My garden of musings

101 Dalmatians Roger & Anita Limited Edition Dolls 🐾

Folding fan with an image of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

c. 1870

France

While love at first sight is considered a romantic trope, I feel like it's usage in some pieces is for cutting out the need for a relationship arc. Ergo, I kind of feel like, since a lot of Disney movies that feature romantic leads use this trope and don't devote more than a scene or two to the couple by themselves and being romantic, I don't see those specific movies as Romance Movies.

The plot line of Cinderella is "Cinderella needs to get out of this house and has to be really careful about it because her abusers are evidently capable of physical violence," the prince is the means by which Cinderella jumps straight from suffering into comfort (and politics, which is a whole other can of worms, but hey). Luckily the audience knows he's meant to be a good person to go with his good looks.

The plot line of Snow White is mostly "Snow White needs to survive" and it's mostly devoted to displaying the kindness and friendship between her and her allies, the dwarves and the animals (how come no one blames Disney for making them think it's easy to make ride-or-die friends?). The Prince represents her hopes for the future and is a reward for her hardship, on top of being the deus ex machina that saves her from her fate.

The plot line of Sleeping Beauty is "the three good fairies try really hard to save a young princess from an evil curse" - best foster parents ever BTW, given the fact they had no experience whatsoever with the entire situation they jumped into, and still successfully raised a good kid with healthy attachment (quite a feat given the isolation)

I'd say the more modern movies like The Little Mermaid and Tangled are more romance movies because both heroines have a pre-existing dream, but both movies are devoted to showing the relationship progression between the two leads. Heck, Tiana was actually being encouraged to give up the dream she'd been holding onto with her fingers dug in, and go for a True Love relationship with a man she's known for days and actually got her into this mess through manipulation, but he changes for the better so it's fine.

Mulan is more like Hercules where going on a Hero's Journey helps you find your place in the world as the central theme. The romance adds to it, but like the early princesses, both Mulan and Hercules seem to experience at least attraction, possibly love at second sight (given that the actual first sight was part of a distracting stressful incident), and they have a handful of touching, meaningful moments with their love interests.

In Beauty and the Beast, survival is initially (she loses a lot of her fear through the duration of her imprisonment in a gilded cage) Belle's goal, while the Beast is actually being forced to try and find true love - which is a really rough deal, especially considering that Aurora needed to true love to break her curse but remained unaware of the time limit on it until it was too late and apparently the good fairies never even knew she had a soulmate in Philip. But I still consider Beauty and the Beast a romance movie, if not the definitive Disney Romance Movie, because most of the plot is Belle and The Beast learn to love each other.

If you made it this far, thanks for reading my unedited rambling!

I’d say that The Little Mermaid is less of a romance than some of the movies that came after it, because the main plot is “Ariel wants to be human and her father needs to learn to accept it,” while Prince Eric is mainly a means to that end, although their romance is more fleshed out than those of the Walt-era Princesses and Princes.

I also think Hercules is slightly more of a romance than Mulan. Even though it's mainly about the hero's journey of Hercules, his romance with Meg intrinsic to that journey, because his self-sacrifice for Meg is how he ultimately proves himself a true hero – and yet he chooses to give up the reward he's been striving for all alone, of becoming a god, to stay on earth with Meg instead. Whereas for Mulan, Shang mainly matters as her captan and comrade-in-arms – their attraction to each other is only subtext, not relevant to the actual plot, and romance is still just a future possibility in the end.

Where do you feel a Cinderella version or adaptation should start the story at in order for it to really aim at what's important to the story (moments, character dynamics and development, themes and symbols)?

Different famous adaptations have very different takes on this. The original 1950 Disney version, has some elements of some of these moments but ultimately starts with the dynamic with her step family already established. In the 2015 Disney version, it starts depicting life with her parents. Rodger's and Hammerstein's famously starts with "The prince is giving a ball", a case of the story starting with the invitation to the ball. Ever After never shows her mother, just the relationship with her father. The Ugly Stepsister starts with her meeting the step family for the first time.

@princesssarisa

I know that you, @therapeuticfairy, prefer for the story to start with Cinderella’s early life before her mother’s death, or at least before her father’s remarriage, so that we see and feel the tragic loss, first of her parents (or at least her mother, if her father is kept alive) and then of her entire identity and life as she knew it. You’ve written that adaptations which start with Cinderella already orphaned and enslaved by her stepfamily feel as if they’re starting in the middle of the story. I definitely appreciate that viewpoint.

But at the same time, IMHO, showing the whole process of Cinderella’s reduction to servitude can be difficult. Make her give in to her stepfamily's demands too easily and she can potentially become too passive to like or root for. Yet show her receiving too much spirit-breaking abuse onscreen and it can become too disturbing for a family-friendly fairy tale. And if her father is a sympathetic character, as he usually is to at least some extent, then how can we believe he would marry the likes of the Stepmother in the first place, and if he doesn't die, how can we believe he would let his daughter be enslaved? Starting with her already in rags is the easier choice for an adaptation, because it lets the audience imagine how it all came to be.

I left out SpongeBob since:

1. It’s still going

2. Ran out of spots so it was between that or Rocket Power (funny how there were 13 Nicktoons shows produced in the 90s)

Harry Clarke (1889-1931)

Illustrasjoner til det franske folkeeventyret “Askepott, eller Den Lille Glasskoen” fra Charles Perrault.

Les eventyret på EventyrForAlle.no: https://eventyrforalle.no/charles-perrault/cp006

It's a musical, with all the songs set to preexisting tunes.

These tunes include "How Much is That Doggie in the Window?" "Alouette," "On Top of Old Smoky," and "The Other Day I Met a Bear."

The Prince's servants also sing Tweedledum and Tweedledee's "How Do You Do and Shake Hands" from Disney's Alice in Wonderland as they greet the guests at the ball.