Could a rag tag bunch of high school girls save their home town from amalgamation through putting on a hero show?
When a hero show is cancelled, Kise Mikan decides to stage one herself to cheer up her little sister, who had been looking forward to it so much. She recruits Akagi An, a sporty, athletic class mate and together they work out a show. Meanwhile the student council president and resident rich girl, Shirogane Misaki, is looking for ways to save their home town Hinano City from having to fuse with a neighbouring town. Shirogane stumbles across Kise’s and Akagi’s efforts and is impressed by their work, and moreso by the nation wide attention her video of their performance gets online. So she decides what Hinano City needs is its own regular hero show and drafts the other two into her plans…
I had no idea what Action Heroine Cheer Fruits would be before I saw the first episode, but what I got reminded me a bit of Rolling Girls, if only because the hero show in the first episode reminded me of the hero fight in that series. No road trip here though, but rather we get a topic of perennial anxiety in modern day Japan, the depopulation of the countryside and seemingly any town smaller than Tokyo and how to reverse this. There have been a fair few series recently where this was either part of the background or even driving the plot, as in the still airing Sakura Quest, so it’s not a far stretch to have a group of school girls try to save their town through hero shows…
I always like this sort of cheerful, upbeat show, whether or not anything actually happens in them. Having an actual plot just makes it that much better, though I do hope it doesn’t devolve in the usual anime antics, which the ending to the second episode, with the introduction of a villain/rival type character seemed to hint at.
No Comments