Review of The Swan Princess (1994) by Cassidy H — 09 Oct 2009

I watched this with Darcy. Well, I kept finding excuses to get up and do something else, but I still feel able to comment.

From the 50% of it I saw, its pretty much the same enchanted princess stuff that had currency before pixar started up. Steven wright voices a turtle, which is nice, I guess. I cant remember the names of any of the characters, but the prince, lets call him prince chip, is pretty much this square jawed himbo devoid of charisma or intelligence. not sure how much of that is deliberate. The princess is the the aryan ideal ripped off the disney versions of cinderella and sleeping beauty.

Anyways, the reason I wanted to talk about it, is the way it veers away from a satisfying narrative/character arc. im not a big fan of formula usually, but when something like this comes along that is basically trying to be as formulaic as possible, but messes it up, it just looks really random and incompetent.

Anyways, the gist of the film is all about illusions and being sucked in by superficial appearances. they set this up pretty early as chips weakness- he pisses the princess off by failing to notice or comment on anything except how she looks. then later she gets turned into a swan for some reason (i missed that bit) and on one of his hunting trips he chases after her trying to nail he r with his leet archery skills, til she transforms back into human form. so theres alot of that sort of thing, theres also the frog sidekick claiming to really be a prince etc. So yeah.

Anyways, near the end, the evil wizard makes a hag look like the princess, and chip messes up again by failing to notice, even with a swan manicly fluttering at the windows. Then something else happens, then the wizard transforms into a beasty and chip shoots it.

Thats it basically. so you know, chip starts off as a dude who cant see past the superficial (and who, as mentioned, has mad archery skills), and he ends up exactly the same. he fails to change but just fixes his problems by drawing on pre-existing abilities that were never called into question during the narrative.

Its basically exactly the same as if woody harrelson closed out the last game in 'white men can't jump' with a three pointer. lame.