Yes! PreCure 5Fairouz AiHealin' GoodTropical-Rouge!
Healin' Good Pretty Cure the Movie: GoGo! Big Transformation! The Town of Dreams
Also known as: Eiga Healin' Good PreCure: Yume no Machi de Kyun! tto GoGo! Daihenshin!!
Medium: film
Year: 2021
Director: Ryota Nakamura, Takashi Otsuka
Writer: Ryunosuke Kingetsu
Actor: Ai Kakuma, Ai Maeda, Ai Nagano, Aki Kanada, Aoi Yuki, Asami Seto, Eri Sendai, Fairouz Ai, Hana Takeda, Haruka Shiraishi, Hiyori Kono, Junko Takeuchi, Kazusa Murai, Mariya Ise, Masako Katsuki, Miyu Irino, Natsu Yorita, Nozomi Mikajiri, Rina Hidaka, Seiran Kobayashi, Suzuko Mimori, Takeshi Kusao, Wataru Takagi, Yui Ishikawa, Yuko Sanpei, Yumiri Hanamori
Keywords: Yes! PreCure 5, Healin' Good, Tropical-Rouge!, PreCure, anime, magical girl
Series: << PreCure team-up movie
Country: Japan
Language: Japanese
Format: 70 + 5 minutes
Url: https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/encyclopedia/anime.php?id=23978
Website category: Anime 2021
Review date: 4 May 2023
healing good
It's the only PreCure movie to date to be released to cinemas after its parent series had wrapped. This was the COVID era and the previous film (Miracle Leap) had been repeatedly delayed, so they released this as a double feature alongside a five minute quickie crossover between the new team (Tropical-Garbage!) and the main one of this film (Healin' Good).
The main movie, though, is also a crossover with Yes! PreCure 5 GoGo! from 2007. Sort of, ish. In practice, it's a Healin' Good movie with a limited amount of Yes! GoGo involvement. The Yes! GoGo girls appear out of "what the hell" nowhere to participate in a battle, then get captured (offscreen!) and kept in glass tanks until the finale. I don't get the "offscreen" bit. It would have strengthened the film and raised the threat level if we'd seen the Yes! GoGo girls getting overpowered, especially since, frankly, they're stronger fighters than their Healin' Good successors.
HEALIN' GOOD: four girls, normal superhero-level PreCure combat abilities but nothing too special.
YES! GOGO: six girls, with unusually useful weapons and special attacks. Natsuki Rin can cremate you in mid-air. Don't tell me you'd expect her enemies to survive those flames. Kasugano Urara creates a chain of butterflies that can shoot out up to 30-40 feet, like a superhero version of Indiana Jones's whip. Those butterflies can pick up trucks and hit giant mecha baddies with them, or else more straightforwardly tie up those baddies and throw them through the air.
As for the plot, it concerns a celebrity schoolgirl called Kaguya (a significant name in Japanese folklore) who when going incognito wears a cap so big that she looks like a mushroom. There's also VR-like technology called the Dream Pendant, which to be honest I'd have expected to be more important in the movie. Oddly, the Yes! GoGo girls' Pink Leader (Yumehara Nozomi) has the PreCure name of Cure Dream, yet the film does nothing with this coincidence. (Had this been a solo GoGo movie, you can be sure they'd have been all over it.)
Kaguya and her mother have a secret. This works fine. It's good enough to carry a 70-minute movie and creates enough emotional weight to be satisfying.
The battles are worth your time. They're strong enough that the film doesn't bother starting with a pointless empty battle for the sake of pleasing the punters. (If only I could say the same of all PreCure films.) The early battle against Ego Ego is pretty damn cool, especially when the Yes! GoGo girls get their theme song as incidental music. The finale battles are fine. I enjoyed all that.
Overall, the film's decent. It's simple fare for children, but adults can enjoy it too. It's a respectable, solid seventy minutes in a way you don't always get with PreCure movies.
TROPICAL-ROUGE! PRETTY CURE PUCHI: TOBIKOME! COLLAB DANCE PARTY!
Yikes, this film didn't star the PreCures who are on TV every week right now! Quick, let's bolt on a throwaway short film to please the five-year-olds in the audience!
...and, surprisingly, it's quite good.
It's almost non-stop action. Involuntary skydiving due to loss of plane! A pirate ship firing cannons at you! Blow up the ship! Go underwater! And so on. This is good fun. It ends in a collab dance party (with the Healin' Good PreCures) that's also the end credits.
Also, Manatsu Natsuumi shows off her knack for comedy faces again. That's the best thing about her character, actually, despite being a purely visual trait. Putting her in a crossover movie makes it more obvious that this is something they deliberately gave her in this series, to a greater degree than the usual goofy antics of PreCure Pink Leaders in general.
I did, though, get a better idea of why Manatsu's "tropical as a verb" is more annoying than other PreCure protagonists' catchphrases. It's part of her sodding sentences. She uses it (all the time) as if it has meaning. Whereas when Delicious Party's Yui Nagomi says "deliciousmile", for instance, it's just a random idiot noise that doesn't affect or change anything. It's like uncontrollable flatulence. You don't want to hear it, but it can be ignored.
OVERALL
They're a decent children's film and a fun short. They're both fine. Don't rush out and watch them tomorrow, but they're fine. If you get strapped to a chair and forced to watch them through A Clockwork Orange goggles, you won't swear afterwards never again to go near anime, PreCure, etc. I quite enjoyed them.