Alternative title(s): Kibou no Chikara – Otona Precure ’23
Anime original by Toei Animation and Studio DEEN
Streaming on Crunchyroll

Premise

Back in middle school Nozomi Yumehara and her friends helped save the world as members of the magical girl team Precure 5. Now though they’re grown up and facing the challenges of adult life, while in the shadows a new evil is beginning to grow…

Zigg’s verdict: All Growed Up

Doing adult continuations to magical girl stories is not unheard of, but it’s notoriously tricky to get right because the genre is kind of inherently a escapist childhood fantasy. It’s much easier to justify saving the world when your biggest concerns otherwise are boys and homework. Once jobs, taxes, and all the other detritus of adult life enters the picture it can be a little more difficult to maintain justifiable suspension of disbelief in a candy-coated girls-own adventure.

To its credit, Precure Full Bloom doesn’t attempt to duck away from the more mature considerations of its newly grown cast – quite the opposite in fact. There’s an almost comedic level of trauma in these first 22 minutes and it often feels as if the show is really trying to ladle on the adult themes to justify its own existence and pre-emptively quell criticism of it as a pure nostalgia exercise. To be fair, the main plot thread here, that of Nozomi’s student Rumi, and her trauma at having to leave behind her familiar life and friends, has decent emotional resonance and feels like an appropriately heartfelt issue for a former Precure to be involved in. There are some good character moments too, like Rin’s instinctive observation that Nozomi acts more cheerful whenever she’s feeling upset. I do wish we got a deeper dive into Nozomi’s life outside of her job, as well as more info on the other Precures, but to be fair that might be material that’s in upcoming episodes.

Visually this is a perfectly competent show but rarely anything beyond that. The adult redesigns of the characters are mostly spot-on, and DEEN do a good job of keeping everything moving and mostly on model, but there’s a genial blandness to the overall look. The original shows are much more bouncy, heavily stylised affairs that just convey more personality through their exaggerated aesthetics, plus of course the legendary occasional interventions by Toei’s top-tier action animators. We do get to see a few brief clips of the girls in their retro fighting forms here and it looks solid enough so my hope is that they’ll be a bit more personality in the animation when it matters.

Overall there’s a lot of potential in Full Bloom but, ironically, this first episode was kind of a drag and not that much fun, though I will admit that I’ve got no particular nostalgia for Yes! Precure 5 and that’s undoubtedly going to be a huge part of the appeal for a big chunk of the audience. There’s definitely potential for them to carve out an interesting niche for a story here though, and we’ve got other factors yet to come into play, such as the heavily hinted time-travel mechanics or the presence of the Splash Star! girls. This isn’t an outstanding start but given the intriguing premise I’m happy to give them a few more episodes.