Princess Knight 3

Osamu Tezuka – Kodansha – 1999 – 6 volumes
this is the bilingual version, published in Japan

Ooh, it’s been awhile since I picked this one up!  It’s got such a nice spine design (when you line all six volumes up, they form an illustration) that I put the next two volumes on the shelf and forgot I hadn’t read them.  I’ve got the last two volumes coming in the mail right now, so I’m looking forward to the second half of the series.

Poor Sapphire still can’t catch a break, and the story is still winding itself in interesting ways through a fairy tale landscape.  After being turned into a swan, Sapphire finds herself in a situation where the witch has the upper hand and is very close to marrying her daughter Hecate to the mesmerized Prince Charm.  Luckily, Tink shows up and is the only one that can fight Madame Hell’s evil magic with his angel… uh, stuff.  Madame Hell turns into Maleficient a big dragon when they fight, and of course everything winds up okay.  Except Prince Charm is still angry at Prince Sapphire while being completely smitten with Sapphire’s blonde, female alternate identity.

Other chapters focus on an evil island where Sapphire’s mother is taken and promptly turned to stone, a band of pirate allies, and a chapter where Tink has to make the tough choice to follow God’s wishes or to continue to support Sapphire.  This also features one of the weakest/old-fashioned moments in the volume: when Sapphire is completely dominating the evil Sir Nylon with her swordfighting abilities, God freezes time and takes her male heart.  When time starts back up, she completely loses the will to fight and all her strength, promptly taking a beating from the annoying Nylon.  This brings up the question of whether Sapphire is actually a strong female, or is only strong because she is also part male.

The pace is pretty slow, and the story is very old-fashioned, but the story is still very charming, and Sapphire makes for a wonderful heroine.  This is a long stretch of story featuring nothing but bad breaks for Sapphire, so I’m even more caught up in what’s going to happen next… because it can’t all be bad news.

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.

Princess Knight 1

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

I kind of don’t want to write about this here.  I only cover work that has been released in the US on this site, since as a young fan I was always frustrated with sites that covered material I didn’t have access to.  I hate it when this is included in lists of Tezuka’s work in English, because it wasn’t distributed outside Japan and was never meant for an English-speaking audience, but as an aid for those learning English.  It’s extremely hard to come by.  My copies are used and weren’t expensive, but I had trouble locating them even in obvious secondhand marketplaces, like the Yahoo Japan auctions.  Unfortunately, I thought this was the 2-volume version of Princess Knight from the late ’50s since I could only find listings for the first two volumes.  It’s not, it’s the 6-volume remake from the late ’60s (supposedly the superior version).  After learning that, I found the listings for the rest, but the later volumes are quite expensive, even used in Japan.  Sigh.  And the volumes are only a little over 100 pages long!  There only needs to be three!  Geez.

Anyway, how’s the story?  My first tip-off that it wasn’t what I thought was when it started completely different from the segment that I read in Shojo Beat.  The first scene takes place in heaven, with a mischevious angel that gives a baby a boy’s heart just before God assigns her a female gender and sends her down to Earth.  As punishment, God sends the angel down to fetch her boy’s heart back, but the damage is already done, and the angel simply sits back and watches the girl (named Sapphire) live her life.

It’s exactly like a children’s fairy tale.  The characters all have really appropriate and slightly absurd old fairy tale-ish names (Sapphire, Tink the angel, the prince from the neighboring kingdom Franz Charming, King Plastic, Sir Nylon).  The plot follows the familiar arc, with an evil uncle that threatens to ursurp Sapphire and make his son king in her stead plotting her downfall while she begins dealing with forbidden feelings for Franz Charming, a boy she can’t marry while she’s pretending to be a prince.

The art goes well with the fairy tale story, too.  While it’s not nearly as flowery and ornate as Tezuka’s early shoujo work, it’s still got an adorable, cartoony charm to it, and it does look a lot more controlled than the early work.  Some of the costumes look like they were ripped straight from Disney movies (quite literally, I’m pretty sure the palace women’s costumes are taken from Cinderella), and I love Sapphire’s character design.  Fun fact: one of the first bits of artwork I saw from a Tezuka comic was the first version of Princess Knight, and I was blown away by how it looked like a cross between Disney and Max Fleischer.  After hearing how important he was to the manga industry, I wasn’t sure how I felt about the obvious… homage.

The one interesting difference between Princess Knight and a standard western fairy tale is its themes of gender identity.  It’s interesting how such a complex theme is woven into what seems like a simple story.  It’s also out-of-place here since it is otherwise such a western story, and such a topic is extremely uncomfortable among a large portion of the western audience (at least Americans, anyway).  In the story, the reason given for Sapphire to act like a prince and keep her gender secret is that her cousin Prince Plastic will become king and put the evil Duke Duralmin in a position of power.  She makes for a wonderful prince, and not even the Duke’s best efforts unmask her as a princess.  Her character design is extremely feminine, however, and it’s no real secret to the reader that Sapphire is a female at any point in the story, which is an interesting choice.  By the end of the volume, Sapphire finds herself in a difficult postion in her kingdom, so I’m very curious how the rest of the series will play out.

I enjoy the translation, which is the most literal I have ever read.  Again, this wasn’t meant for an English-speaking audience, really, so the literal translation is likely far better for understanding the meaning of what’s being said.  The Japanese dialogue is printed around the outside of the panels.  The literal translation makes it somewhat difficult to get too absorbed in the story, and is also hilarious in spots.  My favorite part is Franz Charming exclaiming “shit!” when he finds himself in prison.

I’ll talk a little more about the pacing in the next volume, but as I said, I’m having a hard time figuring out where this is going, since pretty much everything that I was expecting to happen was undone at the end of this volume.  Maybe that means exciting things are in store.