to celebrate the release of the dvd/bd on June 17. I mentioned it last news post. On June 16 they announced the event would be streamed. So I watched it.
Here’s a summary:
Have important stuff to do so the post is currently unfinished.
If there’s no source link for a picture, the author of the photo/pic should be in the filename. Takes too much time to make a source link for every pic. Contains unmarked spoilers for the Kinpri movie.
KING OF PRISM by PrettyRhythm, 2nd Prism Elite Event summary. Event was 27th April 2016. Contain spoilers for the Kinpri movie and it’s yet to be officially announced sequel.
Nekketsu Nikki 