12 Days of Anime #10: Let’s Aikatsu!

For the past few years I have found myself more and more in love with a very very peculiar kind of anime.

By this I mean, idol anime.

I am going to cheat a little and write today about Aikatsu, Aikatsu hasn’t exactly finished in 2014 but it entered a new arc focusing on new and younger characters.

If you don’t know about Aikatsu and I’m sure some of you don’t, it simply is an anime about a few young girls entering a school to become idols. We then follow their lives as they work hard to become even more successful.

Aikatsu in particular is adapted from a card game in which you have to collect cards to make outfits, some cards are obviously giving you more specs than other. This aspect cannot be seen a lot in the anime except for the small sequence before a show, it’s like a standard magical girl transformation sequence basically.

I think Aikatsu and many other idol anime take a lot from the magical girl genre. It is sparkly and everything always ends well.

One of the thing I really like in Aikatsu is exactly that. In some anime, the fact that things always end well is a bit annoying. In Aikatsu it’s somehow tolerable, because, while things end well, the path to this good ending hasn’t been a walk in the park, there have been some hardships down the road, as it should be, but hard work conquers all!

For some weird reason Aikatsu has become over the years my ultimate feel good anime. I had originally started just because I loved idol anime and I just couldn’t resist the idea of watching an idol anime made by Sunrise. I expected despair and cries for help, but instead I got ultimate good mood and inspiration. Who could have thought?

I think the one thing that really helped me getting into Aikatsu is Ichigo, the main heroine of the first “season” of the series. Ichigo is basically an annoying shônen hero without the annoying part. Also, she is a girl. And the main difference between a basic shônen hero is one huge thing: Ichigo is not whiny. Ichigo never complains she can’t do something, when she feels she cannot do something she ends up doing it anyway. I really like the moral of Aikatsu, it goes beyond the usual work hard shônen moral. In Aikatsu it goes more like, work hard all you want but if you don’t try you’ll never get anywhere.

And that’s where Aikatsu is beautiful.