Do you know what this is? #1 Princess Knight

In these type of journals, I will discuss a show or movie you guys might or might not know. This one is for a classic Shojo manga called Princess Knight, AKA Ribbon Knight or Choppy and the Princess. It started out as a manga created by the legendary Osamu Tezuka and while it's not the first manga aimed towards the female demographic, it pretty much codified alot of its style like using a more fantasy setting, (Back then alot of female oriented media is focused on fantasy in both the USA and Japan since other settings like science fiction were more men oriented.) focus on more female oriented problems, and also a strong female lead... sort of, I'll explain it later. Like many of his works, it has alot of its influence from Disney films and other old golden age cartoons, in fact the main character herself almost has a hairstyle similar to Snow White: www.garvx.com/wp-content/uploa…

The story starts in Heaven, where unborn children are prepared for birth. An apprentice angel named Tink (Who I'm sure is a boy... I think) however accidently gave a baby girl a girl heart and a boy heart. It was too late to change this mistake though and so Tink gets banished to earth to look over the child.

The girl is given birth by the Queen of Silverland, but unfortunately they wanted to have a boy to inherit the throne due to the fact that the other person who could inherit it named Duke Duralumin is obviously evil. It was the 50's after all so black-and-white abound. There plan to not let that happen is to teach the child how to act like a boy, which coincidently goes with the fact that she has a heart of a boy and a girl. She is given the name Sapphire, which is strange since it sounds a little like a girls name, but considering how it's a manga series I guess the towns people would believe that she is a boy just by being told that in the first place.

Years later, Tink meets Sapphire and tells her that she is a actually a girl who just has both a boy and a girl heart. It seems strange that she doesn't notice something wrong in the first place since boys would obviously be very interested in their own sexual organs openly, but I digress. And so these two go on several adventures for the rest of the show, confronting different threats to the kingdom all the while hiding her female identity.

For many modern watchers it can be a little bit uncomftorable especially in this age of popular female characters in animation these days. It's not that she is fragile and weak, she does have backbone, but due to the fact that she has a boy heart. This can be uncomftorable since they sometimes have stories that have one of her hearts exit her body, so when a boy heart enters someone or something, it becomes strong and brudish, but with the girls heart they become more soft and gentle... Yeah. However, the show does imply alot of times that it believes in gender equality and you can forgive it for being made in the 50's when the idea of a girl capable of fighting was pretty rare and maybe groundbreaking. Aside from that it's still a good fantasy story and the lead is still a good role model even if it is not perfect in our modern perspective. It got a proper DVD release in 2012, but it's still hard to find it, but if you find away to watch it either in English or Japanese then check it out.