Minky Momo is dead. Long live Minky Momo. After episode 46 of the scarred children of Japan with the magical girl's death by truck, the show still has 17 episodes left, far exceeding the original planned number of 50. That means the writers have to figure something out relatively quickly—should they focus on Momo growing up as the child of her Earth parents? Should they pretend she never died and treat her death as a nightmare? Or should they try something different and essentially reboot the story as a metaphor for Momo coping with her own mortality?
If you guessed that last one, you’re on the right track. While episodes 47 and 48 are clip shows, allowing everyone to get back on track, the remaining 15 episodes focus on the new adventures of Princess Fenarinarsan. It begins with her royal father mourning the death of his child. He’s by a pond in Fenarinarsa when he notices some strange diamond-like stones he’s never seen in the water before. He scoops them out and takes them home, where the queen suggests trying to fit one into the center of the crown, which has been left empty since Momo’s death. When he does, the jewel is pulled into the crown and compressed into a laser disc, which begins playing footage of a slightly different Momo. Neither parent knows what’s going on, but as the adventure continues, a dark force draws closer and closer – a dark fog that finally gains a face and purpose. By episode fifty, we can see a strong implication that the scenes they are watching with us are somehow Momo's childhood dreams; the king notes that Momo is still a child in her reincarnated form.
This opens the door for what these episodes actually do: give both Minky Momo and the viewer a way to process her death. Momo died with her mission unfinished; Fenarinarsa is still drifting away from Earth, and its position as protector and source of dreams and wonder is still in jeopardy. Momo is fully aware of the importance of her mission, even as she acts like a typical child, playing her own game in her encounters. The suggestion is that she carries guilt for dying before completing her mission, and now that she’s a baby, she doesn’t really have a way to deal with things—she can’t exactly talk to them, after all. Thus, the dark cloud, later named “Nightmare”, symbolizes her guilt and fear that she has caused irreparable harm, while her adventures can all be seen as her process of overcoming what happened to her.
The main way we see this is in the number of deaths Momo encounters in her dreams. In episode 51, Momo meets an actor who is famous for doing his own stunts; he is terminally ill and eventually dies off-screen. Momo has to deal with the fact that she helped him fulfill his dying wish and he is gone, living only through his films. In the next episode, a penguin at the aquarium loses her chick and Mocha has to help the grieving mother – who ends up forgetting her penguin when she meets a handsome male penguin. This speaks to Momo’s fear of being replaced; yes, she is indeed the child of her Earth parents, but she is also a human, not a magical princess. Does that mean her Fenarinarsan parents will replace or forget her like the penguin replaced her chick? These fears are addressed in the following episode when Momo helps a woman change her tragic past by taking her on a ghostly version of the train she never encountered the first time; by helping Cecilia, Momo is thinking about how she can remake her own life and change her fate to a happy ending like she did for Cecilia.
The other main character in these episodes is the Evil Queen, AKA Snow White's evil queen. Episode fifty explicitly implies that Snow White is dead (as far as the queen and the dwarves know, and she was dead in the first Grimm version), and Momo has twice tried to disguise herself as Snow White to appease everyone's feelings. The Evil Queen then becomes Aunt Devil, a woman who tries to atone for what she has done, mainly by selling delicious apples from the Fairy Tale Forest and using the profits to benefit others. Aunt Devil may represent Momo's desire to help others even though she is now just a normal human, dreaming of finding a way to still make a difference in the world even without her magical powers.
All of this, naturally, comes undone when Nightmare catches up with her. The final three episodes of the series are very dark, with episode 62 being truly terrifying as Nightmare takes out Momo's friends and family one by one, forcing her to doubt herself and all the good she did before her death. It wouldn't be a spoiler to say that she and her friends ultimately triumph (the statute of limitations on spoilers has definitely run out after forty years), but it's not an easy journey for Momo, emotionally. She has to accept the end of her old life and embrace her new one, and neither do we, as viewers. It's a heavy lesson, even for the era of after-school kids' entertainment (let alone the era of toy sales), but I think it's an effective one.
Along with the recurring character Auntie Devil, Momo is also joined by a pink dragon named Kajira, whom she meets in a hilarious episode about Momotaro, which the anime refers to in English as Peach Boy. Kajira, who looks like a pink Spike from the original My Little Pony series, serves a very important purpose. For most of the series, he's simply a cheerful comic, chewing on everything he can get his mouth on while adding to the production values with his ever-changing size. Momo's new outfit is cuter than her old one—her vest is now a hoodie, which works well—and her new transformation has a 100% smaller butt, which looks more like the magical girl series' light transformation. Her transformations continue to have a delightful level of specificity—at one point, she notes that she’s a jet pilot, not a regular pilot, and therefore can’t fly an old biplane. And of course, there are still the problems of a piece of media from an unenlightened time; episode 51 features a pretty terrible stereotype of an Aboriginal man (complete with “how’s that” greeting).
Fairytale Princess Minky Momo has more twists than it initially intended. Momo's death and the circumstances surrounding her dealing with it may not be out of place in other international children's media of the 1980s, but the twist in episode 46 leaves an indelible mark on the series' ending. It's a must-see for anime historians, but it's also a good, if occasionally bizarre, story.