As kids, we secretly wished for our favorite fairy tail characters to be fused into one show. I often wondered how certain characters would interact if they met each other.
“Into the Woods” is a musical by Stephen Sondheim with a book by James Lapine that premiered on Broadway Nov. 5, 1987. Almost 30 years later, the musical has finally made it to movie screens, cleverly combining the stories of Little Red Riding Hood, Jack and the Beanstalk, Cinderella and Rapunzel — all linked together through the main story of a childless baker and his wife.
“Into the Woods” creates a modern twist on our preconceived notions about our favorite characters and subverts our expectations. The movie intertwines the plots of these fairy tales and explores the consequences of the characters’ wishes as they fulfill their quests through funny twists. As a result of the curse of a wickedly funny, once-beautiful witch (Meryl Streep), a baker (James Corden) and his wife (Emily Blunt) are childless. Three days before the rise of a blue moon, they venture into the forest to find the ingredients that will lift the curse and restore the witch’s beauty: a cow white as milk, hair as yellow as corn, a cape as red as blood and a slipper as pure as gold. During their journey, they meet Cinderella, beautifully played by Anna Kendrick, Little Red Riding Hood (Lilla Crawford), Rapunzel (MacKenzie Mauzy) and Jack (Daniel Huttlestone), each one in the midst of their own familiar tales and on their quest to fulfill a wish.
The opening song immediately grasps the viewers as each of the main characters reveals their wish. Cinderella wishes to attend the King’s festival. Jack wishes that his cow, Milky White, would give milk as his weary mother nags him into selling the cow for no less than five pounds. Little Red Riding Hood playfully gets bread from the Baker to take to her grandmother’s house and expresses her concern about safety in the woods. Each of the characters journey into the woods on the verge of the beginning of their stories.
Though Johnny Depp was one of the main reasons why I wanted to see the movie, his role was brief as the zoot-suited wolf. Despite his concise role, I was satisfied with his sinister but playful presence and felt that the couple of minutes he was on the screen were enough to bring a dangerous vibe to the film and document his presence.
Another great performance was Chris Pine’s amazingly acted Cinderella’s Prince. He portrays the characteristic of being unable to control his selfish desire in a hilarious way. One example of this comedic presence is when Pine and Billy Magnussen (Rapunzel’s Prince) have one hell of a remarkable scene performing the song “Agony” at the top of a waterfall. These two narcissistic men try to outshine one another in expressing their manly pain over the woman they can’t be with.
Contrasting the opening song, the song “No One Is Alone” is the main song that ties everything together and reinforces the main theme of the movie, which is wish fulfillment and its consequences. After the characters strive to get their wishes granted, they have to deal with the consequences and the film does a great job formulating these consequences to the characters’ actions and setting the grand theme of being careful about what you wish for.
I found it funny that halfway through the movie, people, thinking that the movie was over, started leaving when they saw the familiar “happily ever after” scene. The film does a great job exploring what happens after the common “happily ever after” ending and it deals with life and moving forward in a realistic way that kids today can more easily accept. The movie disappoints the viewer’s expectations of eternal happiness but left me satisfied with the new ending. Nothing was missing and the ending summed up the stories very well.
In addition to presenting the classic lessons that accompany each individual story, the musical still manages to present new lessons through the combination of these classic tales. The risk Disney took to produce a movie containing such iconic characters was worth it in the end.
Your favorite tales will never again be the same (in a good way) after watching the film. We all know them as we memorized them from books we read and bedtime stories we were told, but now that we’re all grown, this movie provides a whole new view and a chance for us to see the tales that shaped our childhood and taught us life’s most valuable lessons.
