Yesterday Jeannie and I watched The Swan Princess. After our aborted attempt to watch Ballet San Jose's Swan Lake, it seemed like the easiest way for Jeannie to get the story.  Ever since they were babies, Odette and Derek have been thrust at each other by their parents, who want them to fall in love and marry.  Year after year, their dislike for each other grows, until one day BAM! Derek suddenly realizes that Odette is totally hot.  He decides that on second thought, marrying her is an OK proposition. When she asks him why he wants to marry her, he can't come up with any reasons besides "HOT BABE!!!" so Odette storms off, gets captured by the villain and turned into swamp.  Derek has to find his missing Princess and rescue her from the evil Rothbart.

I've always been curious to see how the Disney knock-off movies from the 1990s fared.   By the way, Disney knock-off is an accurate description. I mean, I wish I had the technology to capture screenshots so that I do a side-by-side comparison of certain scenes, because several scenes from The Swan Princess look pretty damn close to scenes from Sleeping Beauty. I mean, there's the scene where Prince Derek looks down at the baby Odette...parallels the opening scenes of Sleeping Beauty pretty well. Later in the movie, the Prince fights through the forest, waving his sword wildly...and all I could think of was Prince Philip fighting the briars.

Which reminds me!

What a friggin' goober. Seriously. Princes are supposed to be sensitive, charming, compassionate, clever...but most importantly, good looking. Prince Derek looks like a chipmunk to me. Look at those teeth! Also, I swear that half the time it didn't look like his eyes were pointing in the same direction. Don't even let me get started on that Prince Valiant haircut...


It actually wasn't a bad movie.  I mean, it wasn't good either, but it wasn't bad.  The animation actually looked pretty good at times, like the swirling water that appeared during Odette's transformations.  The songs were pretty forgettable, but other than Rothbart's bizarre number they weren't terrible.

I was disappointed that the story didn't do more with the Odette/Odile dichotomy.  The tension between the two versions of the swan has always been the highlight of the ballet.  The false Odette in The Swan Princess barely registers, and rather than the sexy vamp we're usually treated to, it's just an old woman in disguise.  Lame.