Tropical-Rouge! Precure & The Little Mermaid

[veu]

Source: www.animenewsnetwork.com/review/tropical-rouge-precure/episodes-13-24/.176401

Tropical-Rouge! Precure
Episodes 13-24
Synopsis:
The Witch of Delays hasn't ceased her efforts (or her minions' efforts) to steal all of the motivation power of the people of Aozora City, and that means that the Pretty Cures haven't had a moment to rest. Laura is beginning to feel a little bit left out, though – she can still help out, but without legs, she doesn't get to participate in a lot of the girls' school and fun time activities. Is there a way to make the story of the Little Mermaid come true for her?


Review:
If you've never read it, Hans Christian Andersen's original literary fairy tale The Little Mermaid is pretty grim. Not only does the poor mermaid feel like she's walking on knives with every step she takes, she also has to sleep outside the prince's bedroom door on a cushion like a dog, and in the end, she opts to kill herself, turn into seafoam, and maybe, if she's lucky, get a soul after three hundred years of service as a spirit of the air and be allowed into the Christian heaven. Despite all of the adaptations and fluffy retellings, it's hardly the sort of story that you'd expect to inspire any of the characters of a feel-good family-friendly franchise like Tropical-Rouge! Pretty Cure.

So what's the second set of twelve episodes to do with it? The first part of the series not only made it clear that The Little Mermaid is one of Minori's favorite stories, but it also introduced us to both an actual mermaid, Laura, and a sea witch, the Witch of Delays. As the show went on, we saw Laura growing increasingly unhappy with the fins that kept her from fully participating in her friends' lives, to the point where she figured out how to walk on her fins (a technical improbability, even in a magical girl show featuring a mermaid) in order to do more fun things with them. This set of episodes brings Laura to the point where she's not just going to sit back quietly and take it anymore (not that either of those things have ever been her strong suit). That leaves her with one good option: take control of her own story and rewrite the fairy tale so that she doesn't end up walking on knives or turning into sea foam.

While this doesn't happen until episode seventeen, Laura's rewriting of Anderson's tale is the heart of these episodes. Episode sixteen lays the groundwork, having Laura read the Anderson original and later be kidnapped and imprisoned by the Witch of Delays. The rest of the Pretty Cures are able to use their powers (which apparently include breathing underwater) to go attempt a rescue, but even if they can breathe, Laura's really the only one who has any real skill at functioning under the sea. Therefore it's up to her to save herself and later them, albeit with a bit of help from Kururun. It's this desire, this need to help everyone that gives Laura her power; she may come across as selfish and a bit of a diva, but at heart she really does want to be a part of the Tropical-Rouge team, and that allows her to express these feelings to the queen. Whether it's the queen's magic or Laura's own determination that's the greater power is up to our interpretation; I think Laura herself and her newly expressed desire is ultimately the strongest force. She's no lovesick fifteen-year-old, after all: she's not only a potential queen in her own right, but she's also bound and determined to do something to help save her world with her newfound friends. That is what ultimately allows her to not only become a full member of the team as Cure La Mer, but also to become a human and a part of their lives even when not fighting Yaraneda. Laura has successfully rewritten the tale of the mermaid who wants to be human on her own terms.

This naturally doesn't mean that all of Laura's troubles are over; she quickly discovers that being human comes with its own issues and that going to school as an exchange student isn't all fun and games. But Laura's new legs mean that the girls have the chance to become even more cohesive as a unit, and we can see Minori and Asuka opening up to the others a bit more as they all grow closer. Asuka in particular allows herself to be a little more vulnerable around the younger girls, and if no one can quite beat Manatsu in exuberance, seeing everyone work and play together more smoothly is a definite highlight of this segment of the show. A summer trip back to Manatsu's hometown on Minamino Island does a particularly good job of showcasing this, especially since the island conceals something that the Witch of Delays very much wants – and another thing that grants Cure La Mer a new power.

The trip home also allows us to see Manatsu in her home environment, and if anything she's even more energized upon their return to the mainland. This does occasionally make her seem a little less than brilliant; episode twenty-four's quiz show does not do her any favors in the intelligence department. But given how serious Sango, Asuka, and Minori can all be, Manatsu is largely balanced out (and yes, it does take three separate characters to equalize her astounding amounts of energy). Laura, despite now truly being part of the gang, still does come off as being a little bit on the outside, but that is more likely due to her proud personality than anything else. In fact, Laura is the only one to do anything to appease a “ghost” in an abandoned mansion on the outskirts of town – the spirit is actually little Elda, the shrimp-maid member of the Witch's team, injured and alone. Laura's kindness to Elda may turn out to be her most important contribution later on down the line; not only is Elda the weakest link among the Witch's minions, but she's also the youngest, and Laura's help could convince someone not fully indoctrinated into the Witch's ways to switch sides eventually.

For all that she's in charge of the plan, the Witch of Delays is still largely absent from the story. She appears in the initial Cure La Mer episodes and again later when she…births? a new, more powerful Yaraneda. But she's still mostly just sleeping in her bed, letting her minions do the work, which feels a little anti-climactic. This set of episodes also has a few that just don't quite pull off their storylines as well as the others, such as episode twenty, which revolves around Manatsu losing a fancy melon bread, and the quiz show of episode twenty-four. There's also some slightly lazier animation and off-model characters, but that could easily be less an effort issue and more a pandemic one. And it must be said that Cure La Mer's outfit is stunning and impressively practical in terms of featuring leggings instead of a short skirt; its emphasis on Laura's toenails is a nice touch to remind us how important her having feet is.

Tropical-Rouge! Pretty Cure may not have the serious pathos of Healin' Good Pretty Cure or the large cast and slightly darker storyline of Kira Kira Pretty Cure a la Mode, but it makes up for that in sheer enthusiasm. Its joy is contagious, and even if you aren't as thrilled as me to see Laura claim ownership of her own Little Mermaid story, it's simply a lot of brightly colored fun each and every week.

Correction: It is Manatsu, not Laura, who showed kindness to Elda. Thanks to Spike Terra, darkchibi07, and Saeryan for pointing this out.


Grade:
Overall (sub) : B+
Story : B+
Animation : B
Art : B
Music : B
+ Laura's change into Cure La Mer is a great take on the Little Mermaid story, Cure La Mer's outfit is lovely. High energy and fun.
− Manatsu can be a bit much, Minori and Sango often feel like they take a backseat. Some off-model episodes.

[veu]

Source: www.animenewsnetwork.com/review/tropical-rouge-precure/episodes-36-46/.182046

Tropical-Rouge! Precure
Episodes 36-46

Synopsis:
Tropical-Rouge! Precure Episodes 36-46
As the fight against the Witch of Delays and her henchmen becomes more heated and dangerous, the girls take a trip to Grand Ocean, where they learn some upsetting information: once Laura is done with her mission, all of their memories will be removed, so that interactions between humans and mermaids never come to light. But even with this worry looming over them, the girls still have to figure out what happened to cause the Witch to begin stealing motivation power in the first place—and the answer may have something to do with Cure Oasis, the Legendary Pretty Cure. Can they learn the answer, defeat the Witch, and defy the laws of the mermaid kingdom?

Review:
It's no surprise that Pretty Cure series can get fairly dark. The series that directly preceded this one, Healin' Good Pretty Cure, was actually very heavy in terms of its symbolism and subject matter, so much so that Tropical-Rouge! Pretty Cure at times felt like it was actively distancing itself from its predecessor. But lest we forget, Laura's storyline is linked to Hans Christian Andersen's original literary fairy tale The Little Mermaid, a story where a mermaid's interactions with a witch and humans does not end well for her. (We'll ignore that Andersen maintained that the mermaid's death was a happy ending because she had a chance at a Christian soul.) We've had reminders of that link throughout the series, and they've marked some of the show's best episodes as Laura struggled to distance herself from Andersen's version of mermaid/human relations. But in this final set of episodes, it becomes something that she can't ignore, because she learns a terrible truth when the girls go to Grand Ocean: that mermaids and humans who interact are doomed to have their memories of their time together erased.

That casts a pall over things for the girls, even as they do their level best to ignore it while dealing with the Witch and their own personal hang-ups. Because the sad fact of the matter is that life doesn't stop to let you deal with unhappy revelations—Asuka still has to think about where she's going to high school, Sango and Minori still have a lot of social ghosts to fight, and the Witch is still lurking in the depths of the ocean. Manatsu, thanks to her sunny disposition, has always given the impression that she's not really thinking about the future but instead living in the moment, which makes her breakdown in the final episode—when the possibility of Laura leaving and all of them forgetting her suddenly become real—all the more striking. The other girls have had difficult issues that they couldn't ignore, but Manatsu, it turns out, is a champ at simply pushing those things down until she just can't anymore. Even when she's kidnapped by the Witch's minions, she's able to keep on tropica-shining; it's when the battle's over that she falls apart.

That personality trait speaks to how well-developed each of the girls are. Yes, they can all be slotted neatly into different character types, but over the course of the show they work to rise above them. Laura becomes more empathetic, Asuka learns to admit to what's bothering her, Sango grows more confident, and Minori stops hiding in her own shadow. Their rates of change vary, so they're all still in different emotional places at the end, but it's clear that change has been happening steadily when we see them all living their lives over the credits of the final episode. Whether it was being Pretty Cures, being together, or a combination of both, all five of them are in a better place by the end than they were in the beginning, and that's not always a guarantee, even in a magical girl show.

It's also a journey through which we understand what the villain of the piece underwent in the past, or at least started on. The origin of the Witch of Delays is directly parallel to what Laura must do in the final episode, and naturally it's also tied to the Pretty Cure who came before ours, Cure Oasis. It's certainly worth mentioning that Cure Oasis, who lived at least a hundred years ago, is much more developed than most of the Legendary Pretty Cures in other series; she has a name and a clear backstory that's important to understanding the Witch and the role of our girls. Simply put, the two interacted and liked each other, causing the Witch, at the time known as the Witch of Destruction, to continually delay her showdown with Cure Oasis, which enabled her transformation into the villain Cure Summer and her gang have to fight. The Witch's failure to take any kind of decisive action doomed her, while also making it impossible for Cure Oasis to get any sort of closure herself. That's what Laura needs to avoid in the end; she can't just sit around thinking about whether she wants a life as a mermaid queen or a normal human, because then she'll be no better—or happier—than the Witch.

While this more serious narrative is cushioned by lighter episodes (and one truly weird summoning of Cure Oasis; she's like a shrieking bobblehead from he**), the thread is effectively carried throughout the show's final quarter. And while the finale does its level best to make us worry, there's always a thread of hope: Laura has been shown, time and again, to be actively defying Andersen's narrative of what happens to a mermaid who interacts with humans. If we're going to get a solid happy ending of the sort we're used to, Laura must carry that defiance through to the end, becoming a mermaid who neither lives mute on land nor turns to seafoam. Her growth is shown in how she handles this decision and the ways she finds to circumvent the way that she's been told things “have” to be.

The animation continues to be stronger in this part of the show when compared to the earliest episodes, and there are some interesting design choices made for a few of the characters, such as how Butler finishes up and Cure Oasis' pineapple-meets-Marge-Simpson hairdo. It is of some concern that, as of this writing, the legal stream has not included the baton-pass to the next set of Pretty Cures, although perhaps we shouldn't read too much into that. More important is that Tropical-Rouge! Pretty Cure really pulls through in the final stretch, both thematically and story-wise in the best magical girl tradition.

Grade:
Overall (sub) : B+
Story : B+
Animation : B+
Art : B
Music : B+
+ Carries through on its promises and thematic use of Andersen, all characters show real growth. Manatsu's breakdown in episode 46 is very well done.
− A few weird moments during the final battle, Asuka and Yuriko's relationship still feels a bit off/unresolved.