Parents' Guide to The Ribbon Hero

Candy-colored and bright, with stunning bursts of animation throughout, this adaptation of an originally groundbreaking manga never becomes especially interesting or compelling. The Ribbon Hero seems unsure of what it's doing, unable to settle on a pacing that works, feeling episodic and overlong at once and disjointed as a result. Early on, a striking mixed-media sequence brings in what looks like paper figures, a genuinely cool touch the rest of the film never lives up to. Princess Sapphire ends up working the crystal mines of Goldland, where she stumbles into a mystical crystal formation and gains the power to fight Nergal, and by then the film has already shifted through several animation styles in a way that feels disorienting more than magical.

Gone is the manga's gender-fluid boy-soul, girl-soul concept, the idea that made Osamu Tezuka's original a forerunner to shows like Sailor Moon and Revolutionary Girl Utena. The closest this version gets is Velvet (Koki Uchiyama), a leather-clad, androgynous-voiced ally who hints at that spirit without ever fully embodying it, while Sapphire herself stays conventionally, safely femme throughout. The animation is beautiful, genuinely stunning in isolated moments, and the score is evocative, but everything around it feels generic in a way the source material never was. One of the film's biggest flaws is that it's meant to feel magical and rarely does. Manga loyalists expecting real justice done to Tezuka's legacy will likely come away disappointed, and viewers unfamiliar with Princess Knight have sharper magical-girl stories already available.