I got an email from Tumblr saying "You're on our radar" and I didn't know what that meant until I saw 5,000 new notes on my Princess Bride painting of Westley that I did back in 2014.
Wow. Thank you.
The Princess Bride is my favorite movie and I don't want to inundate you all with too much Princess Bride art, but, I did a little series of watercolor cutout "animations" back in 2022 and they're still some of my favorite things I've done.
...And I'm wiping tears??
...Because I loved this movie and the allegory and it was the perfect girl movie for International Women's Day which was yesterday???
This movie got a 58% Rotten Tomatoes score and I'm honestly confused! It was a beautiful perfectly original fairytale.
In the good old days, this would have either been a sleeper hit in the theatres or a beloved classic discovery in the VHS rental market and likely overplayed at odd times on HBO like The Neverending Story.
It for me is on tier with The Seabeast and Predator for excellent modern "girl-power" films, that should have been released in the theaters.
It subverts so many fairytale tropes, and while it's predictable, I'm an old soul who still can cast myself back to girlhood and for me, again, the allegory touched me.
Much in a similar way that Maleficent did, with its origin for the title character as a metaphor for the loss of trust and innocence after a violation, "a sexual assault" with loss of wings.
It 100% wasn't intentionally this deep, but this for me was about the price of colonization; of adhered-to ancestral memory that the "winners" who write history carry, sacrificing 'the other" for generations destroying their own souls.... Until the convenient lies are finally faced.
Ugh, I loved what they did with the dragon, with all the supporting characters, with the amount of harrow, and some consequential violence, enough to genuinely scare but not enough to scar.
It felt very old school in that way. -Like a good solid 80's style fantasy, except for some of the non-practical effects.
IDK, maybe it's just about my soft heart, but again...
This movie made me cry.
I honestly and truly adored this fairytale.
#THISISAREC
--For the fairytale girlies... The ones who like dragons, Grimm teas, and girls bloodied and determined.