I’m getting more and more excited about The Red Shoes. For an example of why this movie is so gleefully fucked in the head, here’s the video box:

This is the image they used in the children’s section of the video store to advertise the very best of the movie and make you want to rent it for your child.

My memory is not perfect, but I saw this movie on VHS about four years ago, so it’s all pretty fresh. Key elements:

• Hans Christian Anderson is summoned to his friend’s house; she’s recently lost her husband, and her kid is pretending to be sick to get out of school. (They never even ask if she’s freaked our that her dad is dead; they just think she’s wicked for pretending to be ill.) She is, of course, playing with dolls on the sly, because little girls are never acting out; they’re just wicked.
• She’s supposed to be about 10, I think, but the actress was older, and so when he calls her "Little Karen" it gets a little…statutorylicious.
• He asks her to help him tell a story, which turns into playing a game with him, and the game consists entirely of trying to catch her being willful or indepedent/demonstrating any kind of self-love or self-interest/changing her story, Law and Order style/not being penitent enough. The game takes the form of a puppet show that we see as a ballet. I cannot tell you how creepy it is to watch this guy delight in manipulating a girl into saying something, and then immediately punishing the puppet that represents her.
  This was in the children’s section.
• He finally stops the game when the puppet representing her is footless, destitute, and begging an archangel asking him to forgive her or kill her because it’s all she deserves. Little Karen bursts into hysterical sobbing and runs into her mother’s arms, screaming she’ll never be wicked again.

  Please remember, this is a 10-year-old whose crime was claiming to be too sick to go to school.

Also remember that none of this even touches on the actual fairy tale, in which an orphaned girl is forced by The Devil Himself to dance forever in a pair of red shoes that she liked because they reminded her of her DEAD MOM.

Who can’t wait?! Oh, that would be me.