As I wrote when I first saw it, ‘Princess Tutu is a wonderful, weird and wacky anime about ballet with a lovely soundtrack [made up of] new interpretations of the great ballet themes by Tchaikovsky, Bizet, Delibes et al. Where else can you see a duck-girl taught by a crazy Puss-in-Boots teacher who threatens to marry pupils if they misbehave watching an anteater girl perform the male part of a pas de deux with a prince in the place of the girl?’ (Oct 20, 2003).
There’s something about Princess Tutu that makes it very, very special. I quite genuinely call it amongst the best anime of all time, and I’d quite vehemently defend an assertion that it’s the very best anime ever to have a very, very stupid premise, stupid name, stupid way of having characters resolve their problems and stupid overall world. Because what Princess Tutu grows from is very daft, and where it goes is masterful. I pity those that can’t get past the name or premise.
Princess Tutu is, probably unsurprisingly, an anime about ballet, and most of the most popular ones get a reference of one sort or another. Tchaikovsky is at the heart of the plot: in a ballet school in a romantic fantasy kingdom, a young girl is at the bottom of her class. Her secret, barely known to her, is that she is in fact not a girl but a duck with a magical pendant: indeed, her name is Ahiru, which simply means ‘duck’, and if she quacks, then she transforms into a cute duckling until she gets into some water, when she changes back. But the pendant allows for a further transformation, from the brave girl into the beautiful ideal ballerina, Princess Tutu. Ahiru is in love with the mysterious Mytho (pronounced ‘Myuuto’, probably better transliterated as ‘Mute’), a quiet and strange boy in the school. But as the mysterious Drosselmeyer sets a new story into motion, all the central characters find out that they are connected to the characters of an old story, and soon are forced to question whether they are real at all, or just characters in a story with an inevitable fate.
The balance of the story works brilliantly, for any audience prepared to give it the slightest chance. The first episodes are carried along by the sheer eccentricity and humour of the world - the aforementioned cats and anteaters, not to mention puppets and strange prawn-like innkeepers. Where normal magical girl series might feature a fight, Tutu features a dance that reveals the innermost heart. Really nothing very compelling, but fun and idiosyncratic enough to engage. But that is when, more or less with the shift to a second season, Tutu got darker and more sophisticated, although the ideas behind the change were obviously in place from the start. By the end, very little turns out as expected. At the time I finished it, (Dec 5th 2004), I ‘felt the end was so unfair on poor Ahiru, the noblest character in the anime, despite her humble nature…’, but the more I thought about it, the stronger the ending was because it wasn’t fair. Princess Tutu is not a story of magical happy endings and contrivances. It’s about a cruel (but likeable) madman manipulating others, and the struggle to stop him.
It doesn’t matter if the idea of ballet puts you off, or the first episodes seem babyish and trivial. Princess Tutu will impress you by the end. I feel I can say that with complete confidence. Its quality by the end is some of the best anime can offer, if not in aesthetic then in writing. And of course, it has some of the best music in hundreds of years.
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