kelvinzero":1ttwvsls said:
However I think the critical flaw with the first movie was that it simply should not have been a kiddy movie. The series had to start a lot darker to make sense. I dont mean violent, preventing it being suitable for children. The darkness could have been implied.
Part of the trouble there is that a lot of filmmakers forget that kids can *handle* dark movies. They don't have to be all fru-fru silliness and fairies and sugerplum gumdrops.
I can certainly tolerate Disney adjusting the endings of "The Little Mermaid" and "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" -- the original endings are pretty dismal. But, and here's the important part, kids liked the original "Little Mermaid". One of my favorite books as a child was "The Red Shoes", another Hans Christian Andersen book which actually has a worse ending. Kids actually like that kind of stuff, just as much as adults do. They don't need to be protected from it.
As Terry Pratchett put it in Hogfather:
But it was much earlier even than that when most people forgot that the very oldest stories are, sooner or later, about blood. Later on they took the blood out to make the stories more acceptable to children, or at least to the people who had to read them to children rather than the children themselves (who, on the whole, are quite keen on blood provided it's being shed by the deserving*), and then wondered where the stories went.
* That is to say, those who deserve to shed blood. Or possibly not. You never quite know with some kids.
G. K Chesterton had this to say:
Fairy Tales are more than true; not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.
Or as Steven Moffatt (the new producer of Doctor Who, and writer of such wonderfully dark Dr Who stories as "Silence in the Library" and "Blink") put it:
Fairy tales are how we tell our children that the world is a scary place and there are people who might want to eat them. I mean, Doctor Who can be dark and scary.
And kids love that. They tell each other ghost stories. Dark is *exciting*. And they learn through the stories. All stories are educational. Not just the ones where Abby Aardvark looks for things that start with the letter A, or Petrucia Plum learns how having three apples and getting four more apples means she now has seven apples. Those things are nice, but the really important lessons they get from stories are things like how to be brave, the difference between right and wrong, what death means, the importance of friendship, and how to deal with monsters. For the most part, they're not going to learn that from Dora the Explorer or even Sesame Street. Those are great shows, and they teach kids a lot, but they need *dark* shows to learn the more serious lessons of life, most notably that it isn't always easy and it isn't always friendly.
One of my favorite movies growing up was "The Dark Crystal". It's aimed at children, but is definitely dark. It features slavery (a very sinister kind, where the slaves' very will has been removed), genocide, killing of parents, a brutal raid on a peaceful village, several deaths, exceedingly difficult choices, life-or-death struggles..... It's a good story. Like Chesterton said, it teaches not only that monsters exist but that they can be beaten. And *should* be beaten. They're not very good monsters if they aren't dark.
Contrast Maleficent in "Sleeping Beauty" with Jafar in "Alladin". Jafar was basically just a power-hungry jerk, a sniveling snake who bamboozled the rather dotty old Caliph so he could ultimately seize power. Maleficent, by contrast, was *evil*, fixated on killing a young child for no more reason than because she was an evil fairy and that's what evil fairies do (though ostensibly it was out of spite for not being invited to the baby's party). The best parts of "Sleeping Beauty" were the dark parts. Oh, the silly parts were fun, like the disastrous attempts by the three good fairies to set up a birthday party without resorting to magic. But it was the dark parts that sold the story. Aurora, entranced, following the glowing orb up the hidden staircase, the fairies desperately trying to catch up to her and stop her, and ultimately failing to get there before she touched the spindle and fell into a deep sleep. That's where the movie really hits its stride.