I am continuing to salvage content from my previous, now-defunct blog. This is a lightly edited version of a post that originally appeared over there: I am not entirely happy with it and may revisit this title at some point in the future, but in any case, this is my review as it presently stands.
Princess Tutu, directed by Shogo Koumoto. Starring Nanae Kato, Noboru Mitani, and Takahiro Sakurai. Story by Ikuko Itoh. Hal Film Maker (–). DVDs produced by AEsir Holdings. 26 episodes of 25 minutes (approximately ). Rated TV-14.
After I got an Amazon gift card for Christmas, I thought to myself that I could use it to buy some edifying, uplifting literature, or I could use it to acquire more brain-rotting magical-girl junk. It’s no mystery which choice I made, and I have no regrets: I picked up a complete DVD set of Princess Tutu, which I knew by rumor and reputation but had not previously seen.
The first time I heard of Princess Tutu, the tale of a clumsy girl who receives the power to transform into a magical ballerina, I assumed it was a saccharine, fluffy, and disposable story on a par with something like Lilpri. I would have been cool with it if that were the case—since I’m totally into that—but in fact, my assumption was entirely incorrect because it is so good. This is easily one of the best anime series I have ever seen. It is the best magical girl series I have ever seen. This is an anime that rises, at least at times, to the level of high art.
The Plot
As the story opens, a duck watches a boy dancing on the surface of her lake. She wishes she could dance a pas de deux with him, and her wish is granted when a mysterious and menacing figure named Drosselmeyer gives her a pendant that transforms her into a girl who studies ballet at an arts academy, where she is the worst student.
The Heroine
Duck (Ahiru in Japanese) is adorably klutzy and spastic. In a riff on Disney’s technique of displaying a heroine’s virtue by depicting her as a friend to animals, Duck opens her window every morning to be mobbed by flocks of birds that knock her to the floor. Thought flighty and scatterbrained, she is well-intentioned and determined in most of what she does, though she can’t bring herself to focus on schoolwork or practice ballet consistently.
Her antics are not atypical for a magical-girl heroine, but she remains endearing and never tips over into obnoxious, which is a respectable achievement.
She is, however, blessed with a scratchy voice that sounds like a duck quacking. This is a rare occasion in which I recommend the English dub over the original Japanese: Not only is the English voice cast unusually good overall, but Luci Christian gives a magnificent performance as Duck, playing her with a Homestar Runner–like voice that is simply perfect.
The Obsessive Best Friends
Duck hangs out with two other students, Pike and Lilie, who simultaneously fill the role of Those Two Girls (normal characters meant to contrast with all the weirdness) and a common figure in magical-girl anime that I have come to call the “Obsessive Best Friend.”
As a rule, magical-girl heroines have a tall order to fill: On the one hand, they are supposed to be ordinary girls such as might live on your street, whereas on the other hand, they are supposed to be ideal personifications of the power of love and friendship. To make sure the audience gets it, the protagonist will hang out with another girl who has no purpose in life except to advertise the protagonist’s pure-heartedness or physical beauty or whatever virtues she’s supposed to have.
I think these characters are meant to be funny, but I typically find their monomania disturbing. Pike and Lilie, however, are amusing because they live for the sole purpose of watching Duck screw up.
The Setting
Furthermore, the town where the story takes place, a town designed to look like the walled village of Nördlingen in Germany, is full of funny animal people, and the most frequently appearing is Mr. Cat, a ballet instructor with the curious habit of threatening to force his worst students to marry him. The most common recipient of this threat, of course, is Duck.
The Other Players
The mysterious boy from the lake, Mytho, is also a ballet dancer, and he is furthermore a prince from a fairy tale who escaped into the real world. Having shattered his own heart to defeat an evil raven, Mytho can feel no emotions, but he retains, by force of habit, compassion that drives him to throw himself into danger to protect others.
When Mytho hurls himself out a window to rescue a baby bird, Duck runs to save him and thereby discovers that her pendant contains an additional power—the power to transform her into Princess Tutu, a character from the fairy tale with great magical abilities but a tragic fate. Only Tutu can find and restore the missing fragments of the prince’s heart, but she cannot confess her love for him or she will turn into a speck of light and disappear.
Most of the townsfolk are unaware of Mytho’s identity, but Tutu soon finds herself opposed by others who have designs on the prince—Mytho’s roommate Fakir and another magical ballerina named Princess Kraehe, both of whose motives remain for a long time obscure.
The Ballet
Princess Tutu takes place in a sort of ballet universe. Most of the soundtrack and many of the plot elements are drawn from ballets, especially The Nutcracker and Swan Lake. Tutu uses her magic by dancing ballet, the action sequences are choreographed like ballet, and most episodes climax with a dance sequence—though all but the most important of these are told largely through still frames, the animation budget presumably not allowing for much more.
A real ballet studio assisted with the production, and it shows: I do not pretend to be knowledgeable of the artform myself, but at least to the layman, the dancing looks like the real thing, and not simply like the animators put the characters on their tippy-toes and had them bounce around.
But strictly speaking, Princess Tutu is not a dance show; that is, the story is not an excuse to showcase dancing. Tutu is first and foremost about good storytelling, and I mean that in two senses: It is good storytelling—really, really good storytelling—and it is also about storytelling.
Drosselmeyer, the man who gave Duck her pendant, is also able to watch her every move, and we soon learn he is the author of the story from which the prince escaped. He is intent on finishing his tale, only now he means to use real people in place of the fictional ones: His plan is to create a grand tragedy, but the people forced into his story have other ideas, the question throughout being whether Drosselmeyer or the characters will get the upper hand. In a sense, Princess Tutu depicts a writer as a type of sadist; since stories require conflict, their author can only do what he does by making his characters miserable.
Themes
As its plot develops and its mysteries are gradually revealed, Princess Tutu turns really weird. On account of its surrealism and its Postmodern approach to fairy-tale motifs, it is often considered a spiritual successor to Revolutionary Girl Utena, the first of the “deconstructive” magical girl shows, but I am also inclined to suppose its dreamlike quality, bizarre visuals, and metafictional concerns are inspired more by the German Romanticism that influences some of the ballet to which it pays homage. The choice of the name Drosselmeyer for Princess Tutu‘s sinister narrator may be a clue: He is of course inspired by the Drosselmeyer of The Nutcracker, who is himself a mysterious and arguably sinister figure who appears to be manipulating events from the background. The Nutcracker is ultimately based on the short story “The Nutcracker and the King of Mice” by the German Romanticist E. T. A. Hoffmann, in which Drosselmeyer is clearly an author self-insert.
That being said, Princess Tutu certainly has Revolutionary Girl Utena on its mind: Its handling of fairytale motifs (princesses, mysterious princes, and an antagonistic witch) are similar throughout, but the show ultimately comes to a very different conclusion, suggesting that this is an attempt to put back together what Utena tried to pull apart. One could profitably watch the two shows back-to-back. I won’t take the space to make a thorough examination here, but Utena especially attacked bravery and compassion (represented by the prince), portraying them as meaningless, whereas Tutu is unambiguously of the opposite opinion, depicting what at first appears to be overweening altruism as ultimately justified.
But most especially, the show is preoccupied with the subject of free will, fate, and the nature of reality. Early in the first act, a strange character named Edel, who shows up at odd times playing a street organ and speaking in riddles, announces, “May those who accept their fate find happiness. May those who defy their fate find glory.”
That line, in different forms, gets repeated throughout the series. As the story draws toward its climax, the characters caught up in Drosselmeyer’s tale fight to escape the tragic ends Drosselmeyer has mapped out for them. After viewing it alongside Utena, I am inclined to think Drosselmeyer is a representation of Kunihiko Ikuhara, Utena’s creator, who would not allow his characters a happy fairytale ending even though one would have worked just fine with his plot.
In addition, once Tutu and the other characters learn they are trapped inside a story, they struggle to discern the difference between fiction and reality, and to break out of the story into the real world, paralleling the Gnostic themes that characterize Utena’s final episodes, and which Utena mostly borrowed from Herman Hesse’s Demian. Both Utena and Tutu are trapped in a world created by a malevolent demiurge, but wheareas Utena at last discovers that “reality” is nothing but a small platform surrounded by an empty white space (akin to the climax of the Gnostic novel Voyage to Arcturus), when the characters of Princess Tutu discover reality, their world expands rather than contracts: The mist around the town fades, and all the countryside is revealed. In Utena, reality is a lie, but in Tutu, reality truly exists and is bigger and more interesting than what even an ingenious storyteller could come up with.
Criticism
Princess Tutu is not without defects. Despite its dancing themes, it contains dancing mostly in short snippets, and some scenes told through still frames could probably have had more impact if they were animated. There are moments of obvious CGI, though that is, fortunately, limited mostly to water and fog effects, similar to Prétear, which comes from the same studio. A handful of episodes, particularly in the first half of the second act, are repetitious and feel like filler.
These are, however, minor complaints. This is a well-structured show, especially for one having such an ambitious storyline. Unlike some other surreal and self-consciously weighty anime that preceded it, it never collapses into incoherency. By the end, everything is satisfactorily explained and wrapped up.
Conclusion
But more than that, this is a show containing much beauty and a heavy emotional impact. I was not far into the series before I was committed to the characters, and the grand finale, though absurd if taken in isolation, makes an effective tearjerker in context.
Bonus Materials
I own this series on DVD, but in the time since I purchased it, the cost has shot up to collectors’ prices. The show is, however, streaming on HiDive and Amazon Prime at this time of writing.
The DVD extras are not spectacular, but they are unusually edifying. They include some overviews of the development of the show and some short videos explaining the basics of ballet and the sources of the musical pieces in the soundtrack. Also thrown in are videos of the English voice cast doing the recordings.
The explanations of the dancing and music are the best parts, but they’re not worth the current price of the DVD collection, so streaming is a better option.
Princess Tutu
128.97
