The PreCure franchise celebrates its 20th anniversary while looking ahead to its newest arc.
The very first PreCure anime was titled Futari wa Pretty Cure, which translates to “The Two of Them Are Pretty Cure.” At the time, it made perfect sense, as the franchise kicked off with a focus on characters Nagisa and Honoka, whose magical alter egos are Cure Black and Cure White.
In hindsight, though, saying “The Two of Them Are Pretty Cure” feels pretty ironic. The number of Cures is now up past 60, and that’s about to climb even higher with the anime’s newest arc, Hirogaru Sky! Pretty Cure, set to premiere this month. For a lesser franchise, this proliferation of protagonists might have presented a problem, since there’s a digital mural in Tokyo right celebrating PreCure’s 20th anniversary. With so many characters, how do you choose who to include?
But this is PreCure, and so the answer is you include everyone.
The massive mural is located in the East-West connecting passage of JR Shinjuku Station, on the screens of the LED signage wall called Shinjuku Wall 456. With Shinjuku being the busiest train station in the world, you’ll want to avoid rush hour if you’re hoping to take unobstructed photos like these, and thankfully the display is powered on from 5 a.m. to midnight.
Not only does the presence of each and every Cure mean that fans are guaranteed to find their favorite waiting for them, it also gives you a chance to look back on two decades of character design trends and aesthetic evolutions within the PreCure franchise.
And the fact that this is a digital mural allows for some very cool visual flourishes. PreCure may be the most popular modern-day magical girl series, but it still carries on the genre’s tradition of transformations, and the highlight of the Shinjuku Station display is when the collected Cure crew performs theirs in sequence, like seen in the videos below, set to one of the series’ rousing theme songs.
The digital mural will be on display until February 5, the same day that Hirogaru Sky! Pretty Cure makes its Japanese TV debut. In the meantime, because of how huge the display is, in order to show you the whole thing we’re going to have to turn our photos on their sides, and ask you to do the same with your screen, but we think you’ll agree it’s an inconvenience worth putting up with for anime art as awesome as this.
Photos ©SoraNews24
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[ Read in Japanese ]