Your best! My best!
生きてるんだから　失敗なんてメじゃない!

Your best! My best!
Because we’re alive, failure’s not really a big deal after all!

DANZEN! Futari wa Pretty Cure – That’s Right! The Two of Us Are Pretty Cure – is the theme song to (predictably enough) Futari wa Pretty Cure and in many ways has become emblematic of the franchise as a whole. It was heavily present throughout the recent Precure 15th anniversary celebrations, both in television commercials and in the show proper. A remixed version played during the credits of the 2018 film HUGtto! Pretty Cure♡Futari wa Pretty Cure: All Stars Memories. A single of the Max Heart version of the song charted at #60 on the Oricon Singles Chart. It has appeared as a playable song in the game Donkey Konga, and has been parodied or referenced in countless other anime.

For example, episode six of Kyoto Animation’s Lucky Star:

The visuals of the opening are arguably just as iconic, featuring the first appearance of a Cure leaping out of smoke and debris – which would become the Precure series’ very own Akira bike scene.

Who is behind these moments? Who defined Precure from the start?

Let’s take a closer look, starting with the music.

The lyrics to DANZEN! were written by Kumiko Aoki, who, interestingly, seems to have moved on to animation after writing songs for a few shows including Futari wa Pretty Cure, Yes Precure 5 GoGo!, and Fushigi Yugi. It was arranged by Naoki Sato, who did music for the first four seasons of Pretty Cure as well as for Mermaid Melody Pichi Pichi Pitch. It was composed by Yasuo Kosugi, who would also do music through Yes Precure 5 GoGo! and worked on previous Toei productions such as Ashita no Najda, Ojamajo Doremi, and Super Sentai. As noted in the previous post, Kosugi also did the theme song for Tezuka’s The Three Eyed One, with which DANZEN! shares some similar musical motifs.

Finally, the song was sung by Mayumi Gojo. She would go on to sing the theme again in Max Heart, as well various songs through Yes Precure 5 GoGo! and a Precure All Stars movie in 2009.

What I find perhaps the most interesting about this look into the staff on this song is that they all moved on from Precure after the fourth season. I had always thought that the shift from Yes Precure 5 GoGo! to Fresh Precure had been largely stylistic in a visual and directorial sense, but I find it fascinating to see that it very much did so musically, as well.

DANZEN! was, as I mentioned earlier, enormously successful, and would go on to win the Radio Kansai Award for best theme song at the 2004 Animation Kobe Awards.

The music, of course, only tells half of the story of the opening. The storyboarding was done by director Daisuke Nishio, who also directed the vast majority of Dragon Ball Z and storyboarded 26 episodes of it. Perhaps it was this immense amount of experience that allowed him to pack so much action and intensity into just over a minute.

In this case, I think the storyboards speak for themselves, although I’d ask that you note how in many cases the drawings themselves are so energetic, so dynamic, that they aren’t contained to one small frame and leap off of it:

I do, however, want to post some side to side comparisons with the storyboards and the actual opening:

Taking these sketchy, stationary drawings and adapting them to fully animated scenes worked so well that many of these scenes have become iconic and frequently referenced by Precure itself. The “leaping through smoke” scene I mentioned earlier is easily the most familiar, but the spinning wall jump appeared as recently as the 2018 film HUGtto! Pretty Cure♡Futari wa Pretty Cure: All Stars Memories…

…while the shot of Cure Black pulling Cure White out of rubble appears in more humorous fashion as a LINE sticker:

Perhaps one of the things I appreciate the most about the opening, taken as a whole, is how well known it is not just in Japan, but abroad. Sure, it’s no Moonlight Densetsu from Sailor Moon, but in some countries, kids of a certain age in the early 2000s got to know their own version of DANZEN! very well. It has been translated into Chinese, Korean, Spanish, German, Italian, and more. It was not, for some reason, translated into English with the Canadian Ocean dub – this dub gave us a new opening which, in my opinion, is unfortunately inferior – but there is a mythical lost English dub by Odex and Voiceovers Unlimited which only aired in Singapore, so who knows, maybe they have an English version of DANZEN! intact. The first and so far only known clip of that dub (from a commercial) recently surfaced online, so perhaps further surprises await in the future.

Until then, an excellent unofficial English translation of the entire song was given a jazz redo and covered by Platina Jazz. You can view it on YouTube and it is absolutely worth a listen.

Looking back on it now, the impact that this opening has had is undeniable, but back in 2004 this was the first ever look at the mega franchise that would become Pretty Cure. And I may be biased, but if you ask me, it was a pretty damn good start.

NEXT TIME: First Look at the Legends: Futari wa Pretty Cure Episode 1

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References & Resources:

Pretty Cure Wiki
ANN Encyclopedia
Wikipedia