Toei Animation has been making magical girl anime since Sally the Witch in 1966 – and TV Asahi (previously known as Nihon Educational Television, or NET) has been airing these shows for just as long. Sally the Witch, for the uninitiated, is largely considered the first animated magical girl series. (Himitsu no Akko-chan preceded it as a manga first serialized in 1962, but it would not be adapted into an anime until 1969. Yes, Toei did that one too.)
Inextricably linked, Toei and TV Asahi have brought the world far too many magical girl shows to recount here, although some of the more popular ones include Cutie Honey, Sailor Moon, and Ojamajo Doremi. By the time the 21st century hit, Toei was no stranger to the world of mahou shoujo and its sister concepts. Witches from another world? Androids? A team of Super Sentai-esque magical warriors? Together, Toei and TV Asahi had been there and done that.
So they were looking for something a little different for 2004. Ojamajo Doremi had been highly successful in the 8:30am Sunday time slot, so perhaps returning to magical girls after the then-currently airing (and underperforming) historical romance Ashita no Nadja would be a decent idea. This new series would be directed by Daisuke Nishio of Dragon Ball Z fame, and feature characters designed by Akira Inagami. Notably, this would be Inagami’s first shot at character design – his background includes key animation in Dragon Ball Z and directing some episodes of Ojamajo Doremi.
Takashi Washio was chosen to produce this new series. He had no prior experience working on a girls’ series, as the biggest credit to his name up to this point was assistant director on One Piece. Washio is the one credited for coming up with the first seeds of Toei’s new show. There was no real difference between the way girls and boys acted when they were very young, he noticed. Both girls and boys want to save the world. Both girls and boys like action. Transforming heroines had been very popular in the past, but why not throw in something more? In his notes for laying the groundwork of the series, Washio said one of his most popular and oft-quoted lines: “｢女の子だって暴れたい｣” – “Even girls want to rampage.”
I have been blogging, on and off, about various topics, for over ten years. Sometimes a lot of people read these and leave all sorts of comments. Other times, I’m lucky to get one or two people engaging with me. Often, it’s somewhere in the middle. The amount of engagement I get, however, does not have much of a bearing on the occasional return of the Urge to Scream On A Blog Somewhere. So here I am, back again.
When I first started this particular blog a couple of years back, I don’t quite think I was ready for it. My vision was for it to be a comprehensive place to discuss a wide variety of things across an entire genre. Which is all well and good, but there was a slight problem:
My girlfriend pulled me into Precure Hell.
Very specifically Precure Hell.
The result was that I soon realized I could scream the same things about Precure on Twitter over and over, and this blog quickly fell by the wayside. A little bit embarrassing.
But old habits die hard, and recently I’ve been thinking about doing something… a little too big for twitter.
Specifically, I want to scream about every episode of my favorite anime of all time. In detail.
There they are!
I don’t… quite know what it is about Futari wa Pretty Cure in specific that makes me love it so fiercely. I really don’t. Is it the characters? The charm? The 2000’s aesthetic? The action?
I don’t know. I just know that it’s my favorite, and I want to share it with the world. Episode by episode.
If everything goes well – if this gets a good response, or even if I just like doing it – then I might continue it beyond one season. But for now, one season, my very favorite, seems like a reasonable goal.
So, translations. If you watch anime and don’t have a decent grasp of Japanese then you have to deal with them. Sometimes they’re bad, sometimes they’re good, and sometimes they turn into a meme.
This was my senior quote in the high school yearbook. This factoid will both date me considerably and also cement my status as a colossal loser.
So Precure has been around the block. It’s had official translations, fan translations, and it’s been dubbed in English (and other languages). Between all the seasons and all the different versions, it’s been translated, like… dozens upon dozens of times.
And sometimes it’s adorable.
“Call me Nat, okay?”
Futari wa Pretty Cure got an official English dub (as well as an official English sub) as “Pretty Cure”. This involved localizing the names, meaning that Yukishiro Honoka and Misumi Nagisa becamse Hannah Whitecastle and Natalie Blackstone, respectively. Which is already cute as is because it keeps the first letter of each girl’s given name as well as keeping the pun in the last name relatively intact – “Yukishiro” contains the kanji for “snow castle” and Misumi contains the kanji for “beautiful ink”.
Anyway, in this particular scene that I’m going to talk about, the English dub had to figure out a way to localize a particular Japanese custom that was essential to move the character development of the two girls forward. Specifically, at the end of episode eight, Nagisa and Honoka would refer to each other as their given names for the first time, rather than the more polite Misumi-san and Yukishiro-san that they had been addressing each other as before. This is an important step in their growing relationship with each other.
The English dub could have bypassed this detail entirely and kept the basics of the episode the same but they actually made the effort to localize it the best they could. In this case, they gave Natalie the nickname “Nat”, which only her friends could use, and then they had her tell Hannah that it was okay for her to use it as well. This is genuinely an admirable bit of localization and is probably the closest you can get to naturally conveying the original exchange.
(That said, I do think there is something interesting to be said about the fact that it tweaks the scene slightly – in the original Japanese, Honoka was the first one to attempt this sort of intimate peacemaking gesture, whereas the dub makes Nagisa/Natalie the one to do it. But that’s all a subject for a different blog post.)
Anyway, like I said. Adorable and also clever.
Mackenzie Makoto
So let’s talk about Glitter Force. It’s an English dub of Smile Precure, and later Doki Doki Precure, that was abridged and then put on Netflix. If you are a Precure fan, you’ve probably heard of it. In fact, there’s a good chance you hate it.
BUT WAIT, HEAR ME OUT.
Kenzaki Makoto, aka Cure Sword (or Glitter Spade) got the CUTEST EVER NAME LOCALIZATION. Her new name is… Mackenzie Mack. Which somehow managed not only to incorporate the unique sounding “kenz” present in her family name, but also kept the “mak” part in her first.
Oh, and there’s a famous song called Mack the Knife. A knife is like a sword.
Regardless of whether or not you think Precure localization needs to rename the characters, this is flipping adorable.
A cute name for a cute character!
“I write the O like a heart!”
We’re moving on from official translations now to fan ones and I’m going to start with Fresh Precure. Specifically, I’m going to talk about a scene where the main character Love introduces herself to another character, Miyuki. Miyuki asks for her name, and the sub tells us:
“I’m Love Momozono! I write the ‘o’ like a heart!”
Which is incredibly cute and incredibly in-character for her.
It’s also not actually what she says. She says “Momozono Love desu! Katakana de Love!” – denoting that she writes the name “Love”, which is a foreign word, with katakana, the Japanese script that is usually used to write foreign words.
A neat little detail, but not one that a lot of Westerners just here for a cute magical girl show would care about. So we get “I write the ‘o’ like a heart!” instead and you know what, it’s adorable and it works.
In which Eas makes a bad pun in more than one language
Now let’s move on to the next episode of Fresh (I’m rewatching this; can you tell?) Eas makes a terrible word pun in Japanese. She’s attacking with a… Juice Monster (I love Precure) and she riffs off of the phrase “sou da” (“that’s right”), because it sounds like “soda”, which she contrasts with juice.
If you translated that straight into English, you’d lose the pun.
Not to fear, fansubs are here:
“More power… or in this case, more juice!”
Pun is intact and Eas is a huge dork. Well done.
Fuwa-Fuwa Time
Now we’re jumping way forward in the future to the currently airing season, Star Twinkle Precure. There are a few different groups fansubbing this, and they’re all translating it a bit differently. Is Hikaru’s catchphrase “Twin-cool” (twinkle)? Is it “Galactastic”? Is it “Glitteriffic?” (Hi Glitter Force, we meet again). They’re all cute in their own way.
But today I’m talking about this mascot character:
Her name is Fuwa, which comes from “Fuwafuwa”, onomatopoeia for “fluffy”.
And this one sub I’m watching?
Translated it as Puff.
PUFF.
IT’S ADORABLE. IT’S SO CUTE. I CAN’T DEAL.
Okay, anyway. There’s good translations, and bad translations, and there are translations full of old bad memes (I’m looking at you Splash Star fansub) and then there are translations that are cute and clever and that’s what I’m saluting today. Well done all around!
For anyone who is into magical girls, Precure is a near inescapable juggernaut. It may not have the worldwide clout that Sailor Moon has, but in Japan it’s big business and, well… a career option, for a lot of kids. No, really. (My only question is: why is it not number one? Because it would be number one for me.)
The best part is I think most of these have been involved in a Precure series at some point.
Whereas other shows come and go, Precure never ends, consistently releasing an all new series every year. And to think it all began fifteen years ago today thanks to these dorks:
Yeah I literally did this. I bought my plushies a cupcake.
You’re awesome, Precure. Don’t ever change (except for the better)!
