9. Odette - The Swan Princess
Straight-up confession. When it comes to train wrecks,
Swan Lake is my favorite. It is one of the many works of hoity-toity classical stuff that makes me wonder what the bleep is wrong with humanity. (I also think this while listening to
Turandot or
Don Giovanni. I just referred to this stuff as hoity-toity, but my parents brought me up to appreciate that kind of crazy.) Just in case you haven't seen the ballet,
The Swan Princess or Natalie Portman's awesome psychotic thriller
Black Swan, the ballet plot goes like this: Girl meets boy. Girl flirts with boy. Boy turns out to be an evil sorcerer named Von Rothbart who then curses her to be a swan by day and a human by night. Random prince named Siegfried gets a crossbow and a lecture on settling down with a nice girl for his 21st birthday. To blow off steam, he goes swan-hunting and is about to shoot down one swan when she turns into a beautiful young woman. They slow-dance. A lot. (Also in between clever synchronized "swimming" from her swan maiden posse.) He almost kills the sorcerer out of anger, but she stops him because if he does before she finds true love, the curse will never be broken. Siegfried vows to pledge his eternal love to her so the curse will be broken. Before he can do so, the sun rises. At a ball at his palace, he's presented with four princesses a.k.a. potential brides from distant lands. None of them are quite right and he's ready to swear off women when the heralds announce one final visitor. It's the girl of his dreams and her father. After a lot more slow-dancing (because making out wouldn't work in Tchaikovsky), he announces that he has found his bride. Her father insists that he pledge his eternal loyalty before sealing the deal. Siegfried is only too happy to to do so. The catch is that a moment later, he sees a vision of the real girl of his dreams. Turns out that the swan princess he fell in love with at the ball is her evil twin, Von Rothbart's daughter Odile. He has fallen in love with the wrong girl and doomed her to be a swan forever. In some versions, Siegfried and Odette defeat Von Rothbart by breaking his wing. In some, she commits suicide and he doesn't, but that still breaks the spell. In the version I've seen most frequently, they both commit suicide and are essentially sainted in the apotheosis of the ballet. Every version concludes with Odette forgiving Siegfried and Von Rothbart being defeated. Sorry, that was a really long introduction to this, but you have to have perspective on the plot before I go into my commentary on this movie.
The Swan Princess is an animated feature version of
Swan Lake. It's got catchy music, woodland friends to help Odette out and a much more developed love story. How developed, you might wonder. We first meet Odette and the re-named Prince Derrick as children whose parents really hope they get together. They resent each other. They prank each other. They wish everyone would just stop trying to fix them up. Their romance doesn't happen in one night of slow-dancing and assassination-preventing. It develops over years of friendship. And when they come of age and Prince Derrick announces that he's found his bride, Odette takes a stand. She has turned into a first-class hottie with a killer wardrobe and he can't help but notice. So when she asks him what else he loves about her and he might as well admire her "HUGE...tracts of land," she refuses to marry him. Yes, this is the point at which I have to say, "You go, girl!" I once got proposed to while a guy admired my huge tracts of land and was a little more physical about refusing him, but the principle is the same. If a guy doesn't love you for something other than your beauty, he doesn't deserve your love. Call me Jessie Spano if you have to, but I think that it's a solid way to judge romance. I also like that Odette tries to stop Von Rothbart's balltime deception herself. I don't make it a requirement for someone to rescue themselves from their dilemma, but it doesn't hurt.