My Life as a Fairy Tale / Snow Queen

wish it was available on DVD but our old one was broken so we got this one - thanks

I've had this video for years and I just recently watched it again, remembering how much I adore it. It's hokey at times and the animation is not that good, but the songs are catchy (to the point of using the basic Sound Recorder and an old microphone taped to my TV to get the music on my computer). I still get chills from that scene before the actual feature starts, when it shows the queen turning the princes into swans with the creepy music.All in all, a wonderful nostalgic movie.

the story was similar, but the animation was not. I still cannot find the one I watched as a child.

I grew up with Danny Kaye’s version of “Hans Christian Anderson,” and it is an excellent movie that I would love to see on Amazon Video. This version, however, was tedious. The title character regularly accosts strangers to tell them his fanciful stories. The most unbelievable thing to me was that so many people that he forced himself upon were receptive to his storytelling instead of demanding that the authorities to lock this somewhat unstable person away. I can see that a small child might be interested in the stories, but I certainly wouldn't want any child of mine to emulate his abhorrent behavior. All in all, I found it tremendously annoying, and only watched half of it before I gave up to come here and warn off likeminded Amazon customers. Frankly, I amazed that my patience lasted that long. I gave it 2 stars because, after all, it is about Hans Christian Andersen, whose stories I loved as a child.

I do not know much about this movie's origins, but the story is quite simple. It's adapted from Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale, THE WILD SWANS, in which a wicked enchantress casts a spell on twelve boys, turning them to swans(...). A fairy tale as lovely as this deserves a classic treatment, and visually, this animated movie is quite lovely to look at. The animation, the backgrounds, and the stylized artistry are all gorgeously rendered... almost something inbetween a Disney movie and Russian/Czecholsylvakian/Danish paintings. It's obviously an older movie, too; it's plain to see how somewhat static the animation looks in comparison to today's features and the classical-sounding music sounds like it could have been recorded from the 50's. I do not know if this movie was a success or not, but it is an interesting, beautiful tapestry of a fairy tale. Unfortunately, its U.S. release is another matter. Released by JUST FOR KIDS!, it appears that there are a lot of flaws which bog down this picture. The most noticeable oddity are the songs. Yes, the film is a musical, but I have a feeling that was more opera-oriented. In the U.S., however, the songs are rock/pop ditties by Bullets. Normally, I am not against this (some Japanese Anime films which had rescores for the U.S. I saw -- notably KIKI'S DELIVERY SERVICE and CASTLE IN THE SKY -- had been able to get away with this quite successfully), but here in SWANS the rock music, although catchy, clashes horrendously with the fairy tale quality of the picture. In addition to which the U.S. voice work is a mixed bag. The voices are mostly phony, cartoonish-sounding and would probably work well in a different film, but they not only fail to match the characters, the synchronization is so painful that the results come off as laughably bad. (Added to which, the brothers and sister sound older than they should... even when they are children!) I have seen very few dubs of foreign animated films which come across as so poor (because I've found more good ones than horrible ones), but SWANS happens to be one such example. It's no wonder that this one is already in obscurity. The movie is beautiful to look at, yes, but the painful-to-watch Americanization "treatment" it got ultimately seals its doom. This is a shame, for this really could have been a pretty good treat for kids. The saddest fact, though, is that even youngsters will turn down the U.S. soundtrack when they notice how it does not match up to the visuals. Even the worst dubbed Japanese Anime I've seen (few fortunately) are more watchable than this one.