I'm trying to recall how I first came to watch an anime about a ballerina. Maybe it was the years of magical girl shows chipping away at my manhood, from Fancy Lala to Full Moon wo Sagashite to Earth Girl Arjuna, not to mention other young-girls' fare like Rayearth and Stellvia. Is it any wonder that anime fandom is overcrowded with fat-headed and/or fat-bodied grown men who've traded their balls for a life of being big brother to a pillowcase? But I digress.

While they don't escape the horror completely, magical girl shows aren't exactly the darlings of otakudom, thanks to the outlandish notion that each protagonist is capable of standing on her own two feet.

I know, right? Pure, unadulterated, madness.

Anyone who's seen a mahou shoujo knows the playbook:

Act the First: A little girl wants to be a big girl, either to satisfy a crush or chase her dreams — usually both. Some form of fairy Godfather grants her that wish, with at least one delicious caveat that will repeatedly get in the way of what she wants. She proceeds to have the time of her life.

Act the Second: It's time to rain on her parade. The protagonist is given reason to believe that her good times might be at the expense of someone else's. (Makoto's aunt, in The Girl Who Leapt Through Time movie, uses almost those exact words.) Decisions have consequences? Oh no! This is also a convenient time for somebody to discover her true identity.

Act the Third: Friends, enemies, and crushes come and go, but the dream is a reliable constant. Our magical girl realizes that following the dream that lent life to her magic gift is the only way to see things through. But first, that which was given will be taken away. She'll have to face one or more of the remaining challenges as what she is, rather than what she wants to be. Of course, she had it in her all along, and that Wicked Witch of the West is a sideshow. It's not unusual at this point in time for the object of her affections to shift.

The curtain falls, the kingdom is saved, and our twinkling star falls back to Earth a little more mature and sure of herself. If it all had the desired effect, the audience is left with a manic jealousy. Childhood itself is somewhat of a magic transformation, where any number of mistakes are exonerated under a badge of ignorance or temporary hormonal insanity. When we're all grown up, we make fewer mistakes, but those we do make tend to be massively life-altering.

You could say that Princess Tutu turns the genre on its head, but the thing was shaped like an hourglass in the first place. Our protagonist is a duck, whose name is Duck (Ahiru). Rather than floating on her pond all day long, she wants to float across a dance floor in toe shoes. She wants to dance as beautifully as the boy who frequents the pond, and she wants to put a smile in place of that empty expression of his. Little does she know that the surrounding town is the kind of place where stories come true, and even a little yellow duck's fleeting desires, should the author wish it.

One story in particular paints a shadow on the town, because it lay unfinished upon the author's death. It's the story of a Prince and a raven — the light and dark, enemies to the last. The author's timely death affords the raven a chance to escape and wreak havoc upon the unsuspecting town, but alas! The prince, proving his princeliness, impales himself and shatters his heart into convenient core-emotion-sized pieces, then scatters them to the not-so-heavy winds. In doing so, the raven's influence is held at bay for all eternity. Maybe even longer.

What storyteller can, even posthumously, abide idleness? Why, he'd be turning in his grave! And so Herr Drosselmeyer does just that. He decides to, in a tiered approach, grant the little duck her wish. He fits her with a pendant that, in contact with water, changes her into Ahiru, the less-than-talented ballet student! She can remain a girl as long as she doesn't utter a quack, which of course she does every time she's nervous or startled. Rinse. Repeat. But that's not all.

Ahiru the ballet student has the ability to become Princess Tutu, the masterful, graceful, flawless ballerina, who charms pieces of the prince's heart into returning to him. (In other words, she shows a little skin and His Princeliness starts having these "feelings.") Tutu has an achilles heel as well: she can never profess her love of the Prince, for she would become a speck of light and vanish. Oh, and the Prince doesn't know he's the Prince (He must've lost his purple outfit and guitar), and everyone calls him Mytho. He has a friend named Fakir, who wants to protect him by keeping his heart from coming back together. Finally, there's his girlfriend Rue, as in "He'll rue the day he met that bitch." For a time, they all get along swimmingly — i.e. I'm describing Act the First. You know how the rest goes.

Princess Tutu differentiates itself by borrowing — quite effectively — from Tchaikovsky's scores and accompanying fairy tales, and undoubtedly several other stories I didn't recognize, and rearranging things so that almost nothing is a direct imitation. Swan Lake becomes a duck pond, the toymaker a storyteller, the Prince's signature dance is the Sugar Plum Fairy's, and Tutu's the Blumenwalzer (aka Valse des Fleurs or Waltz of Flowers) — both from The Nutcracker. Anyone familiar with the ballets will find many parallels between those stories and the show's plot, expertly blended into its own flavor. Adding to the fantasy are a number of colorful characters, from Ahiru's overbearing and almost-sadistic roommates, to Neko Sensei — a large cat and dance instructor, who threatens marriage upon any student who steps out of line — and Edel, a marionette who would dare to have emotions. Goats and snakes, anteaters and moles and a princess of crows*...curiously, our little duck seems to be the only animal in town who can't talk!

In other words, Princess Tutu is a melting pot of awesome. Now excuse me while I wash off the shame with Berserk, or the Rambo trilogy, or push-ups, or something.

* The show calls her by the German, Krähe, meaning crow.