It sneaks up on you. You come in expecting a polite storybook cartoon and you leave with a lump in your throat, because Toei plays this one completely straight. Tchaikovsky's score isn't background here, it's the engine, and the animators cut Odette's movement to it so a swan drifting across water reads as choreography rather than filler. The whole thing hinges on that first image, a swan wearing a crown, and Siegfried following it for no reason he can explain, which is the most honest description of falling in love anyone has animated. Rothbart works because he isn't grand evil, he's possessive, a man who decides a woman is his and rewrites the shape of her body to keep her. And the cure being love that holds all the way through, no partial credit, is what makes the ending land like it does. Cel animation from 1981 that still knows exactly where to put the ache.

Prince Siegfried spots a beautiful swan wearing a crown and, without knowing why, feels he must follow it. He learns that the swan is really Odette, a princess under a wizard's curse that turns her into a swan during the day. The wizard Rothbart wants Odette for himself, and the spell can only be lifted by a man who loves her completely and sincerely. The film is a fantasy romance with dramatic stakes.