20 Greatest Dance Scenes In Movie History
2. The Ballet Of The Red Shoes - The Red Shoes (1948)
The Red Shoes is that quietly brilliant dance movie which seems to always go under the radar, despite its artistic creativity. Based on a Hans Christian Andersen fairytale of the same name, our heroine Victoria Page is a ballet dancer who joins Boris Lermontov’s world-famous ‘Ballet Lermontov’. Although she is a rising star, she is stuck in a conundrum of choosing between her career or her romance with composer Julian Craster.
When it comes to the title ballet sequence, it is a fifteen minute masterpiece. It is poetry in motion. The music marries perfectly to the movement of the stage performers, the colour palette is impeccably crafted to show off the technicolor cinematography and a story is told purely through dance. It was definitely not an easy project to complete as the sequence took six weeks to shoot, with over one-hundred paintings by Hein Heckroth and over fifty dancers incorporated into the scene.
The hard work paid off as the film won the Oscars for Best Art Direction and Best Music Scoring. There have been plenty of ballet focused movies ever since, but none of them are quite as magnificent as The Red Shoes.