Glitter Force Review: Awesomely Stupid

I like anime but I’ve never been a fan of the magical girl genre. I saw Sailor Moon back in the day but I never really got into it. Monster of the day shows always struck me as just lazy. Sailor Moon rarely had much of an ongoing plot aside from “kill time until the season climax.”

I watched Glitter Force initially as a lark fully expecting it to be stupid. And it was. It was very stupid. The basic idea is you have an unlikely hero (a normal girl) with some connection to a magical fantasy realm who is now appointed by destiny to build her team of heroes and save the world from evil. Yeah, this show doesn’t really break any new ground in the plot department.

The show on the other hand is actually pretty clever. I watched the whole season trying to figure out if they were intentionally satirizing the magical girl genre or if they were playing the whole thing straight and were unintentionally hilarious. The show is 100% pure vintage cheesiness and cliche. It’s like someone watched Sailor Moon and said: “This isn’t nearly cheesy and formulaic enough.”

The main characters are stereotypes and seriously bland. They’re not annoying per se as so many magical girls are, they’re just pretty much blank slates. The high point of the show is clearly the villains, all of whom have some great dialogue and seem to consistently know just how ridiculous everything going on around them actually is. Each monster (Called a “Bufoon”) has a clown motif which is actually a lot cooler than it sounds.

The dialogue, especially that of the villains is often hilarious. The subject matter of most episodes is equally ridiculous. They do a full episode about how important it is not to tell lies on April Fool’s Day. They try to teach children not to be afraid of bugs. The morals are silly and non-thought provoking to the point of being self aware. I face palmed at the dialogue or plot choices at least two or three times per episodes but that kind of aided the hilarity of the situation. It was so stupid it became inexplicably awesome. Whether you love or hate magical girl animes, Glitter Force is (surprisingly) really worth checking out. You can laugh with it or you’ll laugh at it but I’ll be surprised if you don’t laugh.

6/10