Princess Knight 2

Osamu Tezuka – Kodansha – 1999 – 6 volumes
This is a bilingual version published in Japan

This continues to be a wonderful mix of Walt Disney and fairy tales.  Specifically, this volume had a lot of elements that reminded me of Sleeping Beauty.  I’ve only seen that movie once or twice, but… there were a lot of uncomfortable similarities.  At one point, Sapphire is saved from a tower by an evil witch that flies in the window in the form of a huge dragon.  She looks and acts a lot like Maleficent.  She gets my favorite line in the book: “Don’t be scared, I’m Madame Hell, and I’m here to help you.”  Like Madame Hell appearing out of thin air in a tall tower is a good thing.  To be fair to Madame Hell, she’s not nearly as evil as she seems.  She wants to help Sapphire in exchange for her female heart, so she can give it to her daughter Hecate and turn her into a proper young lady.  She’s extremely forceful about it, and later goes so far as to kidnap Sapphire, but she really doesn’t seem to want to do her a lot of harm otherwise.

I liked Hecate a lot.  She has a fun design, and she’s very strong-willed and rambunctious in a way that Sapphire is not.  Sapphire is strong-willed, but she also does a lot of the right thing, whereas Hecate is a little mischevious.  The gender role themes are reinforced a little more with Hecate, who is a little nicer to Sapphire than Madame Hell is.  She’s not interested in being changed into something she’s not, and continually asks her mother why she should have to act like a proper lady.  I suspect that Chocolat from Sugar Sugar Rune might have been partially inspired by Hecate.

Franz Charming reappears in this volume and crosses paths a few times with both the beautiful blonde maiden (Sapphire in full-blown princess mode, sporting a fancy blonde wig) and Prince Sapphire.  He still doesn’t like Sapphire, and blames her for Sir Nylon’s treachery last volume, but knows that King Plastic, Duke Duralmin, and Sir Nylon are not going to give her the fair treatment she deserves.  There’s a plot about sneaking into King Plastic’s quarters as the perfect young lady that goes awry, and an escape that is plagued by Madame Hell, who eventually kidnaps her.  Towards the end, we get a taste of Swan Lake, which I liked.  If it wasn’t enough of a fairy tale for you, there’s also lots of dancing animals, good angels versus evil witches, damsels in distress, and a literal Prince Charming.  At one point, Tink, the angel that’s sent to retrieve Sapphire’s heart, prays to God and recieves a really cosmic vision of a dozen Jiminy Crickets playing in an orchestra, so he carves a wooden flute and plays it for the forest animals.  Pure, undiluted children’s entertainment.

There are strange pacing issues, which I think has a lot to do with its age.  There’s a lot of abruptness in the scenes and some jumping around without a lot of explanation, something that you notice a lot in Tezuka’s early work.  This isn’t helped out by the literal translation, which can be downright hilarious and very appropriate in spots, but I can’t begrudge a book meant for people learning English its literal translation.  The charm of the story more than makes up for these flaws though, and I genuinely enjoy reading this super-girly fairy tale mish-mash.