Princess Tutu Funny Face Princess Tutu Duck
Yous don't know real pain until your waifu turns into a bird.
I am continuing to salvage content from my previous, at present-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, merely in any case, this is my review every bit information technology before long 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.
Subsequently I got an Amazon gift card for Christmas, I thought to myself that I could apply information technology to buy some edifying, uplifting literature, or I could use it to acquire more brain-rotting magical-girl junk. It's no mystery which option I made, and I take no regrets: I picked upwardly a complete DVD set of Princess Tutu, which I knew by rumor and reputation but had not previously seen.
The first fourth dimension I heard of Princess Tutu, the tale of a impuissant girl who receives the power to transform into a magical ballerina, I causeless it was a saccharine, fluffy, and disposable story on a par with something similar Lilpri. I would have been cool with it if that were the case—since I'm totally into that—just in fact, my assumption was entirely incorrect because it is and so practiced. This is hands 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 to the lowest degree 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 effigy named Drosselmeyer gives her a pendant that transforms her into a girl who studies ballet at an arts academy, where she is the worst pupil.
The Heroine
Duck (Ahiru in Japanese) is adorably klutzy and spastic. In a riff on Disney's technique of displaying a heroine's virtue past depicting her as a friend to animals, Duck opens her window every morning time to be mobbed past flocks of birds that knock her to the flooring. Thought flighty and scatterbrained, she is well-intentioned and determined in most of what she does, though she tin can't bring herself to focus on schoolwork or practice ballet consistently.
Her antics are non atypical for a magical-girl heroine, but she remains endearing and never tips over into obnoxious, which is a respectable achievement.
She is, nonetheless, blessed with a scratchy voice that sounds like a duck quacking. This is a rare occasion in which I recommend the English language dub over the original Japanese: Not only is the English voice cast unusually skilful overall, but Luci Christian gives a magnificent performance as Duck, playing her with a Homestar Runner–similar phonation that is simply perfect.
The Obsessive Best Friends
Duck hangs out with two other students, Freeway and Lilie, who simultaneously fill the role of Those Ii 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 dominion, magical-girl heroines have a alpine order to make full: 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 exist ideal personifications of the power of honey and friendship. To make sure the audience gets information technology, the protagonist will hang out with some other daughter who has no purpose in life except to advertise the protagonist'due south pure-heartedness or physical beauty or any virtues she's supposed to accept.
I think these characters are meant to be funny, but I typically notice their monomania disturbing. Pike and Lilie, however, are amusing considering they alive for the sole purpose of watching Duck spiral up.
The Setting
Furthermore, the town where the story takes place, a town designed to wait like the walled village of Nördlingen in Germany, is full of funny animal people, and the almost ofttimes actualization 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 grade, is Duck.
The Other Players
The mysterious male child from the lake, Mytho, is as well a ballet dancer, and he is furthermore a prince from a fairy tale who escaped into the existent earth. Having shattered his own centre to defeat an evil raven, Mytho can experience no emotions, but he retains, by forcefulness 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 ability to transform her into Princess Tutu, a character from the fairy tale with great magical abilities but a tragic fate. Only Tutu tin find and restore the missing fragments of the prince's center, but she cannot confess her love for him or she will turn into a speck of calorie-free and disappear.
Most of the townsfolk are unaware of Mytho's identity, but Tutu before long 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 fourth dimension obscure.
The Ballet
Princess Tutu takes place in a sort of ballet universe. Most of the soundtrack and many of the plot elements are fatigued from ballets, specially The Nutcracker and Swan Lake. Tutu uses her magic past dancing ballet, the action sequences are choreographed similar ballet, and nigh episodes climax with a trip the light fantastic sequence—though all merely the most of import 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 similar the real thing, and not merely like the animators put the characters on their tippy-toes and had them bounce around.
Merely strictly speaking, Princess Tutu is not a trip the light fantastic toe evidence; that is, the story is non an excuse to showcase dancing. Tutu is first and foremost well-nigh good storytelling, and I mean that in 2 senses: It is expert storytelling—really, really good storytelling—and it is as well about storytelling.
Drosselmeyer, the man who gave Duck her pendant, is also able to sentinel her every move, and nosotros soon learn he is the writer 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 thousand tragedy, simply the people forced into his story have other ideas, the question throughout being whether Drosselmeyer or the characters will get the upper paw. In a sense, Princess Tutu depicts a writer as a type of sadist; since stories require conflict, their author can only practice what he does past making his characters miserable.
Themes
Equally its plot develops and its mysteries are gradually revealed, Princess Tutu turns actually 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, just I am likewise inclined to suppose its dreamlike quality, bizarre visuals, and metafictional concerns are inspired more by the German language Romanticism that influences some of the ballet to which information technology pays homage. The pick of the proper name Drosselmeyer for Princess Tutu's sinister narrator may be a clue: He is of grade 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 conspicuously an writer 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 combative witch) are similar throughout, but the prove ultimately comes to a very unlike conclusion, suggesting that this is an effort 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 test here, simply Utena especially attacked bravery and compassion (represented past the prince), portraying them as meaningless, whereas Tutu is unambiguously of the opposite stance, depicting what at beginning appears to be overweening altruism as ultimately justified.
But well-nigh especially, the show is preoccupied with the subject of gratuitous volition, fate, and the nature of reality. Early in the commencement act, a foreign character named Edel, who shows up at odd times playing a street organ and speaking in riddles, announces, "May those who take their fate find happiness. May those who defy their fate find glory."
That line, in different forms, gets repeated throughout the series. Equally 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. Later on viewing information technology aslope Utena, I am inclined to think Drosselmeyer is a representation of Kunihiko Ikuhara, Utena's creator, who would not permit his characters a happy fairytale catastrophe even though one would have worked but fine with his plot.
In addition, once Tutu and the other characters acquire 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 existent earth, paralleling the Gnostic themes that characterize Utena's terminal episodes, and which Utena mostly borrowed from Herman Hesse's Demian. Both Utena and Tutu are trapped in a world created past a malevolent demiurge, just wheareas Utena at terminal discovers that "reality" is nothing merely a small platform surrounded by an empty white space (alike to the climax of the Gnostic novel Voyage to Arcturus), when the characters of Princess Tutu discover reality, their earth 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 upwardly 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 accept had more impact if they were animated. There are moments of obvious CGI, though that is, fortunately, express generally to h2o and fog effects, like to Prétear, which comes from the aforementioned studio. A handful of episodes, specially in the commencement half of the second human activity, are repetitious and feel like filler.
These are, however, pocket-size complaints. This is a well-structured show, peculiarly for one having such an aggressive storyline. Different some other surreal and self-consciously weighty anime that preceded information technology, it never collapses into incoherency. By the end, everything is satisfactorily explained and wrapped upward.
Decision
But more than 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 constructive tearjerker in context.
Bonus Materials
I own this series on DVD, but in the time since I purchased it, the price 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 prove and some short videos explaining the basics of ballet and the sources of the musical pieces in the soundtrack. Too 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 cost of the DVD collection, so streaming is a better selection.
Source: https://deusexmagicalgirl.com/2020/09/26/anime-review-princess-tutu/
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