Wonderful Precure!

Wonderful's strongest point is its character-driven humor. Iroha and Komugi share a brain cell between them, and Komugi in particular is a literal dog and acts like one. Mayu is Bocchi 2.0 in a codependent relationship with her cat. This is the most weirdo cast I've seen in a Precure, and I mean this in the best possible way.

Visually, it's light on sakuga but otherwise has solid direction. They don't hold back on interesting camera angles and compositions, even in the SoL scenes. There's a strong sense of "show don't tell" – the first episode establishes the lead character without a single line of dialogue.

Others ... have complained about the lack of hand-to-hand combat, but it's not as big a change as you'd think. In Precure, punches and kicks are merely to weaken the enemy. The real work is done in the heroic speeches and friendship laser beams, and Wonderful keeps those. And adds random animal facts. Did I mention the cast are weirdos?

Wonderful's true weakness is its low stakes. Every episode so far has advanced the plot or lore (or both), and the Kirarin Animal collecting gives a sense of progression. But the lack of villains, and the chill tone in general, makes that easy to forget. You're not watching this for the plot.

Overall, it's no Hugtto. But it takes its premise – "dog turns into magical girl" – and runs with it. And that's all I can ask for.

Did I think that 2024 would deliver the worst precure season of all time after giving us one of the best? No, but let me tell you why this show is terrible and you should skip it entirely if you're new to precure.

1. Characters
The entire show hinges on this human-animal duo premise. On the surface, I can get behind this idea. I love the idea of helping kids learn about animals and how important they can be as pets.

However, it falls flat when the main character is stupid as rocks. She acts like a dog, talks like a dog, and quite literally is unbearable. I ... absolutely despise Wonderful as the lead character, and I feel like making her stupider than any other magical girl makes her feel like she belongs in another show than a series about girl power.

Friendy, her owner, is slightly better, but not by much. Friendy is just...a nice girl. But also a really dumb one as well. She can't keep her secret of bring a precure at all. Which defeats the charm of magical girl anime.

Then we have cure Lillian, the best character in the entire show. Shy, not confident and wants to make friends. But Lillian is surrounded by idiots, and she doesn't become a precure for a long time. It's unbearably long before we get any progress on her joining the team.

Nyammy is the ice queen kitty. She's okay, but also acts unnecessarily mean in a kids show. She comes across as someone I think I would've liked if they gave her more charm. Ugh.

The plot
What even is the plot? 20 episodes and we still have no idea. We get bad animals that they have to cure but we don't know where they are from or how they got to that state.

Even the most basic precures give us some sense of what's going on. But not Wonderful; they don't care because they just want to sell the makeup, the toys and the stuffed animals of every cute creature ever.

The no combat
Okay, so everyone defending the fact they have no combat doesn't understand why we like magical girls. Fighting evil by Moonlight in pretty outfits is FUN!

But there ain't no monsters to fight. We hug an animal, and put them into a box. In Wonderful Precure, I am convinced the animators didn't care about anything but toys. They said screw the combat, screw the plot, we are going to make millions on selling cute dogs and cats and other crap to little girls.

You can do better.

Go watch a la mode or tokyo mew mew
If you want a better anime with animal girls fighting evil. At least in those shows, the protagonist doesn't make you question if your dog is really that stupid.