PURAORE!: PRIDE OF ORANGE

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CAST

MANGA Slice of LifePuraore!: PRIDE OF ORANGE Preseason - Nusamaibashi​

REVIEWS

• 

  planetJane

  23/100
  Hold a mirror in front of your face, and watch the hope drain from your eyes.

  

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  All of my reviews contain __spoilers__ for the reviewed material. This is your only warning.

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  If you close your eyes, you can almost picture it. _The time is early 2020. The place? An opulent office space somewhere in Tokyo, the residence of a chief CEO. A real big shot. His suit and his coke habit mark him as a survivor of the ’80s entertainment biz. He’s been places. He’s seen things. He’s helped stars rise and he’s made them fall. Today is a day like any other, when a representative pitching a new series–an anime–strides into his office. The rep talks smooth as Crisco, and the boss doesn’t need much convincing. His pitch is simple; everyone’s got an idol show. Your company needs one too. The boss is hung up on only one point. He’s been around the block, he knows his stuff, and he knows that just blindly copying this hot new trend won’t cut it. They need a twist. Idly, he taps a remote on his desk, and the jumbo flatscreen on the other wall lights up. It’s a sports channel, but they’re not broadcasting any of Japan’s typical national pastimes. Instead, he sees an ice rink, and a black puck zipping across it. He smiles at the serendipity as the rep stands there confused. “Son.” The boss says, his tone cool and confident. “There’s our twist.”_ This is probably not how Pride of Orange, a near-instantly forgotten entry in the “idol anime but also something else” subgenre from late last year, actually got greenlit. But it makes more sense to me than the alternative. Some washed-up suit OK’ing this is the only way it seems plausible that it was made at all. What’s the other explanation? That this was focus-tested? That multiple people sat down and assured themselves that yes, idols playing hockey is exactly what the youth of Japan want in their cartoons? If the show had actually been good, it’s possible I’d be sitting here praising the ingenuity of conjoining these two things that absolutely do not go together at all. But we don’t live in a world where Pride of Orange is a good show, so that’s irrelevant. In the US, this is the kind of thing that gets mocked on VH1 by washed-up celebrities 20 years after it airs off the surreal premise alone. Some real Baywatch Nights shit. I don’t know if they have a similar pop culture backwash hall of shame practice in Japan, and if so, whether it includes anime, but Pride of Orange had better hope so on both counts, because there’s no way anyone’s remembering it otherwise. You might take all this to mean Pride of Orange is bad. You’d be right to. It is bad! But every single bad anime I’ve ever covered on Magic Planet Anime before has had a saving grace that Puraore does not; they were bad in interesting ways. Pride of Orange is bad in the same way that Imagine Dragons, ugly logos, and direct-to-Netflix specials are bad. It is an obvious product of a pop cultural media machine completely failing to deliver the one thing that said machine should always be able to. In this case, a baseline watchable cartoon. Beyond its ridiculous premise, there just isn’t much to it. It’s audiovisual wallpaper. An active test of your patience that dares you, with its sheer brain-numbing mundanity, to blink first. This is anime-by-algorithm, a so-inoffensive-it’s-offensive patchwork of tropes, plotlines, and even character designs cribbed from other, better anime, kludged together by grey-suited executives without a single creative bone in their bodies. That’s before we get to its more serious flaws, mind you. So, what is this horrible abomination unto mankind? Well, as mentioned, it’s theoretically an idol series where the idols are also a hockey team. In practice it’s more the other way around. The “idol” bit feels tacked-on enough (a grand total of two dance sequences, with almost no buildup, over its whole run) that I wonder if it wasn’t initially conceived as a straight sports series and then later altered. It does have the cast structure of an idol series, at least, and all characters present fall into broad archetypes that the genre popularized, but quite unlike some personal favorites in it (say, 2011’s The Idolmaster, 2018’s Zombie Land Saga, or 2020’s Love Live! Nijigasaki High School Idol Club),* none of them have much personality. Probably the best of the lot are Naomi and Riko, whose distinction mostly comes from the fact that they’re quite obviously dating each other. (Their brief arc, which culminates in episode 9, is unquestionably the highlight of the series.) The remainder of the cast is fairly anonymous, including theoretical protagonist Manaka. We should also talk about Youko, the team’s coach. Youko is an outlier here, because she’s not devoid of personality like most other characters. Instead, her combination of doofy catchphrases, manipulative, obnoxious personality, and general overbearing nature combine to make her come across as weirdly creepy. In one of the show’s “arcs” (the term seems generous), she attempts to recruit the star player of a rival team, Yu, who’s recently left the life of a hockey prodigy behind to experience a normal teenagerhood. (God knows we can’t have that in our sports anime.) In her efforts, Youko resorts to tactics such as repeatedly, incessantly calling her phone, standing outside of her house and yelling(!), and engineering a situation where she deliberately leaves a pen behind when invited into Yu’s house by her grandmother. This, of course, means that Yu has to return said pen (I’d argue she doesn’t, really, but neither Yu herself nor her grandmother object to the idea). When Yu does so, Youko ropes her into a bizarre bet, which she loses, and essentially forces her to join the team. This is glossed over with the non-explanation that Yu actually enjoys being on the new team, so it doesn’t matter. Youko is similarly unpleasant to her other players, and even engages in gaslight-y emotional manipulation a few times, giving her an almost predatory vibe. None of this is ever addressed, because Pride of Orange has neither the writing chops necessary to address it nor the forethought to simply not make the coach a skeevy weirdo in the first place. I would also argue that Youko having to quite literally trick the cast into becoming an “idol group” on top of being a hockey team feels like it betrays a broad disdain both for the show’s audience and its own genre. But really, while Youko’s situation is the worst of the series’ many writing flaws, it’s far from the only one. Frequent issues like conflicts springing up and then being almost immediately resolved, or flashbacks grinding action scenes to a dead stop to repeat to us information we either already know or could easily infer, recur repeatedly throughout. Pride of Orange often feels like the first draft of an anime that, even were all these issues fixed, would still be merely just below average. All these little problems add up, and they make Pride of Orange an altogether miserable watching experience. One could try to chalk all this up to Puraore’s length, but two of the anime I previously mentioned were also single cour. It is very possible, with economical character building, stylish animation, sharp writing that builds a solid triumph narrative, etc., to make your audience care about even a quite large cast in that amount of time. Pride of Orange never swings that, because it has none of those things. It doesn’t even manage to instill much of a base level thrill off the novelty of its premise, the one thing that objectively distinguishes this series from any other. In October, right around when Pride of Orange started airing, a pilot short called “SHAREDOL” managed to do that much in less than three minutes. Length is no excuse. In the broadest sense, the problem is this. The best anime can, in the moment, feel monumental. I’ll again draw a comparison to The Idolmaster (you’ll have to forgive my lack of experience with sports anime, which would honestly be more appropriate here, but the general structures still apply). One got the sense, during the series’ climactic concert, that those girls had done everything to earn their moment. They would’ve bled and died on that stage if that’s what it took. It feels, as it’s happening, huge. All-important. Pride of Orange manages the almost impressive feat of going in the other direction. Of making not just its parent genres, but its entire medium feel small, trivial, and trifling. While watching it, I felt transmogrified into a disapproving stepmother, finger-wagging at myself for watching these silly cartoons. And you can accuse me of projection, and say that no anime, no matter how bad, should make me feel this way. But the fact of the matter is that taken together, as a whole, Pride of Orange‘s cheez-whiz take on the sports and idol anime genres improbably transforms simple boredom into existential dread. It is such a yawning void of mediocrity that it’s somehow one of the worst anime I’ve ever seen. At the risk of repeating myself, it is distinguished from past Magic Planet Anime worst-of candidates like Speed Grapher, Big Order, The Day I Became a God, and fellow idol trainwreck 22/7 by the fact that those anime were bad in a way that still made it clear that the people behind them cared about them. They may have had any number of very serious qualitative flaws. They may have been downright offensive at times. But a certain kind of terribleness can only come from misplaced passion, which at least implies that there is passion. Let me be very clear; this is not true of Pride of Orange. I do not get the sense that anyone who worked on this series cared about it at all. Whether because they did not want to or because circumstances made it so they could not I do not know, but the few tiny pinpricks of light that poke through–Naomi and Riko’s relationship, the vanishingly brief pair of dance numbers that comprise the entirety of the show’s “idol” element, the surprisingly solid soundtrack–make it clear that for the vast majority of this show, nobody involved gave a shit. It has all the artistry of a McDonald’s order and ends with a limp, nondescript hand gesture too lazy to be a middle finger. Make no mistake, all of this is tragic. And perhaps the worst part is that I don’t think Puroare is unique in this way. Things like Pride of Orange are what you get when a zeitgeist is about to die. Most of my time as an active anime enthusiast has been spent in the midst of the idol anime boom. I have liked a decent amount of those shows, but I wouldn’t quite call myself an “idol anime fan.” Those who would should be wary; things like Puraore are not a good sign. The same is broadly true of the “all-female cast does stuff” supergenre in general, and for that matter, anime on the whole. What else is there to say? Pride of Orange is symptomatic of an industry that is simply producing way, way too much content by sheer volume. Few people watched it. Fewer of those who did will remember it–fondly or otherwise–in a few years’ time. It is hypergeneric but endlessly replaceable, a combination ice skate / high heel stomping on all our faces forever. In this light, the name of the protagonists’ team sounds less like a quirky sports team name and more like a sneered command. Dream, monkeys. Dream hard. Because there has to be something better than this.

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• 

  Juliko25

  55/100
  What do you get when you mix ice hockey, idols, and CGDCT? A shameless corporate gacha ad that falls flat on its face.

  In an industry as saturated as anime has gotten, it's a given that not every show can stand out from the heavy hitters, or even stuff that's similar to it. There are shows that stand out for the right reasons, shows that don't quite stand out, and then you have those that stand out for all the wrong reasons. Sadly, the latter is the case for PuraOre: Pride of Orange, an anime that basically tries to combine three things: ice hockey, the everyday slice-of-life adventures of cute girls, and idols, all while failing at not only balancing them out, but executing any of them in a compelling manner. The story follows Manaka Mizusawa, a chipper young girl who one day finds out her town Nikko is holding ice hockey classes held by the Nikko Dream Monkeys. She convinces her younger sister and other members of her embroidery club to try it out. The girls immediately fall in love with the sport, and through it, they make some new friends and face competition from rival teams, with their manager wanting to shake things up and have them perform victory dances whenever they win.

  Yeah, there's no denying it: Pride of Orange is basically a glorified advertisement for a mobile game. A mobile game that shut down not long after the anime finished, by the way, which should tell you how well this show did at trying to advertise it. Hell, the character designs look like they were ripped right out of Love Live (And from what I hear, the person who designs the Bang Dream characters did the designs!!). Seriously, the whole show just looks...bland. Like it was only made to be churned out by a production committee to convince people to buy stuff, that's it. The backgrounds are fine and the animation is smooth, but everything else about it makes it near indistinguishable from other slice-of-life anime other than the hockey bits. I'm speaking as a person who couldn't care less about sports in any way, nor do I know much about sports, especially ice hockey, but even the show's attempts at trying to make ice hockey seem interesting ring hollow because all it really amounts to is "Ice hockey is great!!" without going into detail about why people would even like the sport. The fact that they have Manaka, the single least interesting character in the show, only gets interested in it on a whim rather than something more substantial, tells you just how little the anime cares about the sport its trying to shill.

  Speaking of Manaka, the characters. There's very little to them. They're all flat, carbon copies of characters from other shows that were done way better elsewhere. They have no depth, no nuance, nothing to them other than their single defining trait, yet the show expects you to care about them. One character, who is advertised as being one of the mains, leaves the show within three episodes and barely appears after that, yet the show makes her departure and everyone's reactions to it sooooo cheesy and melodramatic in an attempt to wring tears out of you, but it doesn't work because we never got the time to even learn more about this character or find reasons to care about her. Manaka doesn't even get so much as a character arc, as she's literally just a discount Honoka from Love Live. Honestly, the only character I really liked was Naomi, that's it. The absolute worst of them is Yoko, their manager, mainly because of the way she tries to recruit Yu, a girl who quit hockey, onto the team, namely she repeatedly calls the girl on her phone and then stalks her by coming to her house unannounced and browbeats her into joining the Dream Monkeys. Because that's a surefire way to make somebody love you, riiiiiight? Beyond her creepy stalking of Yu, I just found Yoko to be obnoxious and annoying.

  Even the soundtrack isn't much to write home about. I liked the ending song, that's it. The thing is, PuraOre tries to mix three things into one package, and is even marketed as an idol series, but there's literally naught but five minutes dedicated to idol stuff, all of which never ties into the narrative whatsoever. You could literally cut it out and nothing would be lost, so for all of PuraOre's posturing over it being an idol series rings completely hollow because it doesn't even do anything with its idol stuff. So yeah, PuraOre's biggest problem is that in its attempts to mix three different genres into one, it completely fails at doing anything substantial with any of them, being little more than just fodder churned out in a bad attempt to copy Uma Musume's success. Is it any wonder the mobile game it tried to advertise wound up being shut down? And don't even get me started on the utterly cheesy dialogue. "The bonds of our hearts connect the puck!" Really? Bleeeegh.

  If you're into this type of show, more power to you. But PuraOre: Pride of Orange is just another generic gacha game advertisement that doesn't even do a good job at trying to advertise the mobile game its based on, let alone being a standalone anime. It's not offensively bad or anything, but it's just bland and flavorless.

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