Princess Tutu

Episode 5-6

Although these two episodes of Princess Tutu don't necessarily appear to advance the plot by leaps and bounds – or at least, episode five doesn't, even though it marks the first good emotion Mytho gets back – they're some of the most interesting from a folklore perspective. That's especially true of episode five, which doesn't even use ballet music for its base; the main song is from the ten-piece 1874 piano suite “Pictures at an Exhibition” by Mussorgsky, which in turn is based on ten pictures by Viktor Hartmann. The song “Catacombs” is meant to evoke walking through the catacombs of Paris, which explains the use of the secret basement in the library. The idea of catacombs, or burial chambers in an underground labyrinth, works very well with the lamp Tutu encounters, which itself seems to be a tsukumogami, or an object that has gained a soul after one hundred years. Like in the GeGeGe no Kitarō episode about tsukumogami, this lamp laments the loss of its usefulness to people – as we see in episode six, the story's world has electricity, so an oil lamp is no longer needed. Tutu therefore not only saves the piece of Mytho's heart, but also the lamp in a display of her selflessness – a quality of hers that we also see later in the episode when she sends Mytho to find Rue at the town square.

Perhaps more important for the story, however, is the mention of a “golden apple” to be given as a prize to the best dancers at the Fire Festival. Golden apples pop up all over the world in myth and tale, with the most famous case probably being the Judgement of Paris portion of the Trojan War story, where Paris is to give a golden apple to the goddess he thinks is the most beautiful. While that does have some bearing on the story here, it's not really the main point; instead, the folktale known as ATU550 – The Golden Bird is the reference. (ATU stands for “Aarne-Thompson-Uther,” the three major cataloguers of fairy tale types.) In tales that fall under this heading, a mysterious bird is stealing golden apples from a tree, and the prince who figures this out is rewarded with the hand of a princess; the Russian “The Firebird” is probably the best known variant.

What's important in Princess Tutu, of course, is the fact that the magical bird is stealing golden apples: symbolically, that's Duck “stealing” Mytho away from Fakir, although as we'll see in episode seven, it can also apply to Rue. In this sense, we can read Fakir as the king desperate not to lose his golden apples; the meaning of his name is a reference to a spiritual need for god can also be used to show his total dependency on Mytho as his personal spiritual prop. But we could also cast Drosselmeyer as the king figure, and it's Princess Tutu, with her white swan iconography (in the Swan Lake sense) who is stealing the story away from him, even if he hasn't quite figured that out yet. As a predominantly selfish figure – the man's even controlling Duck's transformation – he can't see what a selfless person Duck/Tutu actually is, and therefore he hasn't entirely caught on to the fact that she may not be entirely doing what he thinks she is.

That the sixth episode uses the prologue of Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty ballet is also significant, because that episode is really where the major foreshadowing starts to rear its head. Some of it is definitely hitting spoiler territory so we'll come back to it later, but elements of the closed world that is Gold Crown Town are beginning to be understood by the characters, such as when Paulo asks his wife if their troupe leader was always an eel, which has some very interesting implications. (And ties back into episode five with the oil lamp being forgotten technology.) That the story used is Sleeping Beauty is also significant, since, as we saw the last time it was used, it's a piece where the eponymous sleeper is awakened at the end. Mytho, as we know, is the major Sleeping Beauty figure, and Fakir clearly thinks that waking him up is a bad idea, if not outright cruel, but what if Mytho isn't the only one who's sleeping? There's certainly an argument to be made for Duck's transformation into Tutu as an awakening of sorts, but the closed world of the town could be seen as a collective dream, sort of like in the otome game Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly. The question then becomes what happens when more than one sleeper wakes up – and if they even ought to.

Author Jane Yolen opens her WWII retelling of Sleeping Beauty, Briar Rose, with the line “Once upon a time, which is all times and no times but not the very best of times.” That feels appropriate for Princess Tutu. There's a sense of Gold Crown Town existing in a time-without-time, where the world is trapped in a strangely static act of change. It's not the best of times, although it's not the worst either. It's a story-time, and, as Yolen goes on to say, “Once we have accepted the story, we cannot escape the story's fate.” Fakir seems to have accepted the story they're living in. Maybe Rue has, too. But Duck/Tutu do not, and that could make them very dangerous indeed.

Rating:

Princess Tutu is currently streaming on HiDive.