Princess Tutu: the rewatch, Disc 1: Hope, Adventure, Mystery, Author's Prerogative

Am I staying up all night to watch PT and knit? Yes. And yes, I knit now! I started tonight. I'm making a purple scarf. It's great. I can't purle though, the book's explanation just confuses me.


Disc 1

I had forgotten the actual degree of abrupt little asshole Fakir was in the first episodes. I mean, really. He's quite the nasty bitch.

I'm "eh" about Mytho's dub VA; he's alright for the soft-spoken stuff, a little jarring for the louder stuff. Ahiru/Duck's dub VA is quite talented; some of those lines must be murder on your throat. Rue's English voice is lovely and Fakir's is positively splendid. I still wish they had used his actor for Sasuke in the Naruto dub.

I'd forgotten how often, in these first episodes, they repeat the line that the princess is fated never to be with the one she loves. Ahiru says it about five or six times, Drosselmeyer says it twice that often, and even Rue repeats it once. I know how that dialogue reads in the beginning of the show, but having seen the end and knowing how the cards fall... that prediction takes on new tragic meaning, as does Drosselmeyer's fanatic insistence that the audience "never forget that Ahiru, as her true self, is a duck." It's something the audience and Ahiru forget over the course of the series... we start to see her as a girl who turns into a duck, not a duck that turns into a girl. That change in perception (or misperception) correlates with the fact that as the series progresses, Ahiru begins to operate as if it were that way, particularly in her relationships with the other characters. It reminds me so much of The Last Unicorn, as Ahiru is forever changed by being human, and what her true identity is begins to blur as she becomes more than what she was. The transformative aspect of this series is beautiful. The first half of the series we discover who these characters are as pieces of them are revealed... the second half of the series takes those newly-revealed characters and this time transforms them.

Princess Tutu: the rewatch, Disc 2 & 3: A prince doesn't need two princesses.

EDIT: Just went and updated the PT wikipedia entry to include listings of the leitmotifs [character theme music] for the major characters. I found conflicting information on Fakir's theme so I included both, and I couldn't figure out the leitmotifs for Uzura, the Raven, Pique & Lillie, or Autor. I was able to find Drosselmeyer, Edel, and Mr. Cat's pieces, however.



Disc 2

Episode 6 - the dance of awesome badness, and the fear shard

"You're an eyesore." Hah! He just DROPS her. I'd forgotten about that. ::snicker:: What an jerk. Hm... the dance leader Paulo said that the troop leader/electric eel's "approval rate" when way up for these two as the chosen partners.

This episode also has the sequence of Ahiru selecting the mood symbolism stones from Edel's collection: hope, adventure, mystery, artistic license/author's prerogative.


Episode 7 - tasty bread and the ways in which Fakir is like an onion

I had forgotten about the scene where Fakir slaps Mytho. As I'm watching this series again from start to finish... it once again amazes me how this show has such high levels of sugary sweetness, yet has such a fucked up underbelly. In some ways you can say its comparable to Fruits Basket that way... but it's different too. In Tutu you can't really tell which ones are evil, because the character motivations are constantly being unveiled before you. And there's differences in the negative behavior, too... in Furuba you know why the characters do bad or cruel things, and if it happens then they angst about it or talk it off. In PT... the "good" characters do bad shit and the bad characters do good things, and they don't angst about it after the fact (except Ahiru) because everyone is doing what they have to, to survive the story...or what they think they have to. ( Minor Fakir spoilers )

you know, I kinda forgot where I was going with this.

Maybe I shouldn't say that the characters don't feel bad about bad things they do. Because sometimes they do. Rather, the SHOW doesn't apologize for it. Lots of dark things happen that don't get addressed, weighed, and judged the way a lot of moral decisions/actions are judged in an anime show (usually by other characters.) Everything just keeps going forward, and whether a person is bad or good from last week to this week depends more on how much you know about them, and less on the ways they actually behave. In the first half of the series the characters don't really change at all; it's just what we the audience knows about them that changes.

All of this is why the voice-dubbing outtakes bloopers for each disc seem to consist almost entirely of sex jokes or other crudities. It's hilarious. The actor's audio commentary for the DVDs and bloopers/outtakes are suited to an audience about 14+, whereas I think the series itself is fine for someone as young as 10 or less. If you saw the first DVD's set of PT bloopers via the internet, I can tell you that the second set is even WORSE BETTER. The cast definitely realizes how subversive this series is.


Disc 3

From the cast commentary, Jay Hickman / Mytho: "Is there anything more romantic than a nice pas de duex in front of the burning corpse of a puppet?"

Yeah, this demi-finale is still awesome.

A thought on the extras: Each of the discs is loaded with extras, from bloopers to cast/producer commentaries, as well as the etude section, which I JUST NOW AS I TYPE recalled from my high school French classes means "study" (like 24 hours late on that revelation), that very nicely (if a bit fast) goes over each of the main composition pieces used in the show that are borrowed from famous classical music: overtures, ballets, or operas. SO WORTH IT TO BUY THE DVDs.

Very few anime series in these last two years have made me want to shell out and purchase them; the last was Fruits Basket. I've been having the same experience watching PT as I got watching FB on official DVD: it feels new and exciting because I get to hear the English dub voices, which is about the only way you can "re-experience" an anime that you've already seen to the conclusion two or three times. You might never get a second season, but you get an almost Alternate Universe version of the first season by watching it again in your personal native language dub. The DVD extras are just icing on the cake.

The woman who voices Rue, Jessica Boone, who also did the commentary for episode 13 along with Hickman, said that she'd love to see an American professional ballet production of Princess Tutu, that they should make the show into a ballet. YES. JUST. YES. PLEASE.