The Princess Blog

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of The Rose of Versailles anime , MAPPA  launched a brand new movie that was licensed by Netflix  to retell the story using updated music and animation. The Rose of Versailles  sort of works as a film, but it struggles with many of the same issues as the Sailor Moon Cosmos  movies in that it tries to retell a long story for people with short attention spans and ends up skipping over many important details. The movie is presented as a disjointed musical. The first hour contains a stylized music video practically every five minutes to notate the passage of time and the emotional state of the characters. There was only one point where it looked like a character was singing the song, and it came so long after the more artsy videos that it was pretty jarring. The new adaptation of the 1972 anime retells the story about a woman named Oscar who is trained to be a French soldier to defend Marie Antoinette during the French Revolution. It co...

I used to think that Revolutionary Girl Utena  was the most innovative, unique, and original anime out there. After watching  Princess Knight  and now The Rose of Versailles , I realize that it drew inspiration from older anime sources. All three of these series feature women who don swords and take on the role of a man to protect the innocent. They each have their own queer-coded attributes  that combine all the best things about noble heroes  and damsels in distress . The Rose of Versailles, which came out in 1979, right in the middle of the 30-year gap between 1967's Princess Knight and 1997's Utena, stands apart from its surrogate cousins because it is set in a historical setting rather than a fairy tale world. The Rose of Versailles takes place prior to and during the French Revolution. It spans the decades of Marie Antoinette's life from her engagement to King Louis XVI to her beheading at the guillotine. If you haven't already guessed, the show does not h...

Rebel Rose  is the first book in a new series of official fanfiction  called The Queen's Council , which is about the Disney Princesses growing into queens  of historically accurate kingdoms  that incorporate their fictional movies as a jumping-off point. I generally avoid fanfiction, official or otherwise, but the concept behind this series sounded intriguing. After all, I recently completed a visual novel about Marie Antoinette , so it seemed like a logical next step to read about Belle experiencing the French Revolution as well. I found many similarities between the two stories. Both are about powerful women who are concerned about the wellbeing of their people and the way they are perceived. The Marie Antoinette visual novel in Dress Up! Time Princess  is a bit more educational because it doesn't try to blend a magical fairy tale into the darkly realistic setting. Still, I thought Rebel Rose  was pretty good overall for what it was trying to do. B...

Queen Marie is the first visual novel that players can unlock in the Dress Up! Time Princess smartphone game app. It is the most user-friendly story in the game, but that doesn't mean it's easy to complete! It is the polar opposite of Swan Lake  with dynamic story branches that shift based on your choices and a myriad of possible endings. It also has the largest number of characters to bond with, although only two of them are viable love interests. The game allows you to play as Marie Antoinette from the perspective of a modern girl who is aware of her gruesome fate and has the ability to alter history, similar to the anime My Next Life as a Villainess . The interactive visual novel also allows you to unlock a full closet of extravagant French colonial-style gowns and wigs. Queen Marie gives Dress Up! Time Princess players the opportunity to experience the luxurious lifestyle of the pre-revolution French monarchy while making decisions that can alter history and potentially pr...