It’s no secret that I’m a huge anime nerd. I admit this without shame. My taste tends to run toward feature-length anime and limited-run serial anime over How Do They Get People To Make All These Episodes serial anime (Inuyasha being one exception).
Alas, whether because of maturity (ha!) or because there is something with contemporary anime that just lacks a certain something, my anime tastes pretty much grind to a halt after the late 90s.
But then a friend told me that I needed to watch Princess Tutu.
Y’all. Y’all. Go see this shit.
For real. Watch Princess Tutu. Right now. Queue it on your Netflix, find it on YouTube, order it on Amazon. Do what you have to do to see it.
You can find a description online. Princess Tutu even has its own wiki (SPOILER ALERT). Don’t let the name and the weird bits fool you. The story is actually very mature and extremely complex, and they achieve this without gratuitous T&A or blood and gore (there is quite a bit of verbal, emotional, and physical abuse in a few episodes). And then there’s that not-so-small falctor of having a lot of layered female characters–none of whom are necessarily cis–who actually fucking interact with each other and not just to talk about men or be on some Mean Girls type shit.
And did I mention the themes of this shit? Princess Tutu is a story about stories, about the power storytelling has, and the ways in which using that power responsibly or irresponsibly can affect people. If you are a writer, an artist, or a storyteller of any kind, especially one who has any sense of integrity about your work, you need to watch this shit. Princess Tutu is also about the importance of emotions, about how we need even the “bad” feelings like sorrow and disappointment to be whole.
You ever saw something so good that everything else compared to it just pisses you off? That’s Princess Tutu for me. Princess Tutu is why I give Once Upon A Time so much shit. You wanna talk about subverting and deconstructing fairy tales, Princess Tutu pirouettes around Once Upon A Time without breaking a sweat (I’ve often thought to myself that Princess Tutu is the story that Regina deserves, but she’s unfortunately stuck on ABC).
Y’all need to watch Princess Tutu.