#pcd239

Urara has the chance of a lifetime to get closer to her late mother. So of course, Shibiretta conspires to prevent this. Let’s dig in!

The Plot

Urara is preparing for a very special audition: it will be the same show in the same venue as her late mother’s final performance, which left a big impact on young Urara and inspired her to become an actress in the first place. She approaches this with a rare seriousness, saying she HAS to pass. She primarily opens up to Syrup about the significance of this to her, but when she tries to sing a song, she can only cough. Suddenly, she and all the other main cast find themselves trapped under the sea, turned into mermaids and sea creatures.

At Eternal, Shibiretta was spying on Urara and concocting a plan. Anacondy visited her office and the two rivals butted heads, so Shibiretta sprang into action, sucking the girls into the story of The Little Mermaid and capturing Urara’s singing voice in a seashell. The witch offers to return Urara’s voice in exchange for the Rose Pact, and surprisingly, the girls seem to be willing to make this trade, but Urara refuses because their mission to the Cure Rose Garden is bigger than her personal life.

Nozomi convinces her that they can get the Pact back, so they give it to Shibiretta, who predictably double crosses them and refuses to return Urara’s voice. Cococtopus spews ink all over her, and Syrup grabs both the Rose Pact and the seashell with Urara’s voice in the commotion. Then Precure and Milky Rose transform, losing their mermaid tails.

In the course of the battle, Shibiretta tries to steal back the pact by attacking Syrup with the Stingray Hoshiina’s tail. He drops the seashell, nearly losing Urara’s voice, but Coco and Nuts manage to save it. Cure Lemonade then uses Prism Chain to grab the Hoshiina and swing it around before throwing it into the cliff face, and the team finishes it off with Rainbow Rose Explosion. Shibiretta flees and the story world fades away.

Urara performs her song “Twintail Magic” for her audition. Washio later shows up at Natts House to deliver the results. He looks sad at first, but then reveals she passed the audition and got the part.

Urara talks to Syrup alone and redeems the free ride coupon he gave her in episode 18. While flying, he says that the open sky feels nice, and admits that he may have experienced this sensation before…

The Analysis

What I Liked

It’s an alright episode. I enjoyed Urara’s strong determination, watching her work for her dream, because of the personal significance to her.

On the other hand, Urara’s unwavering willingness to sacrifice her personal dream for the greater good is very powerful and mature, it shows that she understands the big picture.

Urara has several flashbacks to recount her journey up to this point, including her singing debut at the mall. I also appreciate the payoff to the free ride pass she got in episode 18.

Urara and Syrup continue to develop a unique closeness. They’re a common shipping couple, though I think they come in last place behind the other three major ships of the series (Nozomi/Coco, Komachi/Nuts, and Karen/Kurumi) and their bond is still portrayed as very platonic, with no romantic signifiers.

While I am not advocating for it, it is a good thing that the Precure series features topics such as absentee parents or even deceased parents sometimes, and how the characters are affected and shaped by it.

The underwater forms for the mascots are funny. Coco becomes an octopus, Nuts is a pufferfish, and Syrup is a sea turtle.

What I Didn’t Like

I know that I said in episode 38 that I appreciated Shibiretta as a villain for the originality of the fairy tale worlds, and that’s true here to an extent, but it still has the problem of the writers and characters not taking full advantage of the setting. The girls are only mermaids for a few minutes and they don’t do anything as mermaids they couldn’t have done as humans. They don’t have to figure out how to swim with fish tails, they don't meet any other mermaids, there’s nothing to it. Yes, Shibiretta taking Urara’s singing voice is a parallel to the original story, and she spells that out explicitly for the younger audience members that may not be familiar with the story, but they don’t need to be mermaids for that. The only advantage of her storybook world is that the girls are stck there until they defeat her.

When the girls transform, they stop being mermaids, which seems like a real missed opportunity in my opinion.

The girls’ mermaid outfits are all identical patterned dresses, just colored in their respective theme color.I wish they’d been more unique. They didn’t have to be in seashell bras, they could have even been in their normal civilian clothes. It arguably would have been less work when making their control sheets to draw their usual tops and then have mermaid tails instead of legs, than redesigning them all in the aquatic dresses they had.

Yes this is petty, but I wish they had used a vocal-only version of Urara’s song for her audition scene. I know they want to get people to buy the single, but it breaks the world a little bit that she starts singing a song with a backing track in a room where she clearly doesn’t have a boombox or anything to sing along to.

Miscellaneous

The story of The Little Mermaid involves a mermaid who makes a deal with a sea witch to become a human, in exchange for her voice. At the end of the story she dies and turns into sea foam, but because of her good deeds she earns a soul and makes it into heaven. Obviously the 1989 Disney movie is the most famous adaptation, which deviates significantly from the story in the last act. It also got a live action remake last year, which I have not seen. However there are numerous other adaptations of the story, varying in their faithfulness to the narrative.

The only elements kept in this episode are the undersea setting, the presence of mermaids, a sea witch, and one mermaid (Urara) losing her voice, though here it’s only her singing voice and not her entire voice.

This is the first appearance of Washio, Urara’s manager, in a while.

We see Kurumi in mermaid form during her pre-transformation stock footage. None of the others get this luxury.

This is the first time the concept of Precures and mermaids are mixed. It will not be the last. I think there’s more episodes where the precures are trend into mermaids somehow, and then of course there is the mermaid-themed Cure Mermaid in Go Princess, and then finally an actual mermaid becomes a Precure in Tropical-Rouge.

I didn’t mention this in the plot recap, but at one point Nozomi gives Urara a bead bracelet that Rin made, and Urara is still seen wearing it and clutching it tightly for encouragement during her audition. So it’s a nice little nod there, and also a casual reminder that the bead maker exists. We’ll get another reminder of that next time.

There is an animation error when Urara’s mermaid form is shown off in full: the bottom of her tail cuts off above the bottom of the frame, leaving a gap.

Milk does not appear in her fairy form in this episode.

Conclusion

It’s an okay episode for Urara’s story but I wish she had been given more time to do her thing. I also wanted more in the setting of The Little Mermaid. The episode tried to do a few too many things but didn’t make the most of its ideas.

Next time, on Precure Daily: Rin has to contemplate the true nature of accessories and why people choose to wear them, and also maybe go on a date with Mucardia!? Look forward to it!