When I recently reviewed the Kamen Rider Fourze movie, I noticed that one of its biggest appeals is that it let me revisit a series I really enjoyed with minimal baggage and maximum enjoyment. In that way, the Smile PreCure! movie has much of the same appeal. Smile PreCure! The Movie: Big Mismatch in a Picture Book! lets you return to the Smile world that has characters you love for one last ride while still having everything you enjoyed about the original.
Unless you just watched the original for Majorina Time or as fodder for your Wolfrun fan-fics. In that case, you should just be ashamed of yourself.
In fact, the movies have a lot of similarities when push comes to shove. They are both based on extremely long running franchises that have variable quality and mass market appeal. They are both fairly goofy iterations of their respective series with an emphasis on having a good time over drama. Both movies are self-contained stories inside a larger and more complex plot. They both take place near the end of the series so they let the cast use most of their high level powers but just early enough that none of the end game events of the series’ climax have started taking place. Both of them also have the old gaiden trap of being important enough that SOMEONE should have mentioned the events of the movie sometime during the TV series but don’t because that is how self-contained side stories work.
But most of all they are fun little stories that can be watched inline with the TV series as a long episode or after the TV series as a refreshing sorbet to complement the main course that is the main story.
I found the Smile PreCure! TV series to be a charming, feel-good show that brightened up my week. So, for the life of me I can’t imagine why I sat so long on this movie without watching it. Happily, it follows in the “everyone is hanging out and having a good time”-formula of the show.
Smile PreCure! The Movie: Big Mismatch in a Picture Book! This also happens to be the first PreCure! movie I’ve watched despite there being at least two for every year in recent memory. I had no idea there was an audience participation portion either!
