![]() ![]() There is an embrace of the feminine and the pretty in the world-building not unlike the recent A Wrinkle in Time. The film moves from sequence to sequence on the strength of its aesthetic wonder, almost as if you are watching a feature film made entirely of Tumblr-based gifs and mood boards. ![]() They lie in the film’s sumptuous set and costume design. You might be able to work out what happens next just from the information I’ve given you, but the chief joys of this movie don’t lie in its formulaic plot. They aim to capture Clara and bring her to Mother Ginger, but Clara’s new Nutcracker friend pledges to keep her safe. Young, strapping, and ever-loyal, Nutcracker soldier Phillip is by her side when the mice who have stolen the key that would unlock her mother’s egg assemble into a moving amalgamation of mice known as The Rat King. Clara meets the Nutcracker soldier ( Jayden Fowora-Knight) when she first enters into The Four Realms. The impressive execution of the fantastical rodentia continues outside the world of ballet in one of the film’s most clever and effective CGI visuals. We are part of the action, and so are they-integral to this world for a moment in a way the pageantry of the previous dances made this reality feel artificial and distant. The camera sets up in the middle of the attacking mice, as they move around us. The camera drops to the floor, catching close-ups of the dancer’s feet as she tries to dodge her rodent assailants. (There is a much better dance sequence during the end credits.)Īs an art form developed for the stage, dance is difficult to represent on film, but the Nutcracker manages to make it interesting by the final sequence in its staging: the dance of the Mouse King. Here, the movie indulges in its only formal representation of the ballet from which it hails… to uneven results. Perhaps dance is not the best format for relaying demographic statistics or the GDP of a realm. ![]() It doesn’t help that, per Nutcracker ballet tradition, the protagonist learns about the world through a series of dances presented to her in a pageant. One unnecessary makeover later, Clara is embracing her role as a princess of the realms.įor a clever girl, Clara is not very curious about the cultures or logistics of the land she now co-rules over. This information is mostly relayed to Clara via her aggressively friendly co-ruler: the saccharine-sweet Sugar Plum Fairy ( Keira Knightley, hamming it up). We’re calling it the Fourth Realm now as its leader, Mother Ginger (a delightfully over-the-top pirate played by Helen Mirren), has gone rogue. Once there, she learns that her mother ruled over the land alongside four other monarchs, one from each realm: The Land of the Flowers, The Land of Snowflakes, The Land of Sweets, and The Land of Amusements-er, scratch that last one. The mystery of the egg leads Clara to another world: The Four Realms. For Clara, it is a locked egg sculpture, sans the key that opens it. She gifts the kids posthumously with one last present each. Marie’s absence lingers heavily over the narrative as the family prepares to celebrate their first Christmas without her. Clara’s mother, Marie, has died, leaving behind three children and a bereft husband (Matthew MacFadyen, playing the kind of bumbling, emotionally stunted character he does so well). Mackenzie Foy ( Murph in Interstellar) makes for a wide-eyed, determined, and charming Clara, the teenaged girl with an engineer’s mind and a grieving family. One part The Chronicles of Narnia, one part Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, and one part The Nutcracker ballet (complete with an updated score arrangement of Tchaikovsky’s iconic music by James Newton Howard), and with a dash of Hugo thrown in for good measure. The Nutcracker and the Four Realms is a fantastical amalgamation of what has come before. Hoffman’s “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King.” ![]() So it’s no surprise Disney wanted to get a piece of that public domain action. While the Tchaikovsky music was never apiece with previous animated Disney classics that have become an open mine for unending live-action remakes, The Nutcracker and the Four Realms taps into a similar kind of collective nostalgia with its (very) loose adaptation of E.T.A. Originally choreographed by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov to a score by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky back in 1892, countless theaters and ballet companies around the world mount productions of The Nutcracker every year. The Nutcracker ballet is a longstanding holiday tradition. ![]()
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