Many shojo anime titles can be compared to fairy tales, telling the story of a beautiful and relatable young lady who faces many challenges in her life and in love, and that includes the hit shojo series Fruits Basket by author Natsuki Takaya. The 2001 anime only told part of the story, while the 2019 version fleshed it all out and told the complete fairy tale in three seasons.
At one point in the 2019 Fruits Basket anime, the narrative really did become a fairy tale when Tohru and her classmates took part in a school production of the classic Cinderella. These young actors' roles and real lives soon blurred together, and it says a lot about who they are and the enduring appeal of Cinderella and certainly Romeo & Juliet. It even says something about the series' main antagonist Sohma Akito.
What Cinderella Revealed About Tohru & Akito
Tohru was only too happy to take part in a play for the school festival, but she was miscast as one of the cruel stepsisters in the original story as opposed to assuming the role of Cinderella herself. This may seem odd at first, but it actually serves as an accurate parallel to Tohru's dramatic relationship to Sohma Akito, the head of the entire Sohma family. In Akito's eyes, Tohru truly is an evil stepsister -- an unwanted companion who is selfishly causing problems and stealing all the love.
Akito is pathologically dependent on the love and loyalty of every Sohma, and she fears that Tohru will steal away all the Sohmas with her charming personality and leave Akito all alone. So, Akito views herself as Cinderella, a fairy book heroine who is "supposed" to get her happily ever after with all the Sohmas. After all, the cursed Sohma family is a reincarnation of the original god and the twelve animals who joined that god for a banquet.
However, while Akito is the heroine of her own fairy tale story, she is actually the cruel stepmother of Cinderella -- a vain and self-absorbed person who thinks she is doing the right thing but is in reality harming the innocent while deriving validation from her supposed superiority. The stepmother of Cinderella is oblivious to the harmful effects of her own problematic behavior and views this paradigm as her birthright.
Similarly, Akito deludes herself into thinking she's doing the other Sohmas a favor with her jealous and possessive ways. Akito believes she is maintaining the proper order of things while keeping disruptive intruders away, but she is really perpetuating an abusive and dysfunctional system. Eventually, like any fairy book villain, she was eventually taught a lesson, and the Sohma curse was finally broken.
The Timeless Appeal Of Cinderella & Other Fairy Tales
At first, it may seem a bit cheap to use a universally-known story such as Cinderella or Romeo & Juliet to make a point about an anime's characters and their relationships with one another. However, if done correctly, the usage of Cinderella and similar stories can serve a vital function in any anime series, shojo-based or not. These centuries-old stories are still popular today for good reasons, such as their timeless messages and universal themes.
Even today, many books, movies, anime series and other works of fiction borrow the basic plot of Romeo & Juliet, Cinderella and Hamlet, with some modern cosmetics and fresh themes thrown in to make something relatively new. That's a basic rule of storytelling -- modern stories are simply older stories with new twists, and these older stories are based on something even older than that. Even William Shakespeare himself didn't invent the basic plots found in his plays -- he just popularized them with his expert dialogue and wording.
Stories are an odd mix of old and new, and the best themes are educational, empowering and inspiring in any era and to any audience, which is why the likes of Romeo & Juliet and Cinderella still endure, including in Fruits Basket. The story of Fruits Basket did much more than depict a fun school play about a prince and princess falling in love against all odds -- it added its own twists to this story to create something new but familiar at the same time.
The basic plot of Cinderella is a convenient and timeless way to reinforce Fruits Basket's core themes, but there is room for reinterpretation, such as Tohru and Akito unwittingly fighting over the role of Cinderella. The play can be viewed more subjectively, with Tohru and Akito each being the Cinderella of their own real-life fairy tale and the other being a wicked stepsister. It's up to viewers to decide which character has a more legitimate claim to the titular role.
