I decided to make a topic for one of my favorite animes. Hope there are other fans. And just for a warning, I have to say that Puella Magi Madoka Magica wasn't the only magical girl anime to break the magical girl genre.

Ok, time for synopsis:

Princess Tutu is an anime about a female duck who falls for the emotionless Prince Mytho and she wishes she could be human so she can be by his side and dance with him. Now, if you say the story sounds like a fairy tale...It is, in fact the entire setting is in a story book. And the deceased writer of the book decides to have the characters of his story flesh out this fairytale. He decides to give the duck a blood red jewel that has the ability to turn her into a human. And now that she is a human she decides to enroll in a dance school to learn ballad. Mytho attends the school, but his self proclaimed girlfriend Rue who is at the top of the class also attends the school. And to top things off, a young man named Fakir who doesn't want Duck to have anything to do with Mytho also attends this crazy ballad school where some of the students are animals. Duck later finds out that her blood red stone can also turn her into a magical ballerina by the name of Princess Tutu. In this form she can dance beautifully and have the power to regain Mytho's lost emotions. Question is, will Duck really get to live happily ever after with her prince? This anime is more complicated than it seems.

My two cents: I LOVE this anime. I would consider it a magical girl anime for people who don't like magical girl animes. And this anime is like a Disney movie, it's family friendly but isn't afraid to cross the line a bit, and I love cartoons that are family friendly but slightly dark, and fairytales. And I assure you, this anime gets darker as it goes on. And what makes this M.G.A (magical girl anime) different from other M.G.A. is...well for one the transformation scenes are short but it doesn't have the usual magical girl anime cliches. And this anime is also like a fairy tale turned upside down because we have princesses fighting over a prince and a princess saving the world. And the ending, my god the ending was brillient! But I have to say I both liked and disliked the ending.

Lastly, I recommend this anime be watched with English audio. I may be biased because I usually perfer to watch English dub anime but I assure you the dub is great. All episodes are on Netflix and I think they're also legally on youtube for free.

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I love Princess Tutu!
I got into watching the anime after my husband sent me a link to this AMV and it just looked awesome, awesome, awesome! I have to admit, I made up my own theories on what is happening in the anime, based on the things I saw in this AMV.
I was kinda wrong about a ton of stuff.
But that's what I loved! I loved it that I couldn't predict how things would turn out. That's a problem I have with most Magical Girl or Shoujo stuff these days, after a few episodes/chapters I can tell you who the boyfriend will be, who the rival and all else that would happen.

I admit, I kind of spoiled myself several things as I didn't start watching the anime until I read up a few things about it on TVTropes and I ignored spoiler warnings. The series started out pretty magical girl/shoujo-ish and I wondered if I would stick with it.... and I did!
The art is amazing. Especially on the ballet dancing! They really, really put their all into drawing those scenes and the music from the ballets themselves used fits perfectly. It's just a really cool anime to see for that. And it doesn't stay very cliché at first. The entire anime is only 24 Episodes long and the first 12 are pretty shoujo-ish, where everything is good and ends on a happy ending, but right afterwards - things start to get more mature, darker and all-round even more interesting.
There still is the magical girl routine - something happens, towards the end is the stock footage, but it's still interesting.

The emotional scenes were done great. Towards the end, a scene where Ahiru is dancing underwater and there's a voice-over about her dilemma and it really feels legit. I felt sorry for several of these characters, I even felt sorry for Drosselmeyer, somewhat!

Now, I never watched the english dub and I don't really want to - I found the japaneses voices wonderful, although I have to say, hearing "Tutu/Chuchu" (that's how they pronounce it) with an echo sounds hilariously like train noises. And my only complaint is the following....
There is a scene where Fakir is supposed to speak German.
And this entire thing is actually supposed to take place in a German town, Fakir supposedly knows German perfectly. But the scene where he's speaking German sounds dreadful! I know they probably just gave the voice actor the lines and a tape with how it was supposed to sound... which is terrible.
It just sounds terrible. Emiko, does it sound better in the English dub?

By the way, what did they ever do to that scene with Mytho and Ahiru?
Ahiru: *nervous* A, I, ... A, I, U...!
Mytho: E?
Ahiro: O.
I found that one hilarious, seeing as that is... well, it's the japanese way of listing the vowels. Or to list things alphabetically in RPGs, the way I've seen it. That was one of my preferred scenes. But if I had to list which are my favorite scenes it's the dance off between Tutu and Krähe at the end of the first "season/arc" and Rue dancing in the bleak Sea of Despair. In the AMV, both of those scenes are shown and oh my god, they are so awesome!

C-A

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Let's see, I haven't heard that scene where Fakir speaks German in a long time. (So now I finally know which language he was speaking) But if memory serves the English voice actor was saying the lines in German.

I agree how a lot of magical girl and shoujo animes are predictable. Last month I watched a shoujo by the name of Ginban Kaleidescope, wonderfully decent anime, characters are great (I still got one of the characters voices ringing in my head, in a good way), sadly it was predictable.

Well actually Tokyo Mew Mew wasn't predictable. In fact, it felt like the anime was screaming, "Ok, let's not have an annoying journey of main character follows love interest. Let's make the two characters like eachother from the get-go and have them go on a date in the first episode." Sadly things don't go smoothly for Ichigo's love life.

And yesterday after turning on netflix and watching PT for the first time in awhile, the scenes with Fakir and Mytho turn my yoai fangirl instincts on. =>.>= =<.<=

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Oh yes, Fakir and Mytho have tons of scenes that could make Yaoi Fangirls cream themselves. Especially if you take the Princess Tutu Abridged Series' idea that Mytho never wears anything underneath when he's just walking around in that long shirt as a fact.

Yeah, that scene always has him speaking German.
I don't know why they suddenly needed him to speak german if everybody spoke Japanese/English beforehand just fine. Except maybe the names, although I think except for Autor and Drosselmeyer, there weren't that many really german ones. From what I remember, I haven't watched Tutu in years.

Tokyo Mew Mew was so predictable! Especially the part with... what's his name. Aoyama? You know, the guy Ichigo likes. It was obvious he'd be those two characters - I mean, with a name of Ao (Blue) of course! That's the problem with naming characters after a theme, you kind of know what they turn into.
Like with Sailor Moon, we have the girls with the kana for Fire, Water, Wood and Metal in them, so it's really obvious what they turn into. Well, sort of. Wood = Jupiter might not jump into the mind immediately...

C-A

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D'oh! Didn't know that part of Aoyama's name means blue.

Still, I love Tokyo Mew Mew for actually focusing more on character development and plot more than the shiny magical stuff...But looking back I think it would've been cool if the mew mews had a second form.

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Oh, and that scene in English where Duck gets nervous when she and Mytho meet up in private.

She's all like

Duck: Uh, E I E I...Oh.

I thought it was adorable.

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I know by now that there will probably be a third season...Not that I have a problem with that.

I had a random idea that there could be a spinoff for Princess Tutu where the fairy tale is similar to The Nutcracker Prince. The Nutcracker Prince is one of my favorite fairytales and I would like to see a rightious prince in an anime.

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After noticing this topic, I decided to give Princess Tutu a go. So far it has been...interesting. I'm only up to episode 3 though, so I don't know enough about it yet.

Oh, and the duck is SO cute. ^^

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Yes! Somebody bumped up my topic!

Keep going it gets better, and my favorite character is Rue.

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ahhhhhhhh! i love princess tutu!
glad to see it's still getting some love (since it's considered quite "old" by now)

Strangely enough, the princess tutu spin-off manga was the first manga I ever got into. It wasn't even particularly good, but it left a huge impression on me as a 9 year old kid. 7 years later, i finally discovered it had an anime and i fell in love with it. The characters are amazing, the story is incredibly sweet and surprisingly dark at the same time, the ending was really INTENSE. Oh and I had a gigantic girl-crush on Rue



The music is also amazing, especially the fact that they didn't limit themselves to "mainstream" pieces in their soundtrack. They used a lot of fairly obscure music as well(i'm a classical music dork and i knew pretty much every piece.)

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