A gorgeous and starkly brutal tale set in the porn underworld, Anders Morgenthaler's feature debut, PRINCESS, is destined for controversy. The film's kinetic explosion of images is both titillating and disturbing. Heads get smashed. Home videos become hot-selling porn. Shops are firebombed. Guns blaze. Just one thing… PRINCESS is animated.

Following the death of his sister Christina, August leaves his missionary work abroad and returns home to become guardian to his niece, the five-year-old Mia, a morose moppet whose only friend is her stuffed bunny rabbit. As it turns out, Christina had another life as The Princess, a porn superstar. August learns of abuses stemming from Mom's lifestyle that have scarred poor Mia.

Distraught and confused, August launches a vicious crusade to obliterate evidence of his sister's legacy, targeting the owners of Paradise Lust, the pornographers exploiting Princess's image even after her death. August's moral high ground collides with his desire to protect Mia as he drags himself further and further down a path of bloody and fiery destruction.

PRINCESS is contentious even in cartoon form: the images of the TAXI DRIVER-like rampage and the visions of Mia's abuse are highly unsettling. Maybe not what one would expect from a man who has directed television and written books for children, but PRINCESS is more in line with Morgenthaler's work with Mikael Wulff on the outrageous German comic strip "WulffMorgenthaler" (now spun off into a TV series featuring a fascist hippo and a politically correct squirrel).

Under PRINCESS' broken bodies and sleaze, Morgenthaler has created a textured beauty - his characters walk through urban settings, dissolving into fantastical landscapes that feel rooted more in European comic art than in the current mainstreams of Western and Japanese animation. He also incorporates live-action, home-video-style footage to fill in the background of August's relationship with his sister. The motivation for August's vendetta is sure to divide opinion, but Princess is undeniably a dazzling debut and a superbly crafted achievement in adult animation. - Colin Geddes, Toronto International Film Festival

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