Hello Kitty's The Nutcracker

 Japanese company Sanrio turned to The Nutcracker in 1979 with Nutcracker Fantasy, which I covered back in 2011. But that one had a tiny blink and miss cameo by their most famous creation, Hello Kitty, and wouldn't you know? There's now a Hello Kitty Nutcracker cartoon. This was part of the series Hello Kitty's Animation Theater, released in 2000. Seemingly, Hello Kitty and her friends would be cast as the characters of a story. Note that the stories ran about fourteen minutes and were very kid-friendly.

In this one, Hello Kitty is Clara and Dear Daniel is Fritz. Clara gets the Nutcracker for Christmas, but when Fritz breaks it, Clara takes it to the shop of Drosselmeyer to have it fixed. While she's there, Drosselmeyer tells her the story of how a king had his sausage party (hey, they said it) ruined by the Mouse Queen eating most of the fat for the sausages. When the king sets traps, the Mouse Queen takes revenge by cursing the Princess. A young Drosselmeyer (who the storyteller teases may be a relation) breaks the nut and the curse, but is cursed and rebuffed by the princess for his pains. Drosselmeyer gives her a necklace that he says may help her.

Clara believes this may be her Nutcracker and that night, she finds herself and her Nutcracker transported to an otherworldly landscape where the Nutcracker fights the Mouse King. When Clara tries to help, she's subdued by the Mouse Queen, who's defeated when she uses magic on Clara, but it's repulsed by the necklace. Using the necklace, the Nutcracker defeats the Mouse King and is restored to his true form and takes Clara for a boat ride to the Land of Sweets, where everything is made of sweets. A suddenly shaky boat turns to Clara being shaken awake at home, just in time to meet Drosselmeyer and his nephew Kristoff.

There's not a lot to this adaptation, which offers a slightly abbreviated Story of the Hard Nut. Like Nutcracker Fantasy, Clara actually encounters the Mouse Queen, who has an expanded role. Having recently seen the Funky Fables version, I couldn't help but note that Clara suddenly being pulled into a different landscape to fight the Mouse King happens in both versions. But like Funky Fables, this one is a very inoffensive Nutcracker. Not bad, but not exactly a major one.