In a distant kingdom there lives a king whose wife has died. He has twelve children; eleven sons and one daughter. He remarries, but the new queen is in fact an evil witch, who, purely out of spite, curses the princes so that by day they are transformed into swans. She then drives them away. She attemps to curse the princess, the fifteen year old Elisa, but the princess is too pure of heart to fall vicim to the witch-queen's dark magic, so instead she is banished. Her brothers carry her out of the land to protect her from the with-queen's wrath.