Of course with the Dead Mother/Wife comes Disapproving Dad (Matthew Macfadyen). Apparently Disney just feels compelled to kill off the mother or else they don’t know how to function. Hoffman’s The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, on which the libretto for Tchaikovsky’s ballet is based. This is not due to source material Clara’s mother is alive and well in E.T.A. What tropes and prefab bits? So help me, it starts with a “Dead Mother/Wife” plot. This sequence offers a fitting metaphor for the film: a complicated mechanical assemblage over which Disney hopes audiences will beat a path to theater doors. The Four Realms opens with Clara (Mackenzie Foy) triggering a Rube Goldberg mousetrap that begins with a hot air balloon and ends with a basket dropping on a conveniently placed mouse. Worse, the bit of the Nutcracker Suite playing at that moment is not the Chinese Dance, but the Arab Dance, which should make you think not of dancing mushrooms but of coy harem-girl fish. In one scene characters run through a forest past brightly-colored mushrooms, and you’re meant to smile with recognition, although the mushrooms never dance and don’t matter in any way. Yet the filmmakers show no sensitivity to the historic associations of imagery and music that are now Disney canon. If you thought the Fantasia connection was just a coincidence and the filmmakers picked this subject just because they love ballet, think again: There’s actually a sequence where a silhouetted conductor climbs onto a dais and the orchestra is glimpsed in rows of colorful shadows. I kid, of course, but there’s something genuinely depressing about seeing one of the most audacious experiments in animation history used not for actual inspiration, but as a kind of scrap heap for spare parts. Will this become a running theme? In another eight years will we be treated to a Dance of the Hours adventure in which the alligators pop out of ominous giant matryoshkas? How will they work nesting dolls into the plot for Toccata and Fugue? Also there are Nesting Dolls of Doom in both movies, sort of, which is a connection I did not expect. Like The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, The Nutcracker and the Four Realms takes a theme from a Fantasia sequence - in this case Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite, along with the ballet and the story that goes with it - and grafts it to an obligatory “Hero’s Journey” story arc constructed largely of standard-issue tropes and prefabricated parts. Now, for Disney’s second dip into Fantasia-themed brand management and cannibalization of its own legacy, there is The Nutcracker and the Four Realms. When Disney’s fantasy-adventure The Sorcerer’s Apprentice debuted eight years ago, I was mildly appreciative that it didn’t come with a franchise-y extended moniker like (actual examples I made up at the time) The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: Oath of the Dragon Ring or The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: Nesting Dolls of Doom. SDG Original source: National Catholic Register The Nutcracker and the Four Realms (2018)
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