“Revolting Rhymes” Revolts against Fairy Tales

Release Date：Jun/3/2017

Genre：Animation

Director：Jakob Schuh、Jan Lachauer

Viola's Rating：7.7

Do you like fairy tales? And how well do you think you know about these anthropomorphic stories? There’s the “Grimms’ Fairy Tales”, but it’s probably too scary for children to read. Therefore, British fight pilot, novelist, poet, screenwriter and short story writer, Roald Dahl published “Revolting Rhymes” in 1982, which is a happy satire, and the TV movie was released in the UK on December 26, 2016 as a Christmas special and in the US on June 3, 2017 at Seattle International Film Festival.

Adapted from Roald Dahl’s collection of poems, this animation takes the classic fairy tales of Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk, Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White and The Three Little Pigs, and then mixes them together and creates a mischievous twist. In the original book, there are six stories, but for some reason, director Jakob Schuh and Jan Lachauer emitted the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears.

“Revolting Rhymes” cleverly knits the five stories together as if we’re watching feature films such as “New Year’s Eve” and “Valentine’s Day”. It strategically separates them into two parts, and Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White and The Three Little Pigs are introduced in the first part. Like unboxing gifts, more fairy tales and surprises come along as the story moves forward.

Similar to regular fairy tales, “Revolting Rhymes” tells moral stories. For example, being careful about strangers from Little Red Riding Hood and building the house strongly from Three Little Pigs are kept, and Dahl even added more lessons to his stories. He teaches kids that marrying to prince is not necessarily a good thing, as long as the person’s a decent man, he’s worth to be marry to. Also, it tells children to take baths every day in a hilarious way that every parent would probably laugh if their kids decide to bathe every day after watching “Revolting Rhymes”.

Interesting enough is that even though most of the time, it is Little Red Riding Hood, who’s propelling the storyline, the plot itself is told from Big Bad Wolf’s perspective. Audiences get to see how Wolf defends himself and explains the real situation that happened humorously, and children may decide whether to believe him or not and whether change their mind on having stereotypes.

At some point, “Revolting Rhymes” tries to tell us that no one’s perfect, and thus how the characters are showed here are more realistic. The world doesn’t work as dichotomy, which differentiates one another so clearly. Therefore, making the right decision is even more important if it’s not so easy to distinguish good from bad, and vice versa.

“Revolting Rhymes” is an interesting TV movie that families can enjoy together and immerse yourselves in the surprises it brings to you. Within one hour, you would go through a whole new fairy tale experience.

Picture Credit: IMDb