![]() This is an unashamedly old-fashioned world of pumpkin coaches, glass slippers and chimes-at-midnight transformations. While Maleficent and Into the Woods unpicked their fairytale roots, Chris Weitz’s screenplay is almost radically anti-revisionist in its refusal to rewrite familiar tropes. Most remarkably, Branagh took the straw of Marvel’s Thor comic strip and spun from it the gold of a surprisingly witty blockbuster ( Transformers meets Xanadu), a remarkable feat of movie magic.Īnd so to Cinderella, a live-action reboot of one of Disney’s most enduring animations (the credits cite their “Cinderella properties” alongside Perrault), notable for its straight-faced sentimentality and unfashionable absence of post- Enchanted irony. Meanwhile, the Hitchcock pastiche Dead Again went from being a copper-bottomed catastrophe to a Stateside hit after an 11th-hour sprinkling of fairy dust (in the form of reprocessed black-and-white flashbacks) turned it from pauper to princess. One of Branagh’s finest fantasy flicks, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, was as cruelly treated as any of Charles Perrault’s fabled heroines, while the marvellously Ken Russell-esque The Magic Flute signally failed to be showered with riches or made the belle of any box-office ball. T here’s always been a fairytale element to Kenneth Branagh’s directing career the question of whether or not he’ll go to the ball tends to hang over all his movies, right up until the clock strikes 12.
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