‘The Ribbon Hero’ Is an Infectiously Hopeful Magical Girl Take on a Classic

In an era when it has become far more common to expect a sausage party of shonen anime adaptations of a beloved manga series, with discourse over powerscaling and faithfulness (or lack thereof) taking up all the air, The Ribbon Hero arrives as a refreshing welcome curveball. The lively Netflix original shojo film shows that reimagining—rather than dogmatically retreading—the work of legendary Astro Boy creator Osamu Tezuka is a road worth traveling. 

The Ribbon Hero, directed by Yūki Igarashi and animated by studio OUTLINE (Star Wars: Visions), boldly goes where few anime projects—save for Naoki Urasawa’s Pluto—have dared. It lifts the scaffolding of Tezuka’s The Princess Knight and revamps a story that stands on its own, unburdened by fusses over what must remain sacrosanct or what can be discarded to justify its differences. In doing so, it transforms its predecessor’s slightly antiquated gender-nonbending fairytale into a feel-good, occasionally capricious, magical girl epic.

The Ribbon Hero follows a girl named Sapphire (JP: Saaya EN: Courtney Lin) struggling with survivor’s guilt as the princess of a kingdom that no longer exists. After the calamity of a hulking, otherworldly creature known as “Nergal” leaves devastation, death, and despair in the wake of her kingdom of Silverland—whose casualties include her regal parents—Sapphire treks to the nearby kingdom of Goldland with her dutiful attendant, Zirco (JP: Mayumi Shintani, EN: Anne Yatco) in the hopes of starting her life anew. Just when she’s on the cusp of making new friends, tragedy threatens to rear its ugly head in her peaceful life once more, with Nergal spinning the block on her newfound home. With the power of her magical-girl transforming ribbon, Sapphire takes up arms as the lone hero, Princess Knight, to save both friends and strangers alike.

While the nearly two-hour film certainly lives up to and honors the tone it establishes of Sapphire’s severe sense of loss and desperate and lonely put-upon mission to prevent another tragedy, The Ribbon Hero is far from a self-serious and severe bummer of a tale. In contrast to the compulsion to contrast the glittery genre of magical girls with nihilistically oppressive tales, The Ribbon Hero‘s true strength lies in its unabashedly warm and hopeful tone.

Throughout Sapphire’s coming-of-age tale of heroism, the film is glittering with cute and endearing moments with her newfound friends that not only lighten up the mood but give reason for her steadfast fight as its hero. Battles are awash with sparkling fluid action sequences, sure. But its quieter moments are where the heart of its Princess Knight reimagining really sings in establishing fast friendships worth staking one’s life for.

That’s not to say the film hand-waves away the elephant in the room about the insurmountable emotional labor its hero has to shoulder behind a beaming smile. The film also gives way to a neat subversion of its setup through the conflict between Sapphire and Velvet (JP: Kōki Uchiyama; EN: Alan Lee), the most obviously character-designed antagonist ever to appear in anime. Rather than serving as her adversary, the two engage in a gripping philosophical battle about sacrifice and guilt, as the complementary fluke to the film’s light-hearted narrative anchor. Put in part and parcel with the movie’s sweeping operatic score by composers Satoru Kōsaki and Ryuichi Takada, which makes you feel like you can walk through a wall, The Ribbon Hero‘s entry-level intrigue as a Tezuka reimagining skyrockets into an entertaining and delightfully whimsical romp.

Although The Ribbon Hero’s first half is arguably its strongest in terms of cohesive narrative and animation quality, its final act gets a bit off the rails. In what I’ll affectionately call “anime nonsense,” The Ribbon Hero‘s final act essentially straps a rocket to itself, fueled by concepts more befitting a metanarrative like Rebuild of Evangelion that feel a bit contrived. Given how fast its plot moves in its last act, maintaining an even-keeled balance of delightfully goofy and hopeful in the eye-of-adversity tone doesn’t quite fit with the fast-and-loose way its story has been moving up until that point. Likewise, the composition between its otherwise fluid 2D hand-drawn animation and CGI creature designs begins to clash in ways that are occasionally distracting compared to the movie’s stronger first half.

Quibbles about an unruly final act aside—on an entirely personal anecdotal aside—hitting credits on The Ribbon Hero brought to mind a quote from Park Seolyeon‘s novel,  A Magical Girl Retires, that’s etched in the folds of my mind: “The first battle a magical girl must fight is a fight to save herself.” Behind Sapphire’s plucky, unflappable heroine bravado, as much as the spitting image of Dragon Ball Z‘s Goku is a send-up of Astro Boy‘s Atom, is a real tragedy that starkly shines throughout the film.

Sapphire’s heroism is steeped in guilt over her own existence, a consequence of a fight she failed to prevent, having sacrificed herself in their stead. Rather than resigning its heroine, as many a fantastical battle anime is wont to do, as a tool whose breaking for the greater good is regarded as a noble and expected sacrifice, the film goes the extra mile to offer a more hopeful tale, one where being gentle and kind begets a hero willing to throw themselves away to make amends for things outside their control. While the film doesn’t harp too much on the point, its script, even with a simple message like “you don’t have to fight alone to absolve yourself,” is a beautiful one.

At a time when anime fans can count on one hand the number of well-written heroines who get to shine, without pointing to decades‑old series as proof that the desire for more representation is a non-issue, The Ribbon Hero arrives as a rejuvenating reminder that the medium has more than enough room for stories led by women—and that even a silly, imperfect magical‑girl romp can still move you.

The Ribbon Hero is streaming on Netflix.

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