PRINCESS PRINCESS

DESCRIPTION

CAST

MANGA ComedyPrincess Princess
SPECIAL ComedyPrincess Princess Specials

REVIEWS

• 

  TheRealKyuubey

  20/100
  You thought your school life was a drag?

  For mysterious reasons that are better left mysterious, first year high school student Toru Kouno has transferred to an all boys boarding school, where he receives a warm welcome... And not because of his personality. As he soon finds out, this school has an odd tradition where in order to inspire and motivate the student body, a non-specific number of attractive, feminine students are chosen to dress as girls, performing a sort of twist on the old School Idol concept. Due to his appearance, Toru is immediately scouted for this project, and he almost refuses, until it’s revealed to him that becoming one of the idols... Called The Princesses... Would net him a slew of tantalizing benefits, including massive assistance to his room and board costs. Now, dressing in frilly goth-lolita dresses and sporting long blue hair extensions, he’ll join the hot-headed ginger Mikoto and the mysterious blonde Youjimu in their daily lives as they inspire the school and become closer friends, even as deeper issues threaten to tear them apart.

  It shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone when I say that Princess Princess was produced by Studio Deen, especially when I add that it came out in 2006. It is true that Studio Deen DID redeem themselves pretty hard throughout the 2010’s by putting out titles that looked like they could have come out of JC Staff, and their output from the nineties looked better than it had any business looking thanks to their skill at cell shading, but in the 2000’s, Studio Deen was an absolute wasteland, even giving Studio Xebec a run for their money in the race to the bottom of the barrel. For several years, Deen was one of the least promising words you could find on a DVD case, because it almost certainly meant the product was cheaper than Great Value pasta, and was just about as high quality. Low budget, stilted animation, grimy color palettes that made it feel like the studio was still reeling from the industry’s transition from cell painting to digital, and while Princess Princess is by no means an exception to any of this, there was one advantage that it did have.

  To its very limited advantage, Princess Princess never really required a ton of money. The bulk of the series consists of facial expressions, long exchanges of dialogue, close-ups and panning shots over static key frames, with limited movement outside of repetitive animation loops. The color palette isn’t terrible, and while most of the cast outside of our four main characters look wholly bland and generic, it does help the four boys with unnatural hair colors stand out in contrast. The world around them looks dull and murky, including their fellow classmates, and while I wouldn’t necessarily call that a big deal on its own, it does kind of become a problem when the same exact fate befalls the majority of the secondary cast... Their family members don’t look unique or interesting, even the few that should. The student council president looks generic outside of his extra angular face and one specific shot where it looks like his fingers are inhumanly long. He has four lackeys, and I can not for the life of me tell any of them apart throughout the series.

  Another drawback to this is that, while I did just mention this exact quality as a positive, there really isn’t anything in this story that’s worth animating. That’s not a condemnation of the anime as a whole(we’ll get there) but there really aren’t any shots in the series that wouldn’t look just as good or even better in still frame in black and white. I haven’t read the manga personally, but I can’t remember the last time I was in the middle of an anime where I found myself thinking that the move from the page to the screen really didn’t do it any favors. Still, it looks fine for what it is. You can definitely tell how little money the series had to work with, but it also never feels like they ever tried to step outside the parameters that budget set for it, so it never actually feels like it’s being held back by a lack of funds... Even if there was never anything here that could have possibly justified extra funds. My gripes with the art direction and character designs notwithstanding, I wouldn’t go as far as to call the animation bad, but there’s really nothing impressive about it either.

  As for the music, the only part of the soundtrack that stands out is a weirdly tedious piano tune that you hear multiple times throughout the story, and not in some deep motif kind of way... It feels like elevator music that they dug out of the public domain and then just lazilly slapped over every conversation they could find that wasn’t meant to be comedic. The Princesses sing a song at one point, but the one they sang in AMV Hell 5 is way more memorable. It’s probably not fair of me to bring that up, but it’s my review, and legitimately the only thing I felt during that scene was “Man, I wish they were singing that ABBA song...” I'm not even kidding, that AMV Hell clip was edited better than the original scene. There’s no english dub, and I’m too monolingual to judge the quality of Japanese acting, but even MY ignorant ass knows how amazing the legendary Romi Park is, and unless my memory is faulty, she’s the only female actor to play a male character in this show, and her performance does feel fittingly troubled and nuanced for the character who has arguably the most interesting backstory and arc. This isn’t important, but if this show ever does get a dub, I’m predicting here and now that Greg Ayres will play Mikoto. I’m usually pretty good at guessing which roles he’ll get.

  Right, so before I get to anything else, let’s address the elephant in the room: The premise of this anime is fucking ridiculous. On its own, I could handle the fact that this school is making some boys dress in drag, it doesn’t sound too far fetched, even if it is a stripper pole and a litter box away from sounding like something you’d hear on an angry Conservative podcast. I have no personal experience with Japanese schools, but I have seen a handful of anime where students were made to crossdress at traditional school events(Cardcaptor Sakura, for example) and even in the west, there was that weird period in the sixties where some United States schools made boys skinny dip when they swam in gym class. At first glance, the premise of this anime is by no means a hard pill to swallow, but just about every detail that they pile on top of that just makes the series more and more baffling and harder to take seriously. Now, there’s nothing wrong with an anime having a ridiculous premise... There are ways to handle that, to not only make it more feasible to the viewer, but to entertain them to the point that they just don’t give a shit, so how does Princess Princess fare?

  Well, they surprisingly don’t go the obvious route, which would be using Tohru as a comedic cypher. Because he is new to this school, it would be absurdly easy to have every weird detail about his new environment earn a different reaction out of him, so there could be a running joke of him making sarcastic commentary over it. That’s not usually the most creative or effective solution to situations like this, but it CAN help. Instead, despite some initial confusion, Tohru just goes with the flow. The other potential solution would be to take the obvious plot holes that the premise creates and exploit them for comedy/story purposes, because the plot holes in this series are actually very interesting and open up a world of implications. For one example, boys are chosen to become Princesses based on their appearances. Well, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so is there any jealousy in the student body? Maybe there are students who disagree with the selection, and are loyal to a rogue Princess candidate who wasn’t chosen?

  It’s intriguing to wonder what the selection standards are in the first place, but once you add in the financial benefits of the job, you’d have to imagine the selection process would be a contentious one, and even one rejected bishounen could have given the series the antagonist it desperately needed. Or here’s another example: It’s mentioned early on that the school regularly takes pictures of the Princesses and sells them to the student body. It isn’t clear how much they sell for, but it’s at least enough for the Princesses themselves to get a cut of the profits. Okay, well, what if someone found a way to undercut the market by smuggling in pictures of actual female students from another school? That could make for a pretty tongue-in-cheek mystery story arc, like the Princesses have to figure out who’s messing with their profits by launching a full scale investigation, which could last at least a single episode if not more. As a red herring, they could initially catch some boy who doesn’t buy their photos because he wizened up and just smuggled in a dirty magazine that they could find and start accusing him, only to realize the dude spreading contraband is still at large!

  But no, the plot related issues in this show are never realized or called out, which is kind of a problem, because it robs the show of even having a plot in the first place. There’s no real struggle throughout the series, and only one of the three Princesses actually objects to being a Princess... I don’t recall if it was ever made clear why he accepted the position in the first place, but the student body president makes it clear that if any of the three quit the group or shirk their duties, the other two will lose their benefits as well, which results in some weirdly mean-spirited bullying from the other two Princesses on the third one, which I think was supposed to be funny, but only really comes off as unpleasant. Each of the three have their own individual story arc, and I guess the best way to describe them collectively would be to say “Two out of three ain’t bad...” The first six episodes touch on these arcs, or at least they do so for Mikoto and Yuujirou, because these episodes are mainly about the boys settling into their roles as princesses and becoming friends, but this entire period is still kind of boring... But it takes until the end of episode seven to learn anything about Tohru, and lord do things stop being boring then.

  Before I get onto THAT shitstorm, what are Mikoto and Yuujirou’s arcs? Well, Mikoto has a girlfriend, and he doesn’t want her to find out he’s a crossdresser for the school, because he’s ashamed of it(despite secretly liking it). Like I said before, this results in some bullying early on that just made me feel kinda sorry for him, but his arc does end on a really cute and positive note. For Yuujirou, his arc is a little more complex, and the kind of thing you’d actually want to seek out therapy for, because it sounds like a genuine, mature problem someone may have. Finally, we have Tohru, and I’m not gonna lie, I was drifting in and out of consciousness when his backstory was revealed, and learning all the details woke me the hell up. I was bored out of my mind, my head just kind of drooping onto my shoulder, picking my head up and shaking myself awake in a groggy cycle, when out of nowhere, I saw something spoilery, which I figured was going to happen eventually, but now?

  I snapped to attention, rewound to the part I missed, and was devastated to find out that this series that I already wasn’t enjoying was making the choice to get worse, not better, by implementing one of the most egregious and infuriating cliches of the last several years... And yes, I realize this show came out in 2006, so it probably wasn’t as much of a cliche at the time, but that doesn’t change how off-putting it is. But hey, it only lasted half an episode, right? It offered a solid explanation for why Tohru transferred at the weird time that he did, and that’s all that matters, right? Well, I wish I could say yes, but after the next few episodes dealt with Mikoto and Yuujirou’s character arc resolutions, Tohru’s situation is brought back as the main issue of the climax of the series, and it gets so, so much worse, not only in the extra details you learn, but in the melodramatic and borderline juvenile way it’s handled, reaching a resolution in one of the most logically bullshit and intellectually insulting ways possible. But hey, as long as it’s being heinous, it’s not boring.

  Princess Princess is available from Anime Works, and I’ll warn you now, the DVD menus are ugly as fuck. They go for some kind of mirror effect on all of the options, but it looks really bad. The two original manga series, one acting as the sequel to the other, were released in the US at some point, but as far as I can tell, physical copies are way out of print and not too easy to find. A visual novel and live action drama have not reached the west.

  I feel comfortable saying that whatever you’re looking for from this anime, you’re not going to get it. If you’re a yaoi fan, you’re probably going to be disappointed, because whatever boys love elements it may have... Pretty boys introduced in sparkling pan-up shots, one kiss that happens out of context, etc... is only window dressing at best, and queer baiting at worst. If you’re looking for any kind of romantic comedy, well there’s almost no romance(at least on a healthy level), and the style of comedy the series is going for is very manga specific, and is thrown off timing-wise by the animation. Even if my review is tempting you to check it out for ironic so-bad-it’s-good reasons, the show is more boring than anything else, unless you skip the first half entirely. There’s no plot, which would be fine if it were funny, but it’s not, and there’s nothing about the story that I found engaging at even the most basic level. I won’t pretend that I was ever the right audience for this series, but I’m having trouble imagining an audience that would find this appealing, let alone satisfying.

  I give Princess Princess a 2/10.

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