Princess Tutu is a Magical Girl show. Or rather, it's a metafictional pastiche of European fairytales, ballet, and opera, by a Japanese creative team, using the basic narrative structure and tropes of a mahou shoujo anime as a vehicle to do so.
The Little Mermaid and The Ugly Duckling are texts written by a queer author, and have both been subject to transgender (especially transfeminine) readings. As the protagonist's story is inspired in part by these narratives, I can't help but feel like there's a read, however unintended, of the protagonist as metaphorically transgender. Unfortunately, once this lens is applied to the text, the story's ending goes from simply a bittersweet story of self-acceptance to a far more dismaying and bioessentialist moral, wherein the body one is born with is the only correct body for a person to have -- regardless of what body makes them happiest.
Princess Tutu is a story about a duckling. The duckling fell in in love with a human prince, and wanted to save him from the sadness she saw in his eyes. The ghost of an author, whose unfinished storybook the prince had escaped from, grants her wish. She is granted two new forms. One of these is "Princess Tutu" - a swan-fairy-princess who existed in Drosselmyer's original story. Princess Tutu, the character, has a costume that resembles a mix of Odette and La Sylphide, white feathers on her head and fairy-wings at the small of her back. Like those characters, she is doomed to a tragic ending; her love for the prince is fated to kill her, as she will turn into a speck of light and vanish if she confesses her affection.
The other form is a human girl, who can interact with the prince and the people around him as humans do. This form is pointed out as being more "ducklike" than the idealized, swanlike femininity of Princess Tutu. Princess Tutu has breasts that fit neatly into her costume; Duck-the-girl is flat-chested. Princess Tutu is graceful, and when she evokes the motions of a bird it is the graceful ballet gestures of The Dying Swan; Duck-the-girl is clumsy, and she flaps her arms frantically when excited or panicking. Princess Tutu talks like a princess; Duck-the-girl... quacks, when she's startled.
Duck thinks to herself, self-depreciatingly, that she is "just a duck." Drosselmyer's ghost reminds her, constantly, that she's "a mere duck", as a means to keep her insecure and thus easier to manipulate, even as he gives her the means to access human form. And yet... while the talking-animal characters1 often act on their animal instincts in what are framed as off-putting and overtly beastial ways, Duck "performs" humanity... very naturally, actually, all things considered. Furthermore, there are things she enjoys about her human form and the opportunities it provides: she likes going to school and practicing ballet, even though she's bad at it and often gets in trouble. She likes having human friends she can talk to; she's on good terms with the birds she feeds every morning, but in episode 14 notes that "all [they] think about is food."2 Meanwhile, there's little to nothing she seems to find enjoyable about her original form: she doesn't seem to particularly relish the escape from human societal rules that living as an animal in the woods provides. Not even flight, that ultimate symbol of freedom, enters her mind as a reason why being a bird might be "better" than being a human girl.
Drosselmyer, performing the same role as the sea-witch in The Little Mermaid of offering transition with a cruel price, forces a rule on Duck: if she were to "say, or do, anything resembling a duck," she will turn back into a duck from whatever form she is currently in, and can only return to human form via a splash of water.3 In practice, this only applies when she quacks. This is an arbitrary rule; if a different tale-spinner, like Fakir, wrote an unrelated story that turned Duck into a girl, there's no reason to believe the exact same conditions would have to apply. Drosselmyer, sadistic old fart he is, chose to contrive a magic system that could punish Duck and revoke her preferred body (albiet temporarily) for failing to perform (human) girlhood to his own capricious standards.
And yet, at the end of the series, Duck returns to being a cartoon duck. Not because she loves being a bird, but because "we need to return to our true selves" and "that's what you actually are." Read as clearly intended, this ending is a bittersweet story of self-acceptance; about how you don't need to pretend to be someone more skilled or glamorous to be loved. Read too literally, and you start asking yourself if it's really ok if the only human relationship she still has is Fakir, and that she can't even talk to hi, when she's already demonstrated an inability to relate to other birds. Read through the queer lens, one asks why Fakir, inheritor of Drosselmyer's power, tells her to accept being a Duck, that the both of them should simply accept being useless and powerless once the story ends, instead of giving Duck her HRT without cruel strings and gatekeeping attached.4
My once comfort, then is the final scene of the anime. Fakir is show writing a new story, one "filled with hope," as Duck floats on the water beside him. Perhaps, with this new story, Duck can experience the world of the human girl once more, with the body and voice that is less idealized than Princess Tutu's but still a girl's, is far more hers than Princess Tutu's, and lets her express herself and experience the world in the way that makes happy to be alive.
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Who, with the exception of Mr. Cat, are revealed to "naturally" be human in the show's credits scenes! Do any of them ever subconsciously miss their animal forms, I wonder? Surely at least one of those meerkat brothers liked being a meerkat.
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In episode 8, Fakir assumes that Duck, in her 'natural' form, is herself simply a cute but stupid animal looking for food in silly places. He doesn't know yet that she's a person, who has complex motivations and thoughts. Yet Duck, who can understand the language of birds as easily as the human tongue, confirms it's a completely founded assumption about "normal birds" in this universe. How are we supposed to read this, beyond that Duck is more human than other, ordinary birds in her world?
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A protagonist who takes the form of a red-headed girl (wearing a braid) when splashed with water, and may do this on purpose to activate her girlform, and also suffer getting wet on accident to facilitate wacky anime hijinks? Hey, THAT'S not a European fairytale pull, that's--
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There's something to analyze about Fakir's own queercoding, his relationship to toxic masculinity how inhabiting the role of a grim and stoic warrior brings out the worst and most toxic aspects of in his personality, how at first his taking up of tale-spinning is treated as a thesis/antithesis/synthesis where this is the way for him to be the protector/knight he wants to be without bleeding out on the battlefield... until the Lake of Despair scene walks back the synthesis, and being unable to protect people with a sword when he was 5 is framed as evidence that he simply can't protect anyone and that he should just accept that that's who he is and is all he can ever be. But it would require its own post.