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Starring Oprah Winfrey
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Well, it’s not Aladdin. And it’s certainly not The Lion King. There’s a lot of lovely things jumping about here, not least of all Disney’s courageous return to the distant past of cave paintings and scribbles on the backs of hands, a retroactive approach that’ll have dribbling old cultural codgers literally dribbling with glee. And it looks amazing, way better than the 90s output did, all swirls and fancy lights and smooth movements, with one bang-smash musical sequence looking like a swath of 1920s Jazz posters brought to omnicolour life. The problem which smacks these amphibian try-hards away from the studio’s glory days lies with the plot and characters, the former being an overly simplistic, unengaging fairy tale pastiche, the latter being a boring mess of stereotypes and carbon-copies from previous efforts. The fat alligator is literally cut and pasted from Peter Pan, whilst the others all sing and dance and wince through a hesitant script and uncatchworthy songs. It’s like Oliver and Company. Tiana, the main draw, does deserve plaudits for not only being the first black princess, but also having a modernized take on the fairy-tale journey; she wants to start her own business, and make the handsome prince her subservient bitch in doing so. Go 2010! Girl Power and… no, actually, it is quite refreshing. So, yes, it’s good, but it’s not great. A tentative step in the right direction for a studio which was bludgeoning itself in the skull with a hammer made of hardened thousand dollar notes a few years back. Little Mermaid wasn’t as good as Beauty and the Beast, was it? WAS IT? No. All hands on Rapunzel….
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