I’m Watching “Futari wa Pretty Cure”, Episode 7
Episode 7 — “A Bitter Lacrosse Battle! A Maiden's Heart is So Delicate!” — original air date, March 14th, 2004
We're thankfully reaching a point in Futari wa Pretty Cure where the English dub is generally doing a pretty good job of giving an equivalent experience to the Japanese version. Either way you choose to watch this episode is legitimate, and the only major difference at this point is the localization of character names. And hey, we're even gonna learn a new name today! Here's the low down.
The middle school's lacrosse team, of which Nagisa is the star player, has a big series of games happening this week. Honoka even stops by during their practice to wish Nagisa good luck. The game is a really big deal—so much so that the Vice Principal of the school swings by to scold and threaten the team, insisting they absolutely must win no matter what. You know, no pressure or anything.
The first of the series of games seems to be going really well. The crowd is hyped and excited, and the team is psyched up to win the game. That's when Nagisa looks up into the stands to see her friend Honoka sitting up near the top by herself in support of her friend. But then suddenly, Nagisa sees another boy approaching Honoka in the stands. Hey, wait a minute! That's that boy Nagisa has a crush on! How could she not love him? He broke a window with a soccer ball, so it was clearly meant to be.
Unfortunately, Nagisa can't hear their conversation, and it's completely gotten into her head. Are they actually an item!? She doesn't know, but the fact that it might be so is enough to throw her off her lacrosse game for literally the entire game. It's gotten to her so bad that it causes Nagisa to be the sole reason why the team loses the game. Her playing is so bad that Honoka up in the stands starts to wonder what the heck is so wrong. Meanwhile, the school principal isn't too worried because he knows there's still another game that the team can win to keep going, but the vice principal is absolutely losing his shit.
Something not really related to the plot that I think is worth mentioning here is that this may be the first episode where it's easy to see a very sudden drop-off in animation budget. Or, I mean, something clearly went wrong here. Sometimes the characters look like they've been drawn a little bit off. But worse than that, there's just so many moments in which a character or an object on screen is just a single picture painted onto a cel, sliding or bouncing across the screen to simulate actual animation. Example: a lacrosse player will be running across the screen, and rather than actually animating her running by moving her arms and legs, they just slide her into frame and bounce her up and down and hope your imagination fills in the blanks. I can only hope there's not a lot of other episodes where this practice is quite as pronounced and noticeable.
Anyway, Nagisa did not have a good day, so she spends the night at home sulking, and also getting into fights with her younger brother giving her shit for playing a bad game and sulking. Meanwhile, Gekidrago is getting scolded by Jyaku-King for having been sent out to defeat Pretty Cure and immediately failing so, uh, he better step up his game.
Pretty soon, it's the next day, and another lacrosse game is about to go down. And things are looking kinda bad already, because not only is Nagisa's head still messed up from wondering if her friend is in a relationship with her crush, but also the lacrosse team she's going to be playing against look like a bunch of NFL linebackers that could totally cream them. But not only that, but Honoka just isn't even in the stands at all this time. Why? Nagisa expected her friend to be in the stands. Her alien cell phone friend Mepple alerts her that he can't sense Mipple, and alarm bells start ringing between the two of them. Now, Nagisa finds herself leaving the game entirely, leaving the rest of her lacrosse team completely helpless against their opponents.
Turns out, Honoka is being cornered by Gekidrago on an empty lacrosse field nearby, shouting at her, demanding she hand over the Prism Stones she already has. As she's refusing to hand the stones over, Nagisa shows up to help. Together they transform into Pretty Cure. But they're interrupted by the unexpected—the Vice Principal. Of course, he's still got a stick up his butt and is just mad that everybody is hanging out someplace they shouldn't be. Gekidrago has decided this is a fantastic opportunity to bring out Zakenna again, this time possessing the body of the Vice Principal. So, it's kinda messed up that the bad guys are using living creatures to do their dirty work now.
But unfortunately for Gekidrago, this has to have been the most ineffectual use of Zakenna he could have executed. All this has served to accomplish is that now we have a monster who is really mad about his job. He feels disrespected by his students, the principal, feels underpaid, wants to be a principal itself, and he just goes on and on and on. Honestly? Not very useful here. In fact, he's so mad at everything around him that he even turns on Gekidrago. And honestly, with the enemies busy getting mad at each other, all the girls have to do is use the Pretty Cure Marble Screw to defeat Gekidrago and just win. That's it. That's the whole fight. I don't know whether or not that's because the animators were trying to avoid animating an entire fight this week because that's how cheaply they were operating here in episode seven, or if they really felt like lacrosse was the more important part of the episode.
Because, hey, there is still a lacrosse game to get back to! So now Nagisa and Honoka have to run back to the game together. But during their intense run back to the game, Nagisa asks Honoka how she knows that boy she was sitting with up in the stands. Well, for one thing, Honoka now finally tells us his name (it's Fujimaru in Japanese, Fergie in English). And it turns out, Fujimaru is just a really old childhood friend of Honoka's, and she thinks of him as an older brother. Oh! That's all it is? Well, that's definitely put Nagisa's mind at ease! Now she can get back to her lacrosse team that she soundly abandoned on the field as the game was starting and jump back in to save the entire game. Whew, crisis averted!
I can't say this has been my favorite episode thus far. The plot was fine enough, but it was clear there was either a crisis in the budget or in trying to complete the episode on time, and for that reason the animation very obviously suffered. Not only that, but there basically isn't a fight with an enemy of the week at all. The enemy of the week barely even exists and isn't in any way a threat, and it's over almost as soon as it began. But I'm very interested in seeing what episode eight will hold as we see one of the girls' first major conflicts with each other. I'm hoping this is a more interesting and well-animated episode.
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