This pretty much was the school example of how you should do a school festival episode. Seriously, school festivals in anime really are a staple, but I don’t know how long it’s been since I watched a school festival episode that did so many things right. And it’s not even over yet: this episode just showed the preparations, while the festival is only going to start next week.
The thing is, at our school we never had clubs like the baseball club, fashion club, et cetera: if you wanted to join such a club, you’d have to join it outside of your school. These school festival episodes are obviously meant for the Japanese audiences to relate to them. For foreign audiences meanwhile, these episodes are instead a chance to see different cultures. After a few of those episodes, this just gets old and rather shallow: the lead characters work hard on whatever they’re working on, they make their deadline and they present their work, often with not much meaning put into things.
This episode of Heartcatch Precure really had me surprised, though. It really managed to put a lot of different things into just one episode: there first of all was the fashion club, and the creators portrayed the stress of Tsubomi and especially Erika, trying to get everything ready. There were many things that had to be done, and many errands that had to be run, on top of Tsubomi who was running around the school, trying to find where the heck Yuri went. This episode didn’t focus on the making of the clothes: it has already been established that the cast knows how to do that. Instead, it really detailed what needed to happen, what they were planning to do, and some of the challenges they faced.
On top of that,the creators also brought the rest of the school alive: Tsubomi and Erika were nowhere near the only ones who were also busy trying to meet their deadlines: this episode saw all kinds of different clubs running around, like the drama, art, movie, photo, baseball and Judo club, alongside Itsuki’s tasks as the student council president. It really stressed that everyone was having the same stress as Erika, and everyone tried handle this deadline in his own way.
Really, I think that this was one of the very few school festival episodes that really showed me how those school festivals must feel to Japanese teenagers.
Rating: ** (Excellent)
At my high school in America, we also have many clubs (although attendance is very loose and sketchy). We don’t have club festivals though, although I remember in my first year of high school we had some class time to see a “club fair” in our gymnasium. Basically, there were stands with posters describing a club with an interest sign-up sheet. It wasn’t nearly as festive nor complicated as the Japanese ones!
A lot of shoujo manga portray school festival preparations like that…
Not in this fashion, as they mainly focus on maybe 1-2 main characters and their own little troubles. You kind of know in your head “ah yes the whole school is busy”, but you rarely ever see it like this. And they always, aaaalwaysalwaysalways either do the Maid café or haunting house thing~ -_- Well, you could see these even here, but it’s refreshing to finally see a school festival episode that does not use them as main theme.
Moonlight kicked ass. Also, I kind of loved Kumojacky’s ohI’msoevil-laugh as Yuri looked around the corner ….
The episodes done by this director (forgot the name) have always been the best ones. I haven’t seen it, though, I’m a few episodes behind, unfortunately.
Could you happen to be interested to join our Livejournal precure community or precure on IRC?
Every episode seems to have some kind of lesson for the kiddies, some good and others not so good, but I really liked this one. I was expecting that Tsubomi and Erika, distracted with helping others, wouldn’t finish what they had on time, and would learn a Valuable Lesson about the Importance of Prioritising One’s Time and Looking Out for Yourself Only (just like in the real world!) But instead they learnt that even when you’re swamped or in a tight spot and don’t have the time or effort to spare to help others out, in the end if you DO spare the time, you’ll be repaid in kind later on. Lesson: it pays to be generous! Sometimes I wish the real world was so kind.