A Mystery that has agonized me for YEARS? (NOT CLICKBAIT)

[malymin]

This is a screenshot of Episode 17 (Timestamp 12:35 out of 20:41) of the cult classic metafictional fairy-tale anime Princess Tutu (2002).

Long ago, I saw a post that identified the exact source of the text in this image. The source, according to the post, was a German book or literary journal of some sort, discussing a landmark piece of German metafiction aimed at children. That novel, Die unendliche Geschichte (1972) by Michael Ende, was published in English-speaking countries as The Neverending Story. Does that name ring a bell? According to a survey from 2006, the original novel was most popular and successful in Germany and Japan; most Americans, meanwhile, were more familiar with the 1984 film adaptation.

My memory, I may have mentioned in previous posts, is not very good. The original post was witnessed so long ago that I do not even remember if it was late 2000's or early 2010's, late-Livejournal or early-Tumblr. I have tried searching both sites. I have never been able to find the original post. There is a post about German in Princess Tutu on the old LJ community; it does not cover this episode.

While lamenting my struggle with stepnix, he hunted down a lead: a German-language PDF of "books you need to know."

Let's go down to page 27!

Er, not what the PDF says is page 27. What the PDF says is page 29. We can actually identify some exact lines from the screenshot in this page!

• und Fantasie. In Die unendliche
• Poesie als Medien der Selbst- und
• als wirksame Möglichkeit, Realität zu
• wechselseitigen Einflusses von Vorstellung-
• allem an der altersgerechten
• Ziele orientierten Jugendliteratur

Now, here's the issue: this PDF, according to the information on the sixth page of the PDF, appears to be a digitized copy of a booklet (or excerpt of a larger book?) published by Duden in 2011. Princess Tutu, meanwhile, aired on Japanese television in 2002.

I sincerely doubt Ikuko Itoh, Junichi Sato, or anyone else who was working on the anime are secret time travelers. Which means that there must be an older source for this writeup on Die unendliche Geschichte.

In the meantime, here's a Google Translate version of the quoted passage:

The central theme of the young adult novel, which has become a cult classic for adults, is the relationship between reality and fantasy. In The Neverending Story, art and poetry assert themselves as media for self-discovery and understanding the world, and fantasy proves to be an effective way to change reality. The exploration of the reciprocal influence of worlds of imagination and ideas opened up new perspectives for young adult literature, which until then had primarily focused on adapting social themes and educational goals to suit the age group.

Finally, though! Now when I say "there's a link between this anime and The Neverending Story", I have something to point to!

Comments

[stepnix]

the possibility of time traveling storyboard artists is low, but never zero

[lb_lee]

Oh yeah, we’ve read Neverending Story a bunch of times. It’s good, worth a read! (Especially if you nab one of the editions where none of the text is black. The colors improve things!) And also thematically relevant from what little we know of Princess Tutu.

[malymin]

I've heard the versions with the proper bi-color text (green for "real world", red for Fantastica) are really rare... I really do need to read it sometime, but I often struggle to sit down and enjoy a bucket-list Important Cool Work Of Fiction on my own. I've only been able to sit down and enjoy classics in anime and film when setting it up as a small social occasion with friends, and obviously that approach doesn't quite work for books.

(Really glad I got around to watching the original Alien, though... very slow paced compared to most movies I've watched in my life, but I really enjoyed that about it.)

Honestly, I have a minor "cartoon lover's book club" list of literature that's been alluded to in-text or cited by creators of non-book media I've enjoyed, in addition to just "general important works" like Paradise Lost or Lord of the Rings. The Neverending Story has allusions in Homestuck as well as in Princess Tutu, and one of Hussie's aborted works (Wizardy Herbert - the unfinished novel leaked because it was just lying around in the files of Hussie's personal website) is even more directly influenced by The Neverending Story than Homestuck is. A Barrel of Laughs, a Vale of Tears was mentioned by Rebecca Sugar as an influence on the character of Rose Quartz; Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto is quoted in an easy-to-miss piece of flavor text in Undertale. Side-texts to Gravity Falls make nods to Flatland. All of these works sound interesting in their own right even aside from how they've influenced stuff I already enjoy, it's just a matter of... sitting down and letting myself read them.