Before starting with my review I want to mention that I didn't know that this movie was based on a play until I read it on WikiPedia, so right here I'm just sticking to what the movie experience was to me.
First of all, I have to say that I really liked to see characters and stories from tales that had never made it into a Disney movie before like "Jack and the Beanstalk", "Little Red Riding Hood" while I also enjoyed the Grimm brothers' original storytelling of Cinderella and Rapunzel being used. And the idea of mixing all those stories in one single universe was fantastic. However, as the movie went on it just didn't pay off.
I do like musicals, Disney or not, and Meryl did an amazing job in Mamma Mia, so I was very excited about this. However, I just think there were TOO many songs. The trailers do not actually tell you the whole thing is a musical and the characters barely speak throughout the movie. Also, the pace of the movie is pretty fast, I would say (with all the characters' stories taking place simultaneously), which is really enjoyable but the singing sometimes makes the course of the story stop, which may be a little bit frustrating and the movie starts feeling too long during the last hour. I have no critics towards the composition, the lyrics or the performances, everyone did a great job regarding that point.
But my major critic regards some really awful character development, and this is when the spoilers being so if you haven't watched it yet, just skip this whole paragraph. The baker and his wife, for example, seem to have a very happy life at the beginning but then she meets with the prince a couple times and starts feeling things for him. This seemed so forced to me, especially because all this subplot takes place just after seeing the lovely couple struggling during more than an hour to break the Witch's course and have a baby, with her constantly telling her husband that they must do it together. So it was very frustrating too see her forget about her baby and husband in a second and surrender to the Prince's charm. Also, the Prince seems to be in love with Cinderella but then we discover that he's just an asshole who wants to hook up with every available woman in the kingdom. So there you have the two magic couple who ran most of the movie you were watching, destroyed within seconds. And I don't even want to mention the stupid deaths that come afterwards. Inexplicably, you just see the characters disappear from one scene to another, and some silly dialogue mentions that they died follows.
So, paraphrasing my last paragraph in case you didn't want my review to screw up your whole movie experience, I will just say that any the stories that make you fall in love with make it to a happy ending. But this is not wrong because Disney is not supposed to be this, but before you can't help but feel frustrated. Sometimes characters are killed off (The Lion King, Bambi) for the sake of the story and sometimes some others just leave, and its fine because the departure is surrounded by a well-developed script that doesn't make you feel insanely frustrated at the end, but this is not the case. Not at all.
I would strongly advise you to stop watching this movie after Cinderella gets married, for that is the ending you would want for every character you get to care about. Then it just gets too dark, unconvincing, silly, and also the movie gets too long because of that. But the worst part is that you really get to like the movie so you will want to get to the end but, trust me, it's just not worth it.
PS: If you got to read this entirely, thanks, I didn't thought it would be that long. Greetings ;)
