Elf Princess Rane

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

Elf Princess Rane is a cult-favorite anime that lasted a grand total of two episodes. "Elves" are about 6 inches high and come from an alternate world where their language is not...quite...ours. Most of what they say on screen is Japanese-sounding gibberish, so the official subtitlers had fun. One of the most notorious of these is when the titular character is grabbed out of the air and shrieks, "Cigar store!!"

There are also humans in this world that know about the Elves' world, or think they do. The most notable being a man most well known by his giant blue hairdo that usually defies gravity, but is continuously falling down...slowly. This leads to him constantly shooting his arm up to throw the hair upright again. While it is possible that the elves are saying exactly what the subtitlers are writing (yay gibberish!!) since they basically consist of random words. There is no way this guy is saying what is written simply because it is impossible to do so in Japanese. One notable example of his rambling speeches was, "Doow kcuhc dluoc kcuhcdoow a fi, kcuhc kcuhcdoow a dluoc doow hcum woh." Read it backwards.

This series lasted for two episodes, whereupon the animators ran out of budget. In the last 20 seconds of the second episode, one of the characters gets a full-screen face shot to beg for monetary donations to continue the series.


Tropes used in Elf Princess Rane include:
  • Anime Hair: Takuma. It's sky blue, has two tendrils down the front (the one on his right is thick and goes down to his feet, ending in a curl, while the one on his left is straight, thin, and goes to around his belt), and is styled into an epic curled horn on his left. Said horn is so massive that he regularly has to prop it up with his hands.
  • Electrified Bathtub: Mr. Yumenokata gets shocked from using an electric shaver while in a bath during the second episode.
  • Inexplicably Identical Individuals: The protagonist has about twenty older sisters, the product of repeated sets of quads and quints, who all look exactly alike. (Five of them have formed a rock band.)
  • One-Episode Wonder
  • Public Bathhouse Scene: The second episode is about a newly built unique public bath house which turns into a giant phoenix making all the bathtubs see-through balls that hang on its wings giving the bathers a view.