The Winter 2025 Anime Preview Guide

I Want to Escape from Princess Lessons

Duchess Leticia Dorman has been betrothed to Crown Prince Clarke since age seven. She was once a rambunctious and free-spirited child, but the strict education she's receiving to make her a fit future princess has really put a cramp in her lifestyle. Her only hope is that the prince might someday take an interest in someone else—so when Clarke shows up to a royal ball with an unknown woman at his side, Lettie is overcome with delight, presuming her dream has come true, and her engagement has been broken off. She wastes no time retreating to an easygoing countryside life, but her newfound peace is cut short when the prince shows up and claims she's still his fiancée. Clarke is determined to win Lettie over and marry her, while Lettie is determined to resist his charms and escape.

I Want to Escape from Princess Lessons is based on the light novel series by writer Izumi Sawano and illustrator Miru Yumesaki. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Sundays.

The colors, Duke, the colors!

Oh, to be a color-blind Jack Russel terrier in a '90's popsicle commercial. I wouldn't be subjected to the hideous colors of I Want to Escape from Princess Lessons. The characters are oddly pale, even in the light-skinned realm of anime designs, while the exterior environments have the brightness cranked WAY up. The eye-smarting result is that my eyes are never able to adjust as I wince my way through the episode. Not that there was much to miss, since the character designs look like they were drawn by a fifteen-year-old with their first tablet. The prince's is especially ugly, which really reduces the draw of a series like this, where at least half the appeal is the fantasy of the hot guy pursuing you.

The episode is very nearly saved by the musical score by Naoyuki Chikatani and the esteemed Yuki Hayashi. It sets the perfect tone for Lettie's emotional arc: her sadness at being sent to the palace away from her parents as a small child, her resignation to having to act like a perfect lady, and her exuberance at being relieved of such a smothering role. I really liked Lettie! I love the rebellious princess archetype as much as the next girl power fantasy fan, but her actively suppressing her true personality until the moment she thinks she's relieved of her duties is a much more interesting approach to take. It creates a much stronger moment of catharsis—and I keep going back to the moment where she's pulled up her uncomfortable hoop skirt to be able to sit in a chair. It just communicates so much about her character: how the moment she's freed of the expectations of etiquette, she plops herself right down in a seat, decorum be damned. And she'll do whatever it takes to make that happen.

But… it's not called, I Escaped from Princess Lessons, is it? I haven't read the source material so I don't know what precisely Prince Clarke (awful name choice, even worse than Keith) has in mind for her, but I'm pretty sure it's nothing good. And like I said, he's way too ugly for him to be the star of anyone's ~problematic~ fantasies. This probably wasn't going to be my cup of tea either way, but the poor execution has rendered it nearly unwatchable.

I have to admit, I am confused by this premiere—and that's not because it's hard to follow: it's not. Over the course of 22-minutes we watch as a happy young girl's spirit and love for life is utterly crushed by endless years of etiquette lessons designed to turn her into the perfect future queen. It's an incredibly effective version of “show, don't tell.” Each scene, we watch as she becomes a little less lifeless—a little more robotic—and, all the while, people celebrate this as if it were some kind of achievement.

This all clearly conveys why she wants to escape her dictated role so fervently. After all, she has no interest in becoming queen, no love for her fiancé, and no real need for a fancy noble's lifestyle. Give her a bit of nature far from high society and she'll be more than happy.

So, where is the confusion? Well, it's right there in the title: “I Want to Escape from Princess Lessons.” But, I mean, didn't she do just that? The prince has chosen another woman over her and broken off their engagement. With this, she is basically free to live her own life (especially since I imagine that few eligible nobles would be willing to tie themselves to the woman that the crown prince discarded so publicly for political reasons). This leaves us 22-minutes into this series and I'm not at all sure what the actual anime is about.

While the show most definitely displays why she wants to escape from princess lessons, it does almost nothing other than that. It doesn't tell me what kind of show this even is. Is it a serious look at soul-crushing expectations placed upon girls in noble society, or is it supposed to be some sort of light-hearted comedy about how Leticia acts once off the leash? I honestly don't know—but I should. That's the problem with this episode.

All this leaves me with an odd quandary. If this were a short film rather than the first episode of an ongoing series, I'd probably rate it rather highly. It looks decent, tells a largely complete story, and has more than a few effective emotional moments. But as the start to a longer tale, it fails to set both the tone and the status quo. To understand what the show is actually about, I'm expected to come back next week—and frankly, I'm left with little drive to do so.

In the interest of perfect honesty, my view of this episode is very much informed by reading the first light novel. That compels me to say that this introduction to the series is not a good example of what's to come, at least if they follow the source material faithfully. The original author states in their afterword that they intended this to be a silly romcom, and maybe the anime will be able to successfully alter the book to turn it into that. But if they don't, well, maybe go look at the book's Goodreads page if you're on the fence.

Even without that, though, the first three-quarters of this is a lot to take. Lady Leticia's life is upended when she's made the crown prince's fiancée, which is a hell of a thing to do to a rambunctious seven-year-old. She goes from playing outside with her puppy John under the loving eyes of her parents to being forced to learn etiquette twenty-four hours a day until every ounce of exuberance has been tamped down deep in her soul. (Or at least, that's what her teachers assume.) Leticia's pain is very well shown; we watch the joy fade from her eyes as she becomes increasingly like a Leticia-shaped automaton, doing only what she's supposed to. Her interactions with her fiancé don't appear to be many, and her older brother Nadir, who came with her to the palace in lieu of their parents, is utterly unsupportive. It's painful to watch, and I think that's the point, so good job with that, show. It also makes the moment when she assumes her freedom incredibly cathartic, which, again, is where my knowledge of the source material interferes with my enjoyment of the episode.

Still, the art successfully shows how downtrodden Leticia becomes. It gets major bonus points for accurately depicting what she has to do to her hoop skirt to be able to sit comfortably on the couch – if you look, you can see that the hoop is billowing up behind her and that her legs are showing because she had to pull the hem up to allow her to lean back. Do the dresses span a time of about one hundred years in terms of fashion? Absolutely, but they all have the right shape, and the hoop scene makes me think that someone paid attention to things like skirt underpinnings. (Still can't get that curtsey right, though. Oh, anime.) I don't love that the two “less attractive” ladies at the ball are so exaggerated, especially the one with the snub nose, but hey, at least even Nadir's costume actually conjures up the 19th century.

My best advice is to look at the book's reviews while being open to the possibility that the anime will improve upon the source material. It may be worth giving it a chance to show its hand a little more.

I Want to Escape from Princess Lessons almost makes it seem like it is going to be another one of those “I was arranged to marry a bastard nobleman who dumped me at the last minute for a villainess-type lady!” shows, though its ambitions end up being much more humble than that. Our heroine Leticia is at no point interested in living the stuffy and choreographed life of a married noblewoman, and it turns out that she herself is the one who hooks her beau up with a new girlfriend, since it's her only way out of her terrible fate. Like the title says, she wants to escape the princess lessons, along with the entire lifestyle that they are preparing her for, and so she does everything in her power to make it happen.

On the one hand, this makes Leticia into a more active protagonist than we sometimes get in these sorts of shows, and she turns out to be pretty likeable all around. Sure, there's not much to her other than being the kind of casual and carefree chick that, like, isn't about all of those rules, man, but that's not a terrible place to start with your main character by any means. On the other hand, the ease by which Leticia achieves her new, simpler life gives the whole premiere an overly lackadaisical feel that doesn't make for the most interesting story. I definitely get that it can't possibly be that easy, since the OP and ED animations make it more than obvious that Leticia isn't rid of Prince Clarke or the threat of the aristocratic lifestyle just yet, but I Want to Escape from Princess Lessons still isn't even pretending that it is going to try and build any suspense or drama out of its premise. I gather that we'll simply be in for twelve weeks of the same old rom-com shenanigans between Leticia and Clark before getting a final episode that maybe kinda-sorta hints at the possibility of Leticia having real feelings for the Prince, only to end on a shrug of an ending that amounts to little more than “I wonder what will happennnnnnnnnnnn~”.

That wouldn't necessarily be such a bad thing if I Want to Escape from Princess Lessons had the lively animation or colorful artwork to make for a fun slice-of-life type of rom-com, but that leads us to the show's other, much more serious problem: It is kind of awful to look at. We're not talking about the kind of abominable failure that a studio like GoHands might produce, mind you, and its not like this show is going to leave you with a migraine or anything. Still, there's a flat, sloppy, and amateurish look to the entire production that simply makes it no fun to actually sit there and watch. Every character looks like they're the half-finished background extra from a crowd shot that we're only supposed to get a passing glance at, and the end product ends up looking like if someone took the opening cut scene to a very modestly budgeted visual novel and decided to stretch it out to full-length without increasing its budget or its time in the oven.

All of that makes I Want to Escape from Princess Lessons a very easy skip for me. I suppose that hardcore genre fanatics that are desperate to complete their seasonal watchlists will have a much easier time overlooking this toons most glaring flaws, but I cannot imagine that it will win over any but the most devoted of viewers.