Pretty Rhythm Aurora Dream (and, Better At Japanese Than I Thought)

No one seems to be subbing Pretty Rhythm Aurora Dream and I’m horribly impatient, so I decided to watch the first episode raw. I don’t know whether I’ll continue—I picked it up thinking it was a magical girl show (specifically a magical idol show, which I now consider a sub-category of magical girl show), but it’s really not. While there’s a clothing machine thing that seems to be run by magic, it’s not treated like a unique magical apparatus. There’s a chance this will change or something though, because I’m pretty sure there were anthropomorphic animals in the OP.

I really enjoyed this episode right up until the idol performance. I’m always up for a show about cute, girly fashion, and this show promises a lot of that, with it’s premise revolving largely around clothes and its lead character being a genius coordinator (of clothes, not Gundams).

This kid rules. Total, unashamed, burning passion for girly shit.

Unfortunately, the episode’s climax was a hideous dance sequence that I don’t know I can suffer through fifty more of. The CG character models are pretty ugly, and it looks like the scenes were made in MikuMikuDance, which doesn’t excuse them at all since I’ve seen many great MMD videos, and this didn’t compare at all. I’m sorry, but as long as Precure ends on those magnificent CG dance sequences, this just isn’t going to cut it.

It was just a matter of time before the Knights of Round became a boy band.

As an aside, I was really amazed by how much I understood of this episode. I’ve watched some raws pretty recently, even of kid’s shows (watched the first ep of Danball Senki raw), and usually I just kind of get the gist of what’s going on. In this case, I understood *every* line of dialog, which I completely didn’t expect, so I might continue the show just in the name of Japanese practice.