Fresh Precure! Movie: Omocha no Kuni wa Himitsu ga Ippai!?

Well, I didn't expect to watch somewhat of a Toy Story movie when I started Fresh, that's for sure.

In the movie of this entry, all the toys are disappearing and our girls have to visit the Kingdom of Toys to face a villain called Toymajin, the one behind all the chaos created.

In all honesty, and despite that I liked it myself, I can perfectly understand anyone who wouldn't like this movie. As it's the case with most of the movies of this type that I have watched, their short run time (and the more or less 10 minutes spent in stock footage of the transformation/movements ... doesn't help) together with wanting to split the screen time so all the girls get protagonism made the plot quite underdeveloped, but the theme of this movie about the feelings of the toys and why of the actions of Toymajin hit me pretty hard emotionally as someone very weak to those elements.

The art was pretty nice as expected of Precure. This movie uses some CGI in the later parts of the movie but it looked pretty good IMO, the awesome models for the characters already used for the ED dances helps with that quite a lot. The music was the same of the TV series and while it's not too memorable it does a good enough job with adding to the scene.

If you liked Fresh and find the story elements I mentioned interesting enough, this movie is well worth a try, but I recommend to not go with high expectations.

The movie occurs in the same place Chiffon teleported to in episode 35, the Kingdom of Toys, which I won't go over because it's frankly obvious and you can likely imagine what it's made of. Anyway, they find Usopyrin or something, Love's toy she left in the closet as a kid. The girls need to find and defeat Toymajin, who is a compilation of abandoned and lost toys. The Cures are tricked by his roulette assistant in an annoying manner; they see Love "play the game" to get the king, get tricked, and they all decide to play his bogus games anyway (since as he ... says, "it's more fun," but no. Not really.) As I said, Toymajin is made of abandoned toys, which means Usopyrin felt abandoned and joins with him or something. Love is able to convince every child on Earth to open their hearts to their lost toys, and she uses the power of their hearts to upgrade into Cure Angel, who uses Lovely True Heart to free all the toys, leaving the real Toymajin to be a simply teddy bear. Later, they do a yard sale and he's given to a cute little girl who loves him. This was pretty good, but tbh it was also just a tad boring unfortunately. I will give it a 6/10!

If a single movie can destroy the liking you have for its 50-episode main series, you know it's in a bad place. I watched this film not long after I finished Fresh Precure, a season where my liking towards it was already on thin ice. This film tipped it over the edge.

This film can generally be summed up as the Precure franchise's take on Toy Story- Very very literally. But unlike the Pixar classic, the plot of the Fresh Movie is extremely generic and too predictable for it to be truly compelling. Predictability doesn't always make stories uncompelling, but it indicates a lack of effort ... to try and structure or express the same message differently with the context in mind, which I think this movie was unable to do. I managed to correctly predict the ending halfway into the movie, and the resolution wasn't a convincing enough message for me to take away.

The only Cure that had any sort of relevance in this film was Peach, and the other three practically didn't need to be here at all. And I get it; Lead Cure ftw, but there have been movies that have done this relevancy issue better even if the story is focused on mostly one Cure (Suite, MahoPre, StarPre, to name a few). So from the get-go, the success of this movie was dependent on Love. And she failed.

Years later, Mahoutsukai Precure would feature a similar Cure-Toy story in Mirai and Mofurun, which was put into the spotlight properly in both series and movie, that created one of the best Cure-Mascot relations and Precure movies of all time. Fresh's movie brought in Usapyon as a movie-exclusive character, who had no impact on the main series whatsoever. It created too much of a burden towards making a deep story between Love and Usapyon for the "Forgotten toy" prompt to be emotionally powerful. Love's defence and promise to Usapyon did not convince me and came off as a spoon-fed message.

Maybe it's to do with how I never really liked Fresh Precure, but this movie was TERRIBLY boring. The board game concept slowed down the pace drastically and only Passion's individual fight scene really made me bat an eye. The CGI for the final battle was jarring as heck and the villain has zero personality. All comedic relief did nothing; I recorded my reaction and as I looked back through it I don't think there were even 5 moments where I was truly engaged. It was more like "Yes yes let's kick the villain's butt and get out of here." As basically a mega-fan of Precure for 4 years, this attitude of mine was unfathomable. But there's a first time for everything.

I've lost count of how many of my Precure friends I've ranted to about this film, going as far as saying "This movie wasted my time." I do feel my disdain towards this film is partly subjective, and I've tried to keep most of it outside of this review. Generally, this film was a bore-fest and it led to Fresh Precure being the only season of the franchise I left hating it. The series had good qualities, but this one- I cannot excuse.