I bought Wonderful Pretty Cure Complete Book
I will try translating the staff interviews.
I think I will probably write important information, so I would like an administrator or someone to add it to the Wiki later.
As I said before, from now on, there is no need to notify me after the fact (in my discussion post) after the information I provide is added to the Wiki. Well, it will be nice to know that the information I provided was useful when someone says "I wrote your information," though.
・Masanori SATŌ (Series director)
・Yoshimi NARITA (Series composition and Main scriptwriter)
・Maki TAKAHASHI (Producer)
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It's too much hassle to translate the whole content, so I'll just translate the gist of it.
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・From 2022 to 2023, Producer Takahashi was busy planning and producing many 20th anniversary works, such as Hirogaru Sky and Otona Pretty Cure.
As of 2023, it had been decided that she would continue as Pretty Cure series producer in 2024, but planning discussions for the "2024 Pretty Cure works" began very late.
・The reason Producer Takahashi chose Satō as series director and Narita as main scriptwriter is because they both had previous involvement with the Pretty Cure series.
(Satō directed 2018 All-Star Memories.)
・After hearing that Narita had finished full production work on the script and composition of Otona Pretty Cure (around the end of 2022?), Takahashi immediately asked Narita to work on the script composition of the 2024 Pretty Cure production, and Narita accepted.
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Interviewer: "When it was decided that series director Satō-san and Narita-san would officially join the 2024 PreCure series, was it already decided that this work would have an animal theme?"
Both of them stated that "it was decided before we even got involved."
In other words, Takahashi ultimately decided on the animal theme.
Considering this, along with information from a magazine I read last year, the 2024 PreCure planning meetings were led by Toei Animation staff, centered around Takahashi and Washio, and TV station staff (the Asahi Broadcasting Group, the largest investor and broadcaster of the PreCure series), but Narita and Sato did not participate in the planning meetings.
It was Takahashi who ultimately decided (at the planning meeting) that the main character would be a dog, and by the time Sato and Narita officially joined the team, it had been decided that the main character would be a female Papillon named Komugi.
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Interviewer: "Who was primarily responsible for coming up with the personalities and settings of the four Precures (Komugi, Iroha, Yuki, Mayu)?"
Narita: "It was me. I thought carefully about their personalities and settings."
When Narita accepted the job, it had already been decided that the 2024 Pretty Cure would only consist of four girls.
Narita had owned dogs in the past, so she was able to decide on Komugi's personality easily.
When creating Yuki's character, Narita consulted with her friends, colleagues, and acquaintances who actually have cats, as well as reading books, and gave Yuki a tsundere personality.
She created Iroha's character as "a cheerful girl who wants to be friends with everyone."
Narita had a lot of trouble deciding on Mayu's character personality.
When Narita first started writing the scenario, she did not anticipate that Mayu's personality would become hyper in the middle of the anime (she gets extremely excited when she hears about the romantic relationships between Iroha and Satoru, and Gaou and Zakuro), and Mayu remained a quiet girl until the final episode. (From what she wrote, it seems that Narita had in mind a personality similar to Kokone's for Mayu.)
However, as Narita composed the scenario, Mayu's personality naturally changed from being just quiet to becoming excited when she heard about things that interested her, such as romantic relationships.
The anime director further enhanced Mayu's personality as written by Narita, resulting in the cute and fun Mayu we know today.
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It was Narita's idea that Cure Nyammy and Cure Lilian temporarily called themselves "Nyanderful Pretty Cure!"
Producer Takahashi accepted her suggestion, saying, "Considering Nyammy's personality, it's only natural that it would take a certain amount of time for her to become friends with Wonderful and Friendy."
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Narita initially thought, "Since they are a four-piece group, I thought I would give them cure names related to the four seasons (spring, summer, autumn, and winter)," but she ultimately decided against it.
Narita was the one who came up with the names (cure names) Cure Wonderful, Cure Friendy, Cure Nyammy, and Cure Lilian.She said that while it was easy to decide on Cure Wonderful and Cure Friendy, she had a hard time deciding on the names Cure Nyammy and Cure Lilian.
In particular, Cure Lilian was the last to be decided, and even at the audition stage for the voice actress to play her, Mayu's Cure Name had not yet been decided.
She said that Cure Wonderful (pronounced Kyua Wandafuru in Japanese) was decided on easily as it was related to "Wan" (an onomatopoeia for the sound a dog barks in Japanese), but she had a hard time coming up with the name to a Cat Precure, since there are no meaningful words in either English or Japanese that start with "Nya" or "Nyan" or "Nyao" (an onomatopoeia for the sound a cat meows in Japanese).
Narita had been thinking of a cure name that included an onomatopoeia of the sound a cat makes, but ultimately could not come up with a word, so in the end, with producer Takahashi's approval, Yuki's name became Nyammy, a completely invented word (the onomatopoeia of a cat's meow, "Nya," and the pronunciation "mmy," (ミー Mī)
The name Cure Wonderful comes from the fact that Komugi's owner, Iroha, has a catchphrase "Wonderful!", so since Komugi is always with Iroha, she heard her catchphrase and remembered it, and when she transformed and introduced herself, she naturally said "Cure Wonderful".
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The first person to be decided on among the voice actors playing the PreCure characters was Reina UEDA, who would play Mayu.
According to Director Sato, in the character audition scenes, he had Ueda act out Mayu's shyness and her excitement at calling the cat Yuki cute.
After seeing Ueda's performance, Sato thought, "Her tone of voice and the way she portrays the gaps in her emotions make her the perfect voice actress for the Mayu I imagined!"
The moment all of the character audition examiners (Wonderful PreCure staff), including Producer Takahashi and Director Sato, heard Ueda's voice as Mayu, they all burst into murmurs of "amazing!" and it was immediately and unanimously decided that Reina Ueda would be the voice actress for Mayu.
After Ueda, the next two to be officially selected through auditions were Maria NAGANAWA, who plays Komugi, and Atsumi TANEZAKI, who plays Iroha.
They were apparently officially selected at almost the same time.
According to Sato, "Tanezaki-san prepared thoroughly for the Wonderful PreCure audition and played Iroha with several voices and emotion patterns during the actual audition. I listened to all of them, and her voice and acting were all very polished, so I wanted her to play one of the main characters. In the end, we chose her as the voice actress for Iroha."
Producer Takahashi thought, "Now that the auditions are over, I think Naganawa-san is the best voice actress to play Komugi. But since she's the main character, we need to think about the voice actress more carefully."
Director Sato knew Naganawa's voice acting from other anime, and thought, "She can do a lot of different acting, and she has a wide range of acting skills, not just a cute voice."
And when Takahashi was worried about whether to make Naganawa the voice actress for Komugi, Sato said, "It'll be fine with Naganawa-san. She is the best voice actress for Komugi." And with that, the final decision was made.
Of the four, the last one to be decided was the voice actress for Yuki, and choosing the voice actress to play her was particularly difficult.
Director Sato had the final decision-making power for Yuki's audition, but Sato was having trouble deciding.
When Producer Takahashi and Takashi WASHIO (an executive at Toei Animation, executive producer in charge of Pretty Cure works in 2023, and founder of the Pretty Cure series) saw Sato struggling to choose a voice actor, they shared the same opinion: "This is merely our advice and recommendation, but we think Matsuda Satsumi-san is the most suitable."
Matsuda is a voice actress who excels at playing boy characters (for example, Touji, Chiyu's younger brother in 2020) more than female or girl characters. However, producer Washio and Takahashi saw her play the female character Beryberie in 2023 and knew that "Matsuda can play not only boy characters, but also women and mature girls."
Takahashi thought that with Matsuda's acting ability, she would surely be able to play Cure Nyammy, a mature girl with a different personality from Beryberie, who is a strong-willed girl (older and more mature to Sora), just like when she played Beryberie.
So Takahashi and Washio recommended Matsuda as the voice actress for Yuki.
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The interview is so long that I can't translate it all in an hour. I'll post the rest later.
Before I write next discussion post, I start by writing about the thing that surprised me the most now.
Even if I don't write follow-up discussion posts in the future, I definitely want to write this, so I'm writing it now.
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Narita: "By the way, Satoru has an older brother. This is just an idea I had in my head and Not an official information, but his brother, who is even more talented than Satoru, is studying abroad."
Takahashi: "That's the first time I've heard that! (laughs)"
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Takahashi: "Actually, when we were planning the project, we had the idea of having a boy Precure appear, and Satoru was the prototype for that character.
However, due to various circumstances, the idea of including a boy Precure for 2024 was rejected, and instead I decided to have Satoru, the prototype for the boy Precure, return as someone to support Precures.
Their transformation in the film was because we wanted it to reflect the history of the idea we had for his character.
By the way, from the beginning, I intended to have Satoru and Daifuku transform somewhere in the anime episodes. In the end, it became episode 49.
So I didn't intend to end up with just the movie transformations regarding their transformations."
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...In other words, it's possible that Mayu would have disappeared and Satoru would have become the official Precures.
It was a shock to me to learn that Satoru was a candidate to become the official boy Precure following Cure Wing, and I think it's the same for everyone else, so please add it to the wiki, either as an administrator or someone else.
