Revolting Rhymes

CONTAINS SPOILERS 

Roald Dahl was my favourite author when I was a kid, and one of my favourite Roald Dahl books was Revolting Rhymes, which was six classic fairy tales reworked as black comedy poems.

In this animated adaptation for the BBC, it begins when a Wolf sits with a woman in a cafe. The woman is a babysitter, and has a book of fairy tales to tell the children. The Wolf tells her that he knows the real stories.

I think we all the basic plots to these fairy tales, but in this there are a few changes to the traditional versions.

Snow White and Red Riding Hood are childhood friends, and this lasts into adulthood. In fact, it’s all but stated that they are in a couple in a romantic relationship. However, Snow White is now “the fairest of them all” meaning her wicked queen stepmother (named Miss. Maclahose in this version), no longer is. Furious after learning this from her Magic Mirror, the wicked queen orders her huntsman to kill Snow White and bring back her heart. Red Riding Hood sees Snow White taken away, and if that’s not enough she goes back to her home, where she lives with her grandma, to find her grandma has been eaten and a wolf, named Rolf, and he is dressed in her clothes. Before Rolf can eat Red, she “whips a pistol from her knickers” and shoots him dead. She then wears his skin as a coat from then on!

Snow White pleads for her life to the huntsman, saying that she hasn’t done anything wrong. The huntsman is moved, and he lets her go. He buys a bullock’s heart from a butcher’s shop to make Miss. Maclahose think he has killed Snow White. Miss. Maclahose believes him and eats the heart!

Snow White hitches a ride into the city and gets a live-in job as cook and housekeeper for the Seven Dwarfs, who in this version are all are ex-horse race jockeys who have become gambling addicts and keep losing all their money. Snow White decides to go back to the palace and nick her stepmother’s Magic Mirror, so the dwarfs can use it to find out who will win all the horse races.

The Three Little Pigs include a manager of a bank named Porkleys, and despite having a huge safe full of gold and valuables himself, decides to spend all his customers money on useless property development by the other two Little Pigs, one who wants to build a block of flats made out of straw, and another who wants to build one out of twigs. The latter two pigs are both eaten by a wolf Rolf’s brother, Rex. Rex then goes to try to eat the Banker Pig, but the security is much better in the bank.

As he can’t blow the bank DOWN, Rex says he will blow it UP instead, using dynamite! The Banker Pig calls Red Riding Hood to help. She comes down and kills Rex. However, upon finding out that the Banker Pig lied to her about how much money he had and that it turns out he had spent all of her life savings, she shoots him and turns him into a travelling case. The Magic Mirror tells Snow White where Red is, they meet up and along with the dwarfs make money from betting on winning horses.

The Wolf telling the story is in fact the uncle of Rolf and Rex, and he locks the babysitter in the cafe toilets, dresses up as her to take her place. The babysitter is working for Red Riding Hood, who now has two children, and when Red and Snow White leave to go out for the night, the Wolf goes to the door…

The children aren’t fooled by the disguise, but boy isn’t suspicious that the Wolf wants to eat them when he makes a stew. The girl asks the Wolf to read them some fairy tales while the stew is cooking. The boy wants to read Jack and the Beanstalk, while the girl wants to read Cinderella. Again, the Wolf says the storybook versions aren’t how it really happened.

Jack and Cinderella were in fact next door neighbours. Jack had a crush on her for a long time, but neither got to speak to each other much as they had to deal with their families treating them badly.

Jack’s mother constantly berates him, and one day tells him as they have no money he has to go to town and sell their cow. Jack takes the cow and passes a Magic Shop. He exchanges the cow for a magic bean. Jack’s mother is angry, throws the bean away and beats him up using the handle of a vacuum cleaner! But a beanstalk grows overnight, and what’s more the leaves on the top are solid gold. Jack’s mother makes Jack climb the beanstalk to get the gold leaves. But up there is a Giant, who smells Jack. Jack quickly climbs down and tells this to his mother, who says it’s because Jack smells from never having a wash. Jack says to his mother that if she’s so clean, why doesn’t she climb the beanstalk herself. She does, and is smelled out and eaten by the Giant.

Jack decides that maybe he had better have a good wash. After he has done that, he climbs the beanstalk and the Giant can’t smell him. After the Giant has fallen asleep, Jack harvests all the gold leaves and uses them to buy the Magic Shop.

Meanwhile, Cinderella has been locked in a cellar by her Ugly Sisters while they go to the ball. The Magic Shop owner, who is also a Fairy Godmother, overhears Cinderella. Cinderella tells the Fairy Godmother she wants to go to the ball in a beautiful dress. The Fairy Godmother grants her wish, but tells her she has to leave by midnight. Cinderella goes to the ball, dances with the Prince, but when it is midnight she runs to leave. The Prince grabs her dress and ends up ripping it all off. She runs away in her underwear, leaving one slipper behind. The Prince declares he will marry the girl who fits the slipper. One Ugly Sister decides to swap the slipper, flush it down the toilet and replace it with one of her own!

None of the girls who try on the slipper can make it fit, because it much too big and wide. But when it comes to the Ugly Sister’s turn it fits, much to the horror of the Prince. Rather than marry her, he orders that the Ugly Sister’s head is chopped off immediately! He chops the second Ugly Sister’s head off before she even gets a chance to try on the slipper.

Overhearing the commotion, Cinderella takes a look. She is shocked the Prince chops off people’s heads, and is disillusioned. She thought she was in love with him at the ball, but she can’t marry someone as psychotic and cruel as him. The Prince decides he want to chop Cinderella’s head off too. Luckily, the Fairy Godmother is around, and changes the Prince and his soldiers into frogs before they can do anything. She then tells Cinderella she will grant her a wish. Cinderella says that princes and money aren’t important to her. What she wants in a man more than anything is that he is decent.

The Fairy Godmother takes her to sometime in the future, at a Christmas where the Magic Shop is now a jam and marmalade store called Jack’s Jams. Jack is now an adult. He and Cinderella are married, have two children and live happily ever after.

Red Riding Hood returns and sees a stew cooked, her children are asleep in the living room… then comes face to face with the Wolf! But he simply says goodbye to her, and goes back to the woods.

In some ways this adaptation is very close to the book, the poems are quoted more or less word for word, with a few alterations to make it more like dialogue, or to give some characters names. Though in the book the stories don’t intersect and cross over, the only ones that are linked are Little Red Riding Hood  and The Three Little Pigs, with Red Riding Hood appearing in both. The poems are all separate stories, and there is no framing device.

The one poem that wasn’t adapted was Goldilocks and the Three Bears. I was a bit disappointed as that was one of my favourites from the Revolting Rhymes book. It raised a fair question really, in that it’s a bit strange that we are supposed to root for Goldilocks. She a trespasser in the Bear’s house, she eats their porridge, sleeps in their beds and breaks the Baby Bear’s chair! In the Revolting Rhymes version she’s definitely a horrible brat, because she eats ALL the porridge, doesn’t give a damn that she’s broken the Baby Bear’s chair, her response is to utter an apparently unprintable swear word, and climbs all over the Bear’s beds with shoes that have dog dirt and grime on them.While Goldilocks isn’t given a full adaptation, it is referenced in a newspaper called The Pun. (I see what they did there). It shows that Goldilocks has been sent to prison,”ten years hard labour in the clink!”, for breaking into and vandalising the Bear’s property and stealing their porridge. But she got off lightly compared to the Revolting Rhymes book version. In that, the Bears eat her!

Thinking about it, Jack in traditional versions of Jack and the Beanstalk is a bit of a git really. I mean, wasn’t the Giant was just minding his own business in his castle up in the clouds, then Jack comes along steals his stuff and kills him! The Jack in Revolting Rhymes however gets his fortune by harvesting solid gold leaves from the top of the beanstalk, and well it is Jack’s beanstalk in the first place.

This version of Jack is quite similar to Cinderella, in that both are treated badly by their families, so it was quite a good idea of the TV version to pair Jack and Cindy up in the end, and they both end up being part of each others happy endings. Having Snow White and Red Riding Hood as a couple was an even more interesting and inventive idea, and it worked very well. It seems to have been one of the most popular parts of this programme.

Though the animation style is a little different, the character designs are inspired by the Quentin Blake illustrations from the book. The idea of having the Wolf read the stories to the children might have been a reference to the original front cover, which had a Wolf reading Revolting Rhymes to two children.

Most of the character designs take their cue from the Quentin Blake illustrations, Red Riding Hood is the exception, she doesn’t look anything like the illustrations, and her character is most changed too.

In a 1995 a live-action version of the Little Red Riding Hood story in Revolting Rhymes was made. It made even more changes from the book and was very weird generally. They added Red Riding Hood inheriting a lot of money and the house from Grandma, and popping champagne bottles and being rather smug flaunting around her new wealth and her “lovely, furry wolfskin coat”. She was a bit like Cruella DeVil in some ways. It is pretty close to the character in Revolting Rhymes though. But this new version when Red Riding Hood says “Hello, and do please note my lovely, furry wolfskin coat” it’s to the Wolf narrator, and it’s not flaunting so much as giving a message of “Don’t mess with me!”.

Red is given more of a reason to do away with the Third Little Pig in this new adaptation too. In this she shoots him because he’s taken all her life savings. In the book, she just kills the Third Little Pig because, well, she thought he’d make a good suitcase. I still don’t think the reason used in this adaptation really justifies what she does to him to be honest, but hey.

That said, I think the changes with the pigs were my favourite changes made in this adaptation. There is a Piggy Bank – literal in that everyone gives their money in piggy banks, and metaphorical in  that it is a bank run by a pig. In the book the Three Little Pigs aren’t much different to traditional versions, in this TV adaptation they were used in a satirical way, with the Banker Pig being a literal greedy pig, and the two property developers wanting to invest money in useless projects doomed to failure, in this case a house made entirely of straw and a house made entirely of sticks.

They managed to link all of the different stories to each other, even some blink and you’ll miss it moments, such as Jack’s Mother applying to be the King’s new wife and that as well as being the person who sells Jack the magic bean, it is Cinderella’s Fairy Godmother who gives Snow White a lift back to the palace.

The baddies were the most fun in terms of voice acting performances. Rob Brydon as Rolf, Tamsin Greig as Miss. Maclahose, David Walliams as Rex and Jack’s Mother. The Wolf, voiced by Dominic West has the most important role in a way, as he is also the narrator, and his voice had the right amount of gravitas and creepiness.

This TV version of Revolting Rhymes was split into two parts. The first part was quite sinister in tone in places, which worked. It was a little tricky to follow everything that was going on though. They had three different plots running alongside each other (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Little Red Riding Hood, The Three Little Pigs), plus the framing device.

The second part was a little lighter in tone. It had echoes of pantomimes, what with the Ugly Sisters, the Fairy Godmother, and Jack’s Mother all being voiced by male actors. In pantomime, those parts are often played by panto dames. Jack had a bit of a Buttons role in Cinderella’s story too.The second part is the better of the two. It stuck a lot closer to the book. It is unexpectedly sweet towards the end, which is a good note to leave a festive TV programme on.

Some elements from the book were toned down. That’s not say that they left out some of the gorier parts of the book, but they were referred to by other characters rather than shown. The exception is the Prince chopping off the Ugly Sister’s heads, but that was toned down in that the Ugly Sisters survive and with them like headless chickens and running after their heads bouncing along the street.

They cut a bit of innuendo with the King choosing his new wife (in the book, he says with a “shifty smile [he’d] like to give each one a trial”). The Prince also calls Cinderella a “dirty mutt” rather than a “dirty slut” as he did in the original version of the book, but apparently some newer reprints of the book use the “dirty mutt” version.

I think it was probably the right call for this adaptation to make these alterations. Apparently even with these changes made, they still got some parents complaining it was “too scary for kids”, so it’s likely they would have complained even more if those things had been left in or shown.

I think also the programme makers wanted to make it festive family viewing with it being broadcast on Boxing Day and Bank Holiday Tuesday.

I definitely prefer the book Revolting Rhymes. It is a lot funnier in tone, and I found that this adaptation was like a lot Roald Dahl adaptations, in that they get the surreal dark fairytale element, but miss the humour. Revolting Rhymes is one of his funniest works too, so it’s a pity in that way. That said, , I like a lot of the changes they made, or more specifically I liked a lot of the stuff they added in. As a TV programme in its own right, this TV version of Revolting Rhymes was good, and has been regarded as one of the TV highlights of the last festive period.

Paul O’Grady’s Favourite Fairy Tales

Paul O’Grady’s Favourite Fairy Tales begins with Paul O’Grady as a “handsome young woodcutter woke up in an enchanted forest” on top of many mattresses. After waking up, he says “I tell you what, I’m never drinking with that crowd again”. He’s told to go on a quest looking at the origins of famous fairy tales.

It’s not really possible to find the “original” version of a fairy tale, as they tended to be passed through word of mouth, and were adapted by different people, translated into different languages and rewritten for different cultures over the centuries. The plots are similar, but many details change. The programme was on location in Germany, so focused mainly on Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm who collected and published fairy tales and folklore in the 19th century, and standardised many of the versions we know today. Disney films aside, if you see a version of a fairy tale today it’s likely to use the Brothers Grimm version as the source.

Cinderella is the most popular fairy tale in a recent poll, which isn’t surprising. There are so many variations and versions of that story, even by fairy tale standards it has been re-told so many times. (Shakespeare’s play King Lear is an example!) Most versions of Cinderella, like the Disney film for example, tend, to be based on French writer Charles Perrault’s version, which was about 100 years before the Grimm Brothers. But the Grimm’s version has some interesting and gruesome additions. The Stepsisters chop their toes off so their feet can fit in the shoe, and at the end of the story birds peck out their eyes!

The programme noted that interestingly in some even earlier versions the Stepsisters were physically beautiful, but had ugly hearts, so in some ways it seems the tale became more superficial over time.

The programme also made the point that children tend to prefer black and white morality to shades of grey. To be honest, I think adults do too, it’s just that part of maturing is being able to see that sometimes there are shades of grey. I remember a psychological programme once which asked children that if a man who stole medicine to save his wife from death, was that morally wrong? Young children all said yes because it was wrong to steal, but teenagers were more conflicted.

Paul O’Grady’s Favourite Fairy Tales made a lot of good suggestions as to why Cinderella has such enduring appeal to people; that it has a message of hope and a moral about being a good, decent person and how you have to go through adversity to get a happy ending.

Little Red Riding Hood is a fairy tale that, perhaps more than any other, people have seen a lot of metaphor and subtext in over the years. Some versions have used it to show themes of chastity and puberty, with the Big Bad Wolf as a metaphor for wolf-man sexual predators. Certainly the conclusion of Charles Perrault’s version strongly implies this.

In more modern times these themes have been dealt with and explored in adaptations, ‘The Company Of Wolves’ by Angela Carter is a famous example.

In the Grimm’s version it is more literal, as wolves were a danger in forests in Germany. Robbers and exiles were also banished to forests making it a place people had to be wary of. Going even further back, there had also been werewolf trials similar to witch trials. Angela Carter also did another adaptation of the Red Riding Hood story titled ‘The Werewolf’, where the wolf in Grandma’s bed IS actually Grandma as she is a werewolf… except it is very, very strongly implied that Red Riding Hood is lying and she framed her grandma so she could inherit Grandma’s house and her money.

In many earlier versions Red Riding Hood meets her death, but the Grimm Brothers added the huntsman/woodcutter character who turns up to save the day.

The programme mentioned that some versions of Sleeping Beauty have very nasty aspects to them indeed. In those, Sleeping Beauty isn’t awoken by “loves first kiss”. A Prince finds her, and rapes her! She becomes pregnant with twins, and even giving birth to them doesn’t wake her up! The splinter from the spinning wheel has to come out before she wakes up. Then, depending on the version, either the Prince is already married, or his mother turns out to be an ogress, but either way the woman in question wants to have the children killed and then cooked so she can eat them, but is given slaughtered animals instead. It shows how similar the story is to Snow White, with a sleeping princess and the Wicked Queen wanting Snow White’s heart. Though it turns out that itself was a watered down version…

In the Grimm Brothers version of Snow White the Wicked Queen doesn’t want Snow White’s heart as proof she has been killed. She wants her lungs and liver! Snow White isn’t woken by “love’s first kiss” either. The Prince falls in love with Snow White after seeing her in her glass coffin! He takes her back to his castle, and she is only woken after the poisoned apple slice that is still in her mouth is knocked out.

Some think that Snow White could have been based on a real historical person, a German countess named Margaretha von Waldeck, who had a jealous stepmother, and is thought to have been poisoned. (Though even if she had been, it wouldn’t have been by the stepmother, as she had already died by the time this happened). Margaretha von Waldeck was due to marry a prince, none other than Philip II of Spain. In England he’s mainly known for his disastrous marriage to Mary I, and his failed attempt at the Spanish Armada during Elizabeth I’s reign, so this was interesting as I never knew about Philip II of Spain’s links to other countries.

The seven dwarves may well have had roots in reality too. There were dwarf-like miners in Germany. Little boys were sent to mines, and the hard labour and lack of time in fresh air and sunlight stunted their growth, and by the time they were 20 they were bearded and looked much older than their years.

Rapunzel, as always with fairy tales, has many earlier versions, but it is the German name which is the most famous. The witch in the story was probably based on old medicine women who would take young girls on as apprentices. In some versions, the witch finds out about Rapunzel letting the prince into her tower when Rapunzel asks her for a new dress as her’s is getting tight around the waist… because she is pregnant!

Paul O’Grady said himself his favourite things about fairy tales are the baddies. He has played them in many pantomimes, and it’s clear he adores playing them. In this programme there were sketches of scenes from fairy tales where he played some of the villains. There was some great black comedy with him as Cinderella’s Stepmother, with a scene of her blood splattered face wielding a meat cleaver, and feeding the chopped big toe to the family dog.

He plays a werewolf version of the Big Bad Wolf in Little Red Riding Hood, the Magic Mirror in Snow White (where he said he has a date with the Genie from Aladdin), and as a servant trying not to throw up after serving the Wicked Queen with the cooked lung and liver she had ordered.

He was hilarious as the hag in Rapunzel. When she finds out Rapunzel is pregnant with the Prince’s baby she is unhappy with the “crazy gene pool” that the baby will be a part of, and berates Rapunzel. “Soon as I’m out you’re chucking your plat out of that window and flat on your back!”

Paul O’Grady a huge fan of Maleficent, the villain in Disney’s version of Sleeping Beauty, as are many people, she’s one of the most popular parts of that film, having recently got her own live action remake starring Angelina Jolie.

His favourite fairy tale is Snow White. While he loves her as an adult, as a child he was terrified of the Wicked Queen in Disney’s version (Bit of Disney trivia for you, Disney actually gave her a name, Grimhilde, after the Brothers Grimm).

When you look at earlier versions of fairy tales it’s easy to see why the horror genre is connected to them. But they have always been altered to reflect the world. In more modern versions of fairy tales, such as Disney’s Tangled, an adaptation of Rapunzel, the heroines take a more active role in the story. One reason these stories have lasted centuries is that they moved with the times. A lot of us were told them as children, which means they will have a long lasting effect on us, and as adults people like to tell them to their children too.

I liked Paul O’Grady’s Favourite Fairy Tales more than I expected, and I already expected to like it. It was very enjoyable. They showed “Germany’s fairytale route” tourist attraction with castles and towers said to have inspired the Brothers Grimm, such as a museum with the original versions of the Grimm’s fairytales kept in a temperature and moisture controlled cabinet. There were very beautiful locations too with the forests and villages. Paul O’Grady describes Alfstedt as a “chocolate box town”. Trendelburg had a tower without a door that may have inspired the Brothers Grimm when writing their version of Rapunzel.

Obviously discussing 5 stories in one hour meant it was going to feel a bit rushed. A lot of viewers felt this would have been good as a whole series with an episode focusing on one story each. There is a lot to talk about with them, you would probably need 100 year curse to fit it all in. But it was informative and concise, and Paul O’Grady provided a lot of humour and made a lot of good points about why these stories are so consistently popular.

Foney Fables

Foney Fables, a Warner Brothers/Merrie Melodies cartoon directed by Friz Freleng was released in 1942. If I’m being perfectly honest, it’s not a cartoon I rate that highly, but it is quite interesting. The animation is a little sketchy and there glitches, such as one where a baby’s leg disappears and appears again, but to be fair it was produced during World War II, and it’s that historical context which I find interesting.

Watching in the modern day, it has a sort of double layer of history to it. The cartoon is a series of jokes relating to fairy tales. While fairy tales have no real setting other than “Once Upon A Time”, they tend to be depicted as some time vaguely in Europe in the medieval era. This is the case here, and it has another layer because it was produced during the Second World War.

It contains some wartime propaganda. In an Ant and the Grasshopper sketch, when the ant tells the grasshopper he’ll starve in winter as he’s lazing about not working, the grasshopper reveals he has bought war bonds, which were a way of civilians investing into the war effort with an added benefit that they would be paid more than they spent for it in ten years time. The Goose That Laid The Golden Egg has given up laying golden eggs and instead is laying aluminium eggs to donate so they can be recycled into weapons for the war. Then there is Old Mother Hubbard, who opens one door of her cupboard to her dog to show it is empty other than cobwebs. But then the dog opens the other side to see it is filled with food. The dog angrily shouts out of the window branding Old Mother Hubbard a “food hoarder”, which was when people had secret stashes of food that was rationed during the war, and it was seen as greedy to keep so much food for yourself.

The way they show some of the fairytales is interesting too. Jack and the Beanstalk has a two headed giant (the  joke being one of the heads has been sick so can’t keep up), but I’ve never heard of a version of Jack and the Beanstalk with a two headed giant other than this cartoon. There is a version of Aladdin with the character shown as a quite bit older than the character usually is, having a beard and wearing a turban. The joke in this one is the genie is on strike. There is a Big Bad Wolf who disguises himself as a sheep and finds another wolf there trying the same trick.  Both wolves look very, very similar to the Disney Silly Symphonies Big Bad Wolf. Similarly, Old Mother Hubbard’s dog looks a bit like Disney’s Pluto.

It has something in common with the other cartoon I reviewed A Day At The Zoo, in that both have a running plot of someone being an annoying pest, getting warned against that by the narrator, and getting comeuppance in the end by getting eaten. In this cartoon it’s The Boy Who Cried Wolf who gets eaten by a wolf at the end. Another thing this cartoon has in common with A Day At The Zoo is that while it doesn’t have any of the famous Warner Brothers cartoon characters, signs of some of them are there. Mel Blanc provides the voices in the cartoon, and The Boy Who Cried Wolf has the same voice as Bugs Bunny, while the Goose That Laid The Golden Egg has the same voice as Daffy Duck.

Snow White and the Huntsman

CONTAINS SPOILERS

**

2 stars out of 5

Appropriately enough for a story about beauty, visually the film is gorgeous. If you like eye-catching gothic imagery, which I certainly do, then this film delivers. We get blood drops on snow, red roses, gnarled black forests, ravens. The dark forest where nothing is as it seems as it appears to make people there hallucinate their worst fears. When Snow White gets lost in the spooky forest in question she sees branches as snakes. But that was fairly similar to the animated Disney version. There is also an opposite forest, the forest of the fairies, which is brightly lit and full of cute woodland critters, which also is similar to the Disney animated version and frankly look just as cartoonish. The CGI and special effects are generally to a high standard to be fair, but this section stands out quite badly.

The Seven Dwarves do show up despite their appearance being somewhat underplayed in most of the promo I’ve seen. They are characterised as gold miners being forced into becoming a sort of gang of thieves because of the queen’s reign, and they provide some comic relief. I could be wrong, but it seems almost as if they are reluctant addition, almost like they are only there because people would expect them to be part of a Snow White adaptation. There is a feeling that they are a little unnecessary.  They don’t appear until quite late in the film.The title suggests the story they wanted to tell was a love story between Snow White and the huntsman hired to kill her. The problem is though, that that story isn’t presented in an engaging way here. There isn’t much there that shows that they are attracted to each other, it almost comes off as they are by default. “You’re the heroine, I’m the hero, we should get together”. Also by the end of the film, this isn’t resolved. They try and set up a love triangle with a childhood friend of Snow White, who is also a duke’s son and standing in for the Prince Charming role. The implication is that the huntsman is Snow White’s ‘true love’ as at different points in the film after she has been poisoned by the apple, they both kiss her and she only wakes from her deep sleep after the huntsman has kissed her. But by the end, it’s not explicitly said whether they get together, but they probably do… to be honest I didn’t really care.

As far as plot is concerned, the main narrative is that Snow White is leading a rebellion against the wicked queen. Making a fairytale princess into an Action Girl isn’t a new thing, Ever After  starring Drew Barrymore did that for Cinderella, but Snow White actually makes a bit more sense to try that. As Ellie Beaven’s character put it in an episode of ’90s CBBC show The Wild House, “according to the story everyone loves Snow White and everyone hates the old bag”, so why not lead a revolution and claim the throne which as the daughter of the deceased king she has a legitimate claim that it is rightfully hers anyway? The ‘Snow White: Warrior Princess’ part of this film is actually one of the things about it that works well. But the film runs out of steam long before the end, and it follows standard “going into the final battle to defeat an evil overlord” clichés. Snow White making a BIG INSPIRING SPEECH TO RALLY THE TROOPS backed by stirring music is a very cringeworthy moment it has to be said.

By far the most interesting thing about the film is Charlize Theron’s performance as the Wicked Queen, here named Ravenna. In the first half of the film it looks like she’s trying to play the character as an insane hammy villainess, which would be fine, in fact if handled correctly it can make a villain iconic, but it still needs to come off as natural and convincing. Unfortunately it comes off as her trying a little too hard. However, when we get to see the more tragic sides of Ravenna, she’s much better. They give a blink and you’ll miss it flashback to a traumatic childhood, but it’s they way Ravenna tearfully remembers it that makes it work. As in the original story the wicked queen is obsessed with her beauty, and in this version she maintains it by stealing it from other young women, causing women in the kingdom to deliberately scar themselves so she won’t take them. But what makes her as a villain more disturbing isn’t her powers, but that her fatal flaw, a desperation to stay young and beautiful, is a very human one, and Theron plays this side of the character very well.  The scene where Ravenna poisons Snow White with the apple and in the final battle is good for this. She’s angry, bitter, twisted and desperate.

The poison apple scene also follows some adaptations that make Snow White seem a little less, well, thick. In the Grimms version of the fairytale, the queen comes back as a peddlar woman 3 times and tries varations of the same trick and Snow White falls for it every single time.  In this film as with some other modern adaptations, the queen disguise herself as someone Snow White knows rather than as a random peddlar woman after she’s well aware of the queen’s magical power and the fact she wants to kill her.

This film isn’t a terrible one, it looks good, and Florence + The Machine’s ‘Breath Of Life’ is an ace film theme,most of the characters are presented well enough, and it does a better job of making them more relatable and fully rounded to modern audiences than some adaptations of fairy tales can be, but overall it’s a little uninspiring really. If you want a film with a dark take on the Snow White story I’d recommend Snow White: A Tale Of Terror starring Sigourney Weaver as the wicked queen.