Mahou History: Princess Tutu

Princess Tutu (2002) is one of my favorites magical girl series. It's a delightful remix of fairy tales, ballet, and more, that goes beyond merely repeating their motifs and plunges into a meditation on the nature of tragedy and narrative itself. It's enough of a cult classic that if you've heard about it at all, I expect you've already heard good things. It's great, go watch it.

But! We're here to discover Tutu's place in magical girl history. How does it interact with previously established mahou motifs? what does it do differently? that sort of thing. So, let's get to it...

For anyone looking for the production history of Princess Tutu I strongly recommend this article from SakugaBooru. My object here is to put Tutu in the context of other magical girl media and uncover trends that may have been obscured.

Princess Tutu is a modern magical girl...

Princess Tutu features a young girl¹ gaining extraordinary power, performing stock-footage transformation sequences, and gathering a collection of plot-objects over the course of an episodic story. The telling is infused with elements from European fairy tales and theatre, but Tutu is very comfortable joining the magical girl milieu and adopting its regalia. Considering its origins, this isn't a surprise: Tutu's creator Ikuko Itoh was the character designer for the anime adaptation of Sailor Moon, and Tutu's director Junichi Sato had worked on both Sailor Moon and Ojamajo Doremi. These are experienced artists and experienced mahouwrights.

...but isn't a superhero
Sailor Moon more or less redefined the magical girl genre, infusing an already-existing genre of transforming girls with tropes from tokusatusu henshin heroics. Action sequences and combat weren't completely absent from magical girl media before, but post-Sailor Moon they became much more of an expectation. This makes it particularly notable, at least to me, that Princess Tutu avoids combat as a form of resolution for its episodic conflicts. To retrieve heart shards, Duck needs to reach an understanding, not overcome an enemy.

This makes me wonder: When did this become an option? Princess Tutu wasn't the first mahou to avoid combat as a primary form of conflict. In Sato's own past work we have Doremi, and as an even earlier example I remember being impressed by Cardcaptor Sakura using a variety of methods to collect Clow Cards², not just combat. This is obviously an incomplete accounting, and there's even more examples of pre-Sailor Moon mahous who didn't default to combat. I suppose I'm wondering how this threads were rewoven: Sailor Moon reintroduces magical girls as a form of superhero, but somewhere along the line, the genre becomes more flexible... potentially by calling back to devices and expectations from prelunar works? There's certainly a resemblance between Duck as a transformed animal³ and older majokko works, where an angel, witch, or fairy princess need to learn to understand the human world. Part of me wants to point to Cardcaptor Sakura as an influential halfway point between henshin mahous and witchling mahous but that feels too easy.

Princess Tutu is concerned with narrative archetypes
So! We've established that Princess Tutu is a conscious genre work, which is exactly what it needs to be for its own metafictional goals. The thematic core of Princess Tutu is interrogating what kind of stories we tell ourselves; the references to theatre and fairy tales are often very direct or explicitly discussed within the work, but by adopting the specific devices of the magical girl genre, Tutu suggests that its themes can be extended to modern or popular media as well.

Are any magical girl works as intertextually essential to Tutu as Nutcracker or Swan Lake? mmm, I'm honestly not sure. Itoh and Sato do have a shared background in Sailor Moon, and there is some resemblance between that work's use of reincarnation and Tutu's concept of characters having "past lives" as characters in a storybook.⁴ But I think the most relevant magical girl context is elsewhere.

Princess Tutu is a direct successor to Prétear
Princess Tutu is a fairy tale-themed magical girl story overseen by Junichi Sato. Prétear is ALSO a fairy tale-themed magical girl story overseen by Junichi Sato. It's not nearly as intertextually ambitious, theatrical, or moody, but there's strong similarities in how some character arcs are handled, and of course the shared interest in fairy tales. I wouldn't call Tutu a remake of Prétear, they each have their own strengths and priorities,⁵ but I do think Prétear prototypes several concepts that found full realization in Tutu.

This is an amateur genre history overview, there is a real and present risk of missing major context or otherwise misinterpreting some element of its subject. I write these because they're the kind of thing I like to see, and I welcome additional perspectives or analysis my own writing might be missing.

1. ...who is also a duck ↩
2. This "collect the plot objects" structure is a point of overlap between Cardcaptor Sakura and Tutu that makes me suspect either shared inspiration or direct influence, but I haven't pursued that thread very far.↩
3. Though not typically considered a magical girl, Ranma 1/2 seems to have inspired Duck's ability to transform from bird to human by pouring water on herself.↩
4. I have heard the interpretation that the sequence of Sailor Moon, Revolutionary Girl Utena, and Princess Tutu is the world's most expensive argument about Tuxedo Mask. I'm not confident this is true, but it would be really funny.↩
5. For example, Prétear is significantly closer to the superhero model of mahou and its protagonist gets to wear a bunch of different transformation outfits. it rules.↩