You can do anything!
You can be anything!
Take that shining future of yours, and embrace it with all your might!

As a pig-tailed youth all smattering of freckles, lost in the throes of incandescent reveries I was never sure of what I wanted to be, let alone who I wanted to become. Childlike curiosity resulted in considering a number of paths, as many as there are stars each glowing with distinct possibility. A veterinarian, perhaps – advertisements calling for assistance in putting an end to animal cruelty tear-inducing, Pavlovian in their searing immediacy. A musician – Fender strings snapped with reckless abandon an ode to punks sullenly glaring from posters slapped on walls, stomping around in battle-hardened high-tops. A writer – nervously fidgeting at the top of my classroom, gaze keenly trained on threadbare carpeting subjected to praise for a Jacqueline Wilson-based report. How they sparkle! How they shine!

As I continued to stumble down an ostensibly unclear path, years since I left the others behind, I often found myself drained and discouraged with what awaited shrouded in uncertainty. Stifled by how much I had to do and how little time it felt as if I have left to do it, hours slipping into days into weeks into months a heart-seizing notion, punching against my rib-cage with agitated insistence. A concatenation of ill-timed circumstances. Thump. Lagging several years behind my peers. Thump. My own mind betraying me at every turn. Thump.

Hugtto! Pretty Cure is immersed in similarly contemplative sentiments, a sugary sweet rush drawing on the myriad possibilities the future holds while acknowledging the uncertainty of it all suggestively opening with the tagline “you can be anything, you can do anything; take that shining future of yours and embrace it with all your might!”. Empowering concepts which younger me would have found herself drawn to – as I am now as a twenty-something.

Enjoying its 16th iteration, magical girl franchise Pretty Cure strives towards spreading a profoundly optimistic message in the midst of contemporaneity in all its avocado-hating cynicism; lost deep within the musty archives of years past, future immaterial with hashtag millennials written off as hedonistic forces hellbent on destruction (which I mean, we totally are but). Putting aside a potentially sceptical reading concerned with the declining birth rate via its adolescent protagonist readily acquiescing to a maternal role, which the production committee has openly spurned, Hugtto! proves to be a thoroughly uplifting series with its ending sequence boasting an assortment of awe-inspiring professions. Stimulating younger minds its cast spring back and forth between roles such as pilot and engineer, gendered connotations refreshingly absent with producer Keisuke Naito emphasizing occupations which children as a collective whole would be enamoured by.

Setting a markedly encouraging precedent, the sequence proves to be one of the myriad indicators establishing that viewers truly can become anything if they set their mind to it, future theirs for the taking. An extraordinarily constructive ethos resonating deep within the series’ core, Precure warriors fight to ensure that time marches on in the face of an ominous corporation concerned with ridding a nation of its ability to prosper and its children to thrive – an ineffably significant gesture evocative of Japan’s Lost Decade, a period of economic stagnation not far from the anxious minds of older viewers. True to its name, Criasu Corp. (‘criasu’ a portmanteau derived from ‘kurai’/暗い and ‘asu’/明日- a bleak tomorrow; a crisis inevitable) is represented as an overly stringent firm with tacit nuances and corporate parlance governing exchanges.

Proposals are approved based on the effectiveness of subjugating Precure, research into their methodology analytical in nature requiring numerous trials, monsters-of-the-week coded as personnel with lanyards swinging from their neck. The Criasu Corp. building tall and menacing, allusions to a black company prove inescapable with the prospect of lives being sacrificed sobering despite otherwise cartoonish trappings. Reducing what ostensibly appears to be an extraordinary concept into something ordinary and closer to home immediately becoming all the more frightening. All the more real.

With members of the population manipulated into carrying out Criasu’s dirty work whenever tremors of doubt reverberate through the disillusioned annals of society, as harbingers of hope the Precure strive to assuage such deep-rooted anxieties. Future Crystals are gathered for an infant representative of Japan and its youth, an otherwise multi-layered theoretical concept made manifest with younger viewers quickly getting to grips with the notion that this is inextricably tied to who they are. Rather suggestively the Precure encourage each downtrodden employee-of-the-week to cast aside the bleakness, the crisis which dominated their lives so in search of a brighter tomorrow.

In a last-ditch attempt at proving himself to a company where he amounts to little more than a number, early adversary Charaleet quite literally becomes more monster than man waging war against the Precure until he admits to protagonist Hana that he’s at a loss; a failure at everything he does. He eventually leaves Criasu Corp. and becomes a streaming sensation, his joy palpable further demonstrating the show’s strengths.

Although my future remains a nebulous shroud, as is the case with the Precure of Hugtto I remember why I embarked on such an arduous journey to begin with, and my heart so filled with yearning swells. Hana mustering up the nerve to transcend her own personal limitations following a spell of bitterly comparing herself to others makes me want to cast aside the gnawing sense of inferiority which arises whenever I acquiesce to venom poured in my ear, substance bottled from the confines of my own mind. Homare’s stirring “there is no such thing as time wasted” call to arms serves as a reminder that universal milestones matter not, each and every individual marching forward at their own pace. Saaya stepping beyond her mother’s shadow lying long and heavy, asserting her own agency inspirational.

The individual is a shimmering composite of their own experiences, lighting up the gloomy annals of uncertainty. Resisting the urge to tear up whenever the plaintive strings of one of those advertisements appear, I am a staunch vegetarian even now. Guitar abandoned to the restless vigour of adolescence, the smooth touch of a piano’s keys prove reassuring. Writing in my free time reserved to mulling over anime, guiltily abandoned whenever the pressure overwhelms but I will always return. I can do anything; I can be anything. Quietly etching the show’s signature phrase within the depths of my heart has taken on a meaning like no other, the agitated thumps slowing at last. I will keep going, just one day at a time.

Hurray, hurray, me.

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