Kiratto Pri☆chan Season 2

Kiratto pri chan is an ugly duckling of an anime. Season 1 was packed with a lot of potential and a lot of insufficiencies. It was a series filled with interesting artistic choices and strange things to love about it, but it was marred by a sludgy stream of mediocrities. I think a lot of people have had that same experience of watching a fifty episode kids show, loving a lot about it, but ultimately giving it a 6 or a 7 because it had 30 episodes of bullshit holding it down. What a shock was it to me then, when, for a brief period in time, about half a year of airing, this show didn’t just deliver on its potential, it spectacularly over delivered. For a brief period of time it was one of the best anime airing on TV, with me looking forward to it every week more than anything else, and for a brief period in time, this ugly duckling spread its wings and flew off, a beautiful swan. I am of course being over dramatic, as I was in my review of season 1, but I’m just so pleasantly surprised that the underdog I had almost jokingly been rooting for really did overcome the Chad Aikatsu. This season was an improvement to season 1 in pretty much every way, too. It’s not just that the central stretch of episodes was so solid, even the mediocrities have become less pronounced. Though there is still one tiny thing that this season doesn’t do as well as the first one. But we’ll get into that. To imagine what makes season 2 so great, you first have to imagine what makes the best parts of the show in general so great. Famously, pri chan and its predecessors have always had much lower production qualities than its rival Aikatsu. Moreover, Aikatsu is noteworthy for taking a much more serious approach to its idol activities. Though I can’t speak about its predecessors, pri chan is a lot less concerned about making sense, and a lot more about simply being fun. Whereas Aikatsu puts a lot of strain on the fact that being an idol is a lot of hard work, Pri chan forgoes all that ‘hard work’ crap and goes straight to the fun parts. Because Aikatsu is much more tightly written, the overall quality of episodic episodes is much higher. Pri chan has to hustle every episode to be engaging and, in season one, failed at that quite often. But there were all these eccentricities that kept me watching: Anna and Emo constantly bitching at each other, Anna’s maid sometimes having superpowers, Rinka’s pathetic brother being dragged around by Meganee-san, the leader of one of the group’s fan clubs being an 8 foot tall middleschooler, and who can forget about Meru Meru’s spastic antics and crazy inventions. Just now I opened a random episode of season one, scrolled through it a bit and landed on a scene where Emo and Anna were leading a tug of war battle between their fan-groups and when Mirai tells Anna to go talk to Sara, Anna has Mirai take her place at the rope, at which point Emo’s team start yelling at her that she’s a traitor and that they knew all along that she was on their side and Mirai is like: “You’ve got it all wrong!”, with this cute, dopey facial expression. Random moments like that, that come out of nowhere, always get me smiling from ear to ear and are what kept me watching the show, despite me recognizing its insufficiencies. Other than that, Pri chan has a lot of random interesting design choices. A lot of side characters have weird out-there designs, like the aforementioned 8 foot tall middleschooler, Anna’s petite dad, reminiscent of the dad in Minky Momo and Anna’s maid who has gigantic eyes, but no irises. There’s lots of side characters that have these weird character designs, and I absolutely love it. Of course I want to see weird, creative character designs in a funny and eccentric show like this! Why do you even have to ask? The designs of the main characters are a lot more ‘normal’, but they’re also unlike any other anime and very solid. You can definitely tell that the meltic star girls are a lot better designed than the main girls, likely because the main girls need to be more generic and relatable. Their designs have grown on me considerably, though. Somewhere along season two I grew a much greater appreciation for the character designs and the design of the show as a whole. I don’t know if that is just me or the show or what, but I’ve been enjoying the main characters a lot more this season. I also love how the rest of the show looks. A lot of the show will look somewhat generic, with very normal locations with very normal looking background characters, but sometimes you’ll see weird looking side characters or interestingly designed locations. The kirajuku square, where the pri chan studio, or whatever it is, where Meganee works, is located, is always a great location. However my favourite has to be Sara’s house, which is this weird round house with a flat roof, sorta resembling an old mill house you see in the countryside, but with the mill taken off and equally broad near the top. This house is located in the middle of the suburbs, surrounded by properties with totally normal looking houses on them, and every time I see it I’m absolutely delighted. Aikatsu has all of these well crafted locations and well designed characters and is very consistent with that, but pri chan, usually much more generic, can totally get one over on The Chad whenever it feels like it. And that shows what this show misses: Consistency. Because of that, I was very surprised to see that, starting just under a third of the way through the season, the show suddenly becomes consistent. Every single episode until the last ten is at least merely good and many of them are great. It was in the early twenties of episodes I noticed how every episode I had recently watched of the show had been a banger and as I continued to watch the episodes as they got translated, I was surprised to see how every single one of them continued the streak. I started looking forward to every new episode more than anything else. It truly was one of the best shows airing during that time. And that was all because it took what made Pri chan so great for me and made it most of the episode, instead of just the spice on top of an otherwise average episodic episode. To help you understand what makes these episodes so fun to watch for me, I’ll briefly go over part of an episode of the show. This is what happens in that episode: Daia-chan gives her intro OP Anno and Emo are on the beach of a deserted island, dressed in leaves Emo says this is karma for Anna being a bitch After Emo askes, Anna says they can’t contact anyone, because they can’t get a signal Flashback to everyone on a massive cruise ship Anna and Emo are scoffing at each other and everyone’s concerned, because they still haven’t settled their argument Flashback to Meganee excitedly telling them to go to this resort for a promotional event(to make her money) Maria states that it would be cute if the two of them would cutely make up Anna’s maid presses a giant doom button The gigantic cruise ship just splits in two and Emo and Anna are separated from the rest Maria surmises that the manner in which the ship is splitting in two is very cute Back to the deserted island, Emo calls Anna’s ship junk and they fight Emo heads into the forest and Anna follows her Emo gets mad about Anna following her and Anna almost lets out that she’s concerned about her and blushes. God these girls are cute. Montage of Anna and Emo having dangerous adventures in the forest and getting chased by animals and almost drowning and falling They come across some ruins and they both simultaneously say that some giant stone monkey head looks like the other. At this point we get to the scene where it turns out that this was all done on purpose to help these two make up. This is six minutes into the episode, four if you don’t count the op and other stuff, and the whole episode has been packed with stuff happening. There was lots of fun dialogue, some cute scene…