Monday, April 26, 2010

Sleighs 'n' Roses

(aka "How a moment of compassion can screw your head up for ever")

A couple of days ago, my mother showed up on our doorstep in a true 'Balkan grandparent' fashion - meaning, armed to the teeth with sweets, home-made traditional dishes, and random gifts for grandchildren. Being an adult (no, really!) I managed to refrain from burrowing into the goody bag for a respectable amount of time, busying myself with brewing coffee and distributing fizzy drinks instead (we Serbs have a thing for tormenting our livers)...

...only to join the kids in squeeing over the latest Ancestor Allowance as soon as the front door creaked shut on the said ancestor's skirtsuit-encased back.

It turned out to be quite an experience.

You see, the 'entertainment' part of the offering contained a DVD of 1957's "Snezhnaya koroleva" - one of the first feature-length animated movies 'yours truly' has seen as a preschooler. Which wouldn't register as more than a blip on the remembrance radar, if it wasn't also the first animated movie Dags has spent crying over 'the bad guy'.

Yep. Dags and the underdogs go that far back.

And you can pick your jaw up from the floor right now - I didn't say I saw it the year (or even the decade!) it came out, did I?

For some inexplicable reason, the whole 'BFF' theme didn't impress ickle Dags at all: apart from the initial "That Kay is an evil boy, wanting to burn the Snow Queen like that!", the kids' characters left her completely 'blah'. Poor Gerda's trials and tribulations were met with barely concealed glee ("Now the Queen will be able to spend more time with Kay!") and the remaining movie time was spent contemplating the sad fate of the slush sovereign, who "had to live without love, because everyone who could love hated her".

Kids' logic. It a wonderful, wonderful thing...

That very same evening I snuggled with my kids on the living room sofa, fully intent on atoning for my childhood delusions by rooting for the BFF. As it turned out, it was already way too late...




You see... Gerda spent her life surrounded by family and friends. And all the Snow Queen had was Kay.

2 comments:

  1. Dags has a blog! Babs will follow! I missed the snark-lock the minute I quit Twitter.

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  2. Was this a dubbed version of a Russian-language animated movie? I think I've seen the same one at my ex-not-really-in-laws'.

    You're quite right about Gerda. It's hard to say what I would have thought as a kid based on the movie, which I just saw a few years ago. I read the story, of course (I loved stories and fairy tales as a kid) and it gave me more of a sense that Kay did not really want to be with the Queen.

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