Whoops, I’ve sat on this one for a wee bit too long, though as an episode, this one very much wears it’s heart on it’s sleeve – it understands that it’s not the time to be making in-jokes, or to be filling itself with cameos of third-string Cinderellas. It plays things straight and effectively.
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I have to admit, this weeks episode of Cinderella Girls didn’t pan out in exactly the way I was expecting. I mean, it was pretty obvious that Mio was setting herself up to some kind of fall throughout the entire episode, but the usual conclusion to this kind of thing tends to be something disastrous happening during the performance itself – stagefright, dance accident, forgotten lyrics or what have you – rather than things technically going without a hitch.
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I do wonder what the Japanese anime industries obsession with Pop-up Pirate variants is. I mean, it’s not quite common enough a thing for me to consider starting up an entirely new blog segment for recording their appearances, but this is hardly the first time I’ve seen such a game in anime, if maybe the first I’ve see with a cat involved.

Anyway, it’s somewhat hard, coming out of this weeks episode of Cinderella Girls, to not retrospectively feel that we were a little bit spoilt across the last two episodes of the show, at least where the animation production was concerned. I would say that it was, therefore, somewhat unavoidably disappointing to get something which was just kind of ordinary after two episodes lead by particularly idiosyncratic and accomplished animation directors, but the fact is that there are even a handful of real continuity clunkers in this episode that really shouldn’t have slipped through.
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This week on Cinderella Girls…I figure that I should probably stop starting these posts by saying “this week on” before it gets real old, but I probably won’t.

There’s a very real temptation to start comparing this weeks episode to the first episode of aniM@S, given its conceit. Whilst the episode is certainly trying to fill a similar kind of purpose – to introduce the larger cast – if in a slightly more transparent fashion, it actually has a little more in common with the sixth episode of Love Live in terms of how it handles it’s actual content.
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This week on Cinderella Girls, Kanako should be care what she eats, because we all know that girls who eat too many sweets can’t be backup dancers – just ask poor Kana.

Which reminds me that I never did get around to writing anything about the iM@S movie, did I?
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