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Notes -
Finished The Rose of Versailles on Netflix
Well, that's not something you see every day; a musical anime film! For a moment, I felt like I was back in the 90s, watching Anastasia and The Road to El Dorado. Some of the songs are pretty good; "Anger and Pain" (which plays as the French Revolution starts) is outstanding, as is "Never Surrender" (which plays during the duel with Alain).
The movie is very pretty, specially compared to the original series. This is to be expected; the animation of a 1979 TV show cannot possibly compete with the animation of a 2025 theatrical film. The colors are vibrant, with red and blue uniforms popping out of the screen. The battle at Tuileries and the storming of the Bastille are particularly stunning.
Unfortunately, writing is the weak link in the movie. The script has a serious problem with "show, don't tell"; characters tell each other they are in love rather than being shown falling in love, or talk about hungry relatives that are never seen onscreen.
The film's pacing is ridiculous, moving so fast that it makes the speed of light look like a stoned turtle. It seemed like every time I blinked, the narrative skipped forward three years. I am not sure I would have been able to follow the plot had I not already been familiar with the story.
Entire subplots are reduced to three seconds of screen time during musical numbers, such as Madame du Barry and the Affair of the Diamond Necklace, or excised entirely, such as the Black Knight or Saint-Just moonlighting as a masked vigilante noble killer (that last one was probably for the best; what the fuck, original series?). Everything is pared down to the core story of Lady Oscar and Marie Antoinette, but even then these characters are missing some serious development.
To some extent, this is understandable. The Rose of Versailles is an epic story, taking place over 33 years and 40 episodes; compressing it into a 2 hour movie is an impossible task. But then, they should not have attempted it. This should have been a trilogy.
The film feels like a highlight reel of the show's best moments, or perhaps a recap episode. Actually, someone on Reddit called it an advertisement for the manga, and perhaps that was its true purpose.
Overall, I'd recommend watching the 1979 anime instead, at least at first. It's free on YouTube!
I haven't watched the Netflix adaptation but I just watched the trailer and the OP sequence for it and I have to disagree. I am a huge fan of 70s anime (shoujo especially) and think the art style in the original version is a million times more attractive and effective than the art style of the new version. The 70s artists communicate so much in their sparseness and simplicity. The new version overloads you with a maximalist scrapbook aesthetic that looks very like, illustrator vector frutiger metro but sort of adapted to the 2020s. I mean the techniques of reproduction (the camera work or whatever process is used to convert the illustrations to a final image) has obviously "technically improved" but the charm and soul of the original is missing. It is similar to how AI generation or smartphone cameras continue to improve in clarity and definition but degrade in terms of soul and art and the sort of in between imprecision of the act of creation. The color grading also seems to lack cohesion in the new version compared to the original anime. And really I don't mean to disrespect the artists working today and it's good that they have careers at all but the taste to me is just a world apart from the taste of the 70s illustrators and animators.
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