Pap...the film still believing in true love and happy endings, and referencing the classics is fine an all, but...
They aren't just gently mocking. They were saying things about the Disney films beyond "isn't this funny?" For one, as I said, they said the early Disney fairy tale characters are flat, undeveloped, and unrealistic. That was the point of the thing. Walt Disney and his artists tried and kept trying to make the characters depthful and realistic, with this quote from working on Sleeping Beauty, "make the characters as real as possible, near flesh and blood and sympathetic." Then they go making Giselle and Edward almost Aurora and Phillip clones, complete with Sampson, forest, and forest animals, and then make the point that they are not realistic, until they become so in the real world.
Which brings up the second point of making Andalasia some completely made up place in some meadows and valleys of happy nowhere, instead of real places like Germany, France, or the Middle East, only fancied up, in the original princess films. Giselle's extra unreal, and it says all the Disney heroines who she is based on are, too.
When I commented, with others, on another forum that Prince Edward was so shallow and empty he wasn't anything like the original princes, more like Gaston, and wouldn't make any woman happily ever after, I heard someone who had to keep hush hush but apparently worked on the film say that the crew was trying to find out "who these [original fairy tale] characters were." The original princes didn't get enough screentime. That doesn't equate shallow and empty. Of course it looks like there wasn't much there...they weren't much in the movie! To say the princes would be like that is an assualt on the characters, and crushes the dreams of happiness that the previous princesses had with the princes.
Like I said, if they just had Giselle go from the past (a real place in the past, perhaps where Art Nouveau originated...Brussels, or it could be just somewhere in Europe, Giselle could name surrounding countries instead of the Valley of Contentment), to the present, it would be better. The audience, more so the adults, could still laugh at how rediculous Giselle looks and acts in the modern world, and in the heads of the people who think a character like that could never exist in that pure form, let them think that instead of tell the whole audience they have to think that.
But they should also have done her "transformation" from stylized art to live-action in more of a "Wizard of Oz" way, with Dorothy going from color to black and white, showing the live-action world is merely it's own stylization, and both worlds are real.
Aaaand if the movie didn't destroy the way fairy tales were supposed to be, an example being the deleted line "I'm talking about the day after happily ever after", then maybe it woudn't be so unjust. Yup, it's a good thing to get little kids to learn relationships don't stay happy all the time, but why not say happily ever after includes a few arguments instead of say it can't happen at all, or it's just your wedding day, then it goes away? The movie tries to hold onto believing in dreams, but they can't let us dream the past Disney princesses are real and that you can fall in love anld live happily forever like they did. Sure, the world teaches you it's rare, and many say it's not healthy to dream such things, but maybe they should have thought about the fact that that's what the past Disney films did teach before they decided to make this film.
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