One Preview and One Review!
First and foremost, you may remember my story about making a movie with my friends last weekend. Fab is at work on preparing the movie for its WORLD INTERENT PREMIERE!!!! She has the footage editing together, now she just has to add the music/sound. She does have a preview prepared though which she has posted on Youtube! HOORAY! For those of you who don't know me IRL, I'm the girl with the ponytail saying "HONEY, I'M PREGNANT!" (Disclaimer: I am not actually pregnant and please remember what I said about us creating the "script" and shooting this movie in about 3 hours with a budget of about 6 dollars)
Moving on, this week I finished my second re-watch of maybe my favorite anime series ever next to Revolutionary Girl Utena. It is a magical series, one that is funny and cute but also very complex, dark, masterfully plotted and designed with loveable characters, a great soundtrack, and layers upon layers of meta. It is filled with awesome for people of all ages and is well worth the investment if you see it in any store that sells anime.
This masterpeice is named . . . . . "Princess Tutu."
Yeah, you read that correctly.
You are probably judging me right now, but just as you can't judge a book by its cover, you can't judge a series by it's (ridiculously girly) name. But yes, it is a magical girl series. Involving ballet. But DO NOT let that put you off. This really isn't a show about ballet, it's more a show about the nature of fiction, the role it plays in our lives, as well as letting love into your life and taking responsibility of your own destiny AS TOLD THROUGH ballet.
The basic premise of the series is that it takes place in an ambiguously German town called Gold Crown Town, which seems to have a very thin line between fiction and reality. You see, there was a very famous writer who lived there and died before he could finish the last story he was working on, "The Prince and the Raven." The characters from the story entered the real world and their tale began to affect the town.
After this prologue, we meet a sweet preteen girl named "Duck" who attends an art school in the ballet division. Duck is a well-meaning girl but lives up to her ungraceful name in the dancing department. She idolizes the prima ballerina, Rue, and has a crush on Mytho, a seemingly emotionless boy who lives with a strangely overbearing roommate named Fakir. Duck only wants to make Mytho smile, but things are more than they seem. You see, Duck has met the writer who is supposed to be dead. Mytho is in fact the prince from the story "The Prince and the Raven" and in his attempt to seal away the evil raven, he shattered his own heart. Now the shards of his heart are scattered around the town, and the only one who can restore the heartshards to the prince is another character from the story, Princess Tutu, a kind, gentle princess who can dance beautifully and can reveal a person's truest feelings. Thus, the writer offered this role in the story to a duck and gave her a pendant to turn her into a human girl, and then into Princess Tutu.
Oh yes, our young heroine Duck remembers at the end of the first episode that she is truly an actual duck who has merely been turned into a girl, who sometimes turns into Princess Tutu. Not your typical identity crisis.
So as you could probably tell, what appears to be a straightforward fairytale already has taken a few turns in the first episode. The story only continues to gorw more complicated from there, with characters having more to them than they first appear (especially the aforementioned Rue and Fakir, whose relationships with Mytho become just as essential to the plot as Duck's) and the nature of fiction and reality in the town.
With that much alone, I would heartily recommend this series, but probably my favorite part besides the loveable characters is the music. The majority of the series is set to actual ballet music and other pieces of Classical music, from the obvious Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, to more obscure pieces by Beethoven, Satie and Mussorgsky. The pieces selected add a very dramatic atmosphere to the show and prefectly supplement the stories told within. In fact, I think this series would be the best way to introduce anyone to Classical music, and show them that it's really not boring at all!
If you still need some convincing, here is a link to a very famous AMV of the series. Not only has it won several awards at anime conventions, it is often used as the best advertisement of the series, as the imagery displayed in it is a more accurate portrayal of the series' tone than its DVD covers. Also, it has spoilers in it, but those spoilers actually won't be apparant except to someone who has already watched much of the series. So watch, and if you're interested, you can buy the whole 26 episode series where they sell anime! Trust me, it's worth it!
Click to viewMoving on, this week I finished my second re-watch of maybe my favorite anime series ever next to Revolutionary Girl Utena. It is a magical series, one that is funny and cute but also very complex, dark, masterfully plotted and designed with loveable characters, a great soundtrack, and layers upon layers of meta. It is filled with awesome for people of all ages and is well worth the investment if you see it in any store that sells anime.
This masterpeice is named . . . . . "Princess Tutu."
Yeah, you read that correctly.
You are probably judging me right now, but just as you can't judge a book by its cover, you can't judge a series by it's (ridiculously girly) name. But yes, it is a magical girl series. Involving ballet. But DO NOT let that put you off. This really isn't a show about ballet, it's more a show about the nature of fiction, the role it plays in our lives, as well as letting love into your life and taking responsibility of your own destiny AS TOLD THROUGH ballet.
The basic premise of the series is that it takes place in an ambiguously German town called Gold Crown Town, which seems to have a very thin line between fiction and reality. You see, there was a very famous writer who lived there and died before he could finish the last story he was working on, "The Prince and the Raven." The characters from the story entered the real world and their tale began to affect the town.
After this prologue, we meet a sweet preteen girl named "Duck" who attends an art school in the ballet division. Duck is a well-meaning girl but lives up to her ungraceful name in the dancing department. She idolizes the prima ballerina, Rue, and has a crush on Mytho, a seemingly emotionless boy who lives with a strangely overbearing roommate named Fakir. Duck only wants to make Mytho smile, but things are more than they seem. You see, Duck has met the writer who is supposed to be dead. Mytho is in fact the prince from the story "The Prince and the Raven" and in his attempt to seal away the evil raven, he shattered his own heart. Now the shards of his heart are scattered around the town, and the only one who can restore the heartshards to the prince is another character from the story, Princess Tutu, a kind, gentle princess who can dance beautifully and can reveal a person's truest feelings. Thus, the writer offered this role in the story to a duck and gave her a pendant to turn her into a human girl, and then into Princess Tutu.
Oh yes, our young heroine Duck remembers at the end of the first episode that she is truly an actual duck who has merely been turned into a girl, who sometimes turns into Princess Tutu. Not your typical identity crisis.
So as you could probably tell, what appears to be a straightforward fairytale already has taken a few turns in the first episode. The story only continues to gorw more complicated from there, with characters having more to them than they first appear (especially the aforementioned Rue and Fakir, whose relationships with Mytho become just as essential to the plot as Duck's) and the nature of fiction and reality in the town.
With that much alone, I would heartily recommend this series, but probably my favorite part besides the loveable characters is the music. The majority of the series is set to actual ballet music and other pieces of Classical music, from the obvious Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, to more obscure pieces by Beethoven, Satie and Mussorgsky. The pieces selected add a very dramatic atmosphere to the show and prefectly supplement the stories told within. In fact, I think this series would be the best way to introduce anyone to Classical music, and show them that it's really not boring at all!
If you still need some convincing, here is a link to a very famous AMV of the series. Not only has it won several awards at anime conventions, it is often used as the best advertisement of the series, as the imagery displayed in it is a more accurate portrayal of the series' tone than its DVD covers. Also, it has spoilers in it, but those spoilers actually won't be apparant except to someone who has already watched much of the series. So watch, and if you're interested, you can buy the whole 26 episode series where they sell anime! Trust me, it's worth it!