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...