Fairy tales are everywhere these days, from the small-screen “Once Upon a Time” and “Grimm” to this year’s duelling
Snow White films,
Mirror Mirror and
Snow White and the Huntsman, opening this week.
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Kids & Up
Walt Disney’s
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is widely celebrated as a beginning, the first feature-length animated film in Hollywood history. It’s just as correct, though, and perhaps more illuminating, to hail it as a culimination — as the crowning achievement of years of experimentation, discovery, growth and achievement by Disney’s animation team.
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Kids & Up*
An orphaned hero. An imprisoned princess. A wise old hermit. A magic sword. A fearsome dark lord. Such conventions are the stuff of myth and romance — yet, inexplicably, the first Hollywood film to give these mythic archetypes their due was not some Arthurian romance or epic costume drama.
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Kids & Up*
Rob Reiner’s great cult classic
The Princess Bride is one of those rare satiric gems, like
The Court Jester and
Galaxy Quest, that doesn’t just send up a genre, but honors it at the same time, giving us the excitement and pleasure of the real thing as well as the laughs of a comedy.
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Kids & Up
The Wizard of Oz is one of a very few
shared experiences that unite Americans as a culture, transcending barriers of age, locale, politics, religion, and so on. We all see it when we are young, and it leaves an indelible mark on our imaginations. We can hardly imagine not knowing it. It ranks among our earliest and most defining experiences of wonder and of fear, of fairy-tale joys and terrors, of the lure of the exotic and the comfort of home.
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