Princess Tutu

This post exists solely because I was talking to our new Teen Librarian Rachel about anime and manga--specifically the Ouran High School Host Club manga and anime, the latter of which my antipathy to is vast--and after I recced this series to her, it occurred to me that I had failed to do a post on it yet! This error could not be let stood. So.

Oh man, Princess Tutu. Assuming you haven't seen it already, and you're still reading past the title, stay with me! This is one truly fantastic anime. I ran out and bought the DVDs as soon as they were released when I was still a poor college student, that is how fantastic is it. "Worth a steady diet of ramen to afford" is a rare honor I bestow (we here come to the crux of why this blog is about 80% manga to 20% anime--one of these is much cheaper than the other [well, was; manga's starting to trend up there as well]).

Princess Tutu is a shoujo fairy tale, except for the parts of it that are action battle sequences, or a horror story, or the characters hijacking the plot from the narrator and rattling the bars of their cage. It is also the story of a duck, who is also a girl, who is not-really a swan, and her love for a heartless prince, who is heartless because he literally shattered his heart with a sword to defeat the Raven King. Ahiru (Duck in the dub) is trying to restore the prince's heart, but she finds herself thwarted by two very different people: the adopted daughter of the Raven King who prefers the prince remain heartless so that he won't leave her side, and the reincarnation of the knight who was struck down trying to save the prince the first time around and who fears that history will repeat itself if his heart is restored. There is also a lot of ballet. I suppose I should qualify that half the action battle sequences are also action ballet sequences.

Still with me?

I hope so, but just in case, let me show you the ubiquitous .jpeg associated with this series. I'm pretty sure it'll do more to convince you to try this show out than anything I can say.

Image from the wilds of the Internet; I do not know the original creator.

Whenever I recommend this anime to anyone, I warn them that the first few episodes are slow. And they are! But the payoff for sticking it out is so high, I promise.

The Princess Tutu anime ran in 2002/3 and was licensed for English by ADV; when that company shut down, another one called AEsir Holdings picked up the title and rereleased it last year (I have the ADV version, so I don't know if there are translation changes between the two. I do know that ADV didn't translate some of the puns in the Japanese; but then, this series was one of the rare cases where the fansubs [which came out prior to the English licensing] were so spot-on and well done that ADV had some Sideshow Bob-sized shoes to fill.) There is also a 2 volume manga, released by ADV in 2004/5, but I do not in any way recommend it. Even as tie-ins go, it's pretty bad.

We don't currently have the series here at Mooresville Public Library, and unfortunately the only library in Evergreen Indiana that carries it is Lebanon PL, which is a bit of a far drive! But it is available online at Hulu. And MPL has both a computer lab with Internet access and offers free wireless!