PRINCESS ROUGE (1997)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous* 
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical*

According to one IMDB review, this two-part OVA was supposed to have had six installments, but for unknown reasons PRINCESS ROUGE was interrupted and never finished. Another review asserts that the two episodes were handled by two different animation houses, and I suppose this is true, as the second part is a little more professional looking. Since ROUGE didn't derive from any prior source, its plotlines would never be resolved.

The emotional core of ROUGE is a very simple love comedy, much like the more popular OH MY GODDESS. Orphaned high-schooler Yusuke lives alone until a strange young woman literally drops into his lap. She wears an exotic costume but suffers from amnesia, remembering nothing about her background, save that her name is Rouge. Yusuke doesn't take Rouge to social services but instead invites her to live in the little shed he rents from a landlady. There's an odd moment in which Yusuke thinks that Rouge looks like his mother, though this might have been thrown in to establish his loneliness, and to motivate him to keep the pretty young thing in his personal orbit. In the course of ten narrative minutes the two young people fall for each other.

Then the "in laws" move in. Two exotically garbed women named Meige and Kaige, the latter wielding a sword, come looking for Rouge, claiming that she is their sister. They appear just as Rouge disappears, so Yusuke joins the sisters in looking for their sibling. It comes out that all three sisters were cast out of their unidentified domain by a tyrant's usurpation, and one of the tyrant's agents, female warrior Vega, has taken Rouge prisoner, keeping her in an energy-bubble. Yusuke shows his feeling for his lady-love by attacking and getting swatted aside, and Vega similarly defeats the sisters. She also reveals that all of them came from "the underworld," by which she seems to mean the Japanese afterlife, which would seem to imply that the three sisters and all their enemies are spirits of some sort, rather than denizens of some faux-medieval realm. Anyway, seeing Yusuke in trouble sparks Rouge's secret powers, so that she breaks free and kills Vega. 

The second half is much more slapsticky in tone. Once all three sisters are shacking up in Yusuke's shed, Yusuke's female classmate decides that he's doing something scandalous with the girls-- presumably because said classmate is jealous-- and she gets her brothers (I think) to beat up Yusuke. Yusuke manages to soft-soap the irate citizens by claiming the girls are cousins or something, but then Kaige (the more obstreperous sister) thinks Yusuke's making a move on Rouge, so SHE beats on Yusuke. The whole matter of whether they hearken from the Japanese underworld seems to have become irrelevant. The tyrant of that realm sends a male swordsman and some random monsters to the Earth-realm, again seeking to kidnap Rouge-- because she's the heir apparent, I suppose. The male swordsman duels Kaige, and there's an odd flashback in which the two of them are showing dancing together at court. In a confusing subtitle, when Kaige kills the guy she calls him "brother," though Rouge and Meige don't recognize him as such. I suppose it's some pet name, like using "onee-sama" figuratively rather than literally.

And so it ends with Yusuke stuck with three women in his dwelling, which actually ensures that he's not going to get any illicit action from this "harem." The only reason I grade ROUGE as "fair" is because of the unresolved "underworld" plotline, though that might have proven as average as everything else in the story.