Not gonna mince words here, I feel Tropical Rouge Pretty Cure is one of the most annoying, frustrating, and disappointing Pretty Cure seasons I've ever seen. While I can understand wanting to make a more comedic, light-hearted season after the more emotionally charged Healin Good Pretty Cure, TroPri had absolutely no interest in fleshing out its characters beyond Manatsu or Laura, it took forever to progress its plot in any real way, its villains and their actions weren't threatening which made the series lack any real tension or urgency, and as a result, the fights were as boring as eating lunch. So when the movie was announced, I initially had zero interest in watching it because of how badly the series turned out...until it was revealed that it was going to be a crossover with Heartcatch Pretty Cure, aka my favorite Precure season ever. But having seen the Healin Good movie previously, I was convinced the Heartcatch girls would be reduced to little more than plot devices that appear in two scenes involving fighting alongside the TroPri girls and do nothing else until the plot deemed it convenient, since that's what the Healin Good movie did. So you can imagine that I wasn't exactly looking forward to watching Tropical Rouge Pretty Cure The Movie: The Snow Princess and the Miraculous Ring based on both the series' failings and what the Healin Good movie did with its crossover characters.

I finally got around to watching the movie, and...holy shit, the Tropical Rouge movie actually seemed to go out of its way to not only address most of its parent series' flaws, but the flaws that the Healin Good movie had. How the hell did this movie manage to be better than its own parent series?! The plot isn't even all that groundbreaking if you think about it: The Tropical Club has been invited to a snowy kingdom called Shantia, specifically to attend Princess Sharon's coronation ceremony. Laura has even been invited to sing as part of the festivities, something she's very much looking forward to. While there, the girls tour Shantia and encounter the girls from Heartcatch Pretty Cure, getting acquainted with them before discovering secrets about Sharon and Shantia that put not only their lives, but other townspeople that were invited, in mortal danger. It's up to the Tropical Rouge and Heartcatch girls to put a stop to the evil force that threatens to keep them confined to Shantia for eternity.

God, I am absolutely amazed at how much Toei seemed to learn from their mistakes both in regards to TroPri's flaws and the Healin Good movie's problems. As much as I liked the Healin Good movie, its biggest issue is that for all that the marketing empathized it being a crossover with Yes Precure 5, the actual Yes girls only appeared in two scenes, felt more like living Deus Ex Machinas to be brought in to save the day than actual characters, and they never interact with the Healin Good girls outside of battles, so they didn't feel like they were that important to the main plot. You could cut them out of that movie entirely and nothing would be lost. The TroPri movie addressed these problems tenfold, as not only do the TroPri girls interact with the Heartcatch girls both before and during the main plot, they remain integral throughout the entire movie and share just as much screentime as the TroPri girls, both outside of and during battle scenes. It helps that the Heartcatch girls' characterization remains true to their parent series, and for anybody who's worried that Erika was just going to be flanderized into the funny girl who makes cartoony faces, rest assured, that doesn't happen, and she even retains a lot of her maturity from the later parts of Heartcatch, though she does have her funny cartoony moments.

Even the villain here is surprisingly a lot more compelling than the trio from the series. Yes, her motivation isn't anything new, and has probably been done lots of times and better in other stuff, but compared to how utterly lazy and bland the villain trio was in the series, her actions are actually legitimately threatening and actually manage to create palpable tension and urgency. Granted, the resolution to her plot at the very end came off as woefully cheesy and mealymouthed, and a lot of things about her backstory don't really make a whole lot of sense from a narrative standpoint, but for what its worth, she's still a better villain than Chongire, Numeri, and Elda could ever hope to be. Granted, I do find it kind of annoying that the movie decided to have Laura be the main focus of the movie and have her be the one to interact with Sharon the most, because God knows the producers just LOVE shilling Laura to high heaven, and I know many people didn't like this about the series. But I do feel that Laura did get some good material out of it, so I don't think it was all bad. The movie does have one flaw it shares with the series: It still doesn't do much with Sango, Minori, and Asuka, because heaven forbid we take the focus away from Manatsu and Laura even for five seconds, but it does make up for this by having Tsubomi and Erika receive just as much time in the limelight, even if it does result in Itsuki and Yuri not doing much.

But for as much as the TroPri movie does right, it's not without its own issues. For one...for a movie, the animation is actually kind of cheap-looking. Other than a few key shots, the animation isn't much better than its parent series. It almost feels like the movie was given a TV series budget, and that should not be. Several minutes are dedicated to stock footage of transformation scenes that go uninterrupted, which I'm pretty sure was done to save on costs. The soundtrack isn't much to write home about either, though I do really like that new remix of the Heartcatch Pretty Cure transformation music, so that's a plus right there. Furthermore, near the end of the movie, various shots are edited and cut in a weirdly erratic manner, and parts of them feel like stuff happened off screen without a real explanation for why they happened, such as how a character got from point A to point B without an explanation for how they got there and why when they were occupied with something else.

Despite these flaws, I can wholeheartedly say that I honestly found this movie to be far more interesting than the actual Tropical Rouge Pretty Cure series, in that it actually gave a damn about having a compelling storyline, a stronger villain, and rectifying at least some of the series' issues, even if it didn't always succeed. Plus, I'm always down for seeing more of my favorite Heartcatch girls!