Anime: Sekai Meisaku Douwa: Hakuchou no Mizuumi

This is the anime adaptation of the ballet play “Swan Lake”. Although not a great story, by incorporating the real music of the play, this movie became a lot more enjoyable than your average old fairy tale.

- Well made graphics but not great. There isn’t much detail in character figures and the backgrounds are simply nicely made. Animation is also ok but not without its minor glitches.
- Being an old title, means that the colors are somewhat dark. And since most of the movie takes place during the night, everything feels dark and sad. But this effect is counterbalanced by the really bright colored character figures. The princess is always dressed in white and the prince in mostly light blue so it’s like a spotlight is upon them the whole time.
- If there were something good to take notice, those would be the facial expressions and the action scenes. The bad guys once again overshadow the good guys both in livelihood and mannerism. You can look forward for some cheesy and bloodless but also well-made action scenes.

Voice acting was fine. The bad guys and the secondary comic relief characters were doing a great job to keep you interested for more. Sound effects were almost absent as the music themes were completely muting them out. And the music themes were the original or slight variations of the Swan Lake ballet play. Very poetic and atmospheric, they turn this silly story into a marvelous experience.

The story is essentially a fairy tale. An evil wizard curses a fair princess into becoming a swan during the day in an attempt to make her marry him. A passing by prince learns of this and tries to help the princess. The wizard sends his daughter disguised as the princess to seduce the prince into marrying her while making the real princess to lose hope on him by watching this and accepting to finally marry the wizard. But things don’t go as planned…
The story is nothing great but it is presented in a very nice way.

- The characters are not very likable and definitely not original or realistic. Still, those two squirrels are very cute and the wizard, although evil, is funny and also interesting and sympathetic as everything he does, he does it out of love. One-sided, selfish love but love nonetheless. And so does his daughter.
- As for the leading heroes, the prince and the princess… Boring! They were picture perfect, like Barbie and Ken, without any need for further development. I didn’t care about them. Fairy tales always are about the ideal people, meeting under ideal situations and having an ideal solution to solve their problems in order to have an ideal happy ending. Who cares?! It’s so predictable. That’s why I prefer anime to cartoons. Because they do not have perfect protagonists. I end up liking the bad guys in most such series for being problematic and unpredictable.

Not great as a movie, but it’s an enjoyable time-waster. Make sure to check out Princess Tutu, a show that blends in lots of fairy tales and has interesting concepts.