The Polar Bear King and Girl Quest Fairy Tales

Once upon a time, I was a little girl who loved movies based on fairy tales. This was a long, long time ago. Twenty years, in fact... or maybe it was yesterday?  Anyhow, if someone asked me if I liked Cinderella, I would look at them with my big, bluish-green-gray eyes and say, "Which one?" Most people would look at me, quite baffled at that little girl wouldn't know what they were talking about or that she knew there were multiple Cinderella movies. Either way, I'd continue, "There's the Disney one, the Muppets one, Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella, and Cinderfella. So... which one?"

They usually walked away at that point or my grandmother would start laughing at them and explain to them that I really liked fairytales or something like that. She still likes to tell me the story of how I was with fairytale movies.

They're just lucky they never asked me about Snow White or Peter Pan!

I just liked movies based on fairytales. While Disney was... nice, there were others out there that fit the books better.

Maybe I should explain something else... I'm sure every person who likes fairy tales remembers that moment when they realized that the Disney versions were... lighter and softer. Most people ended up... disturbed at that time. Everyone has that moment in time. That one incident that reveals how they'll see fairy tales for the rest of their lives. If they don't, they should.

See, mine was The Little Mermaid. My mom bought me a picture book that told the original Hans Christian Anderson story. I'd already watched the movie billions of times. Really. Everyone always seemed divided between referring to me as The Little Mermaid or a monkey. So, I loved the movie because it involved water and swimming and fish and all the stuff I loved. Ariel wanted to walk on land. I wanted to swim under the sea!

Then, my mom read the book to me. And she didn't try to sugarcoat it or lie to me about how it ended. She read it word-for-word and let me see the pictures and everything. So, in the end when she jumped off the boat? I wasn't really sure what she was doing. It wasn't until years later that I realized it was genuine suicide, but I knew that she became a sort of angel after turning into sea foam like all mermaids. I knew she didn't kill the prince even though she was supposed to.

So, I became fascinated by the true fairy tale versions of the movies I was watching while loving the new takes on the fairy tales themselves. For that reason, I never really hated Disney. I just thought that it was rather sad that they watered good stories down so much.

I still won't forgive them for leaving out the flaming chariot pulled by dragons, though. That is unforgivable, kids!

It really is!

Well, at some point, my grandmother found this movie called The Polar Bear King which was supposedly based off a Norwegian fairy tale.  Why? When I was five, we had a foreign exchange student (high school) from Norway. So, she brought it home and I watched it...

And I watched it...

And I watched it. I watched that movie so much as a little kid that the tape eventually got stuck in the player and broke. In other words, I couldn't watch it again. However, it imprinted on my mind.  I always remembered The Polar Bear King. It was stuck there. Why?

It's a movie about a princess who lives in a kingdom in the north where it's always cold and there is always snow, but she dreams of living and finding love in someplace warm... a place of summer. One day, she meets a polar bear with a golden chain. He gives it to her under the condition that he returns with him to his home and lives with him as his bride. She agrees, but her father tries to stop it. Well, obviously he fails and she goes with the polar bear to his kingdom where it is always summer. Every night, the polar bear transforms into a man, and they share a bed. Every year, the princess gives birth to a child, but the child is taken away by her mother-in-law, unknown to everyone. Eventually, the princess asks to visit her parents and the polar bear acquiesces. While at home, telling her father and sisters about her life and the fact that she's never seen the polar bear's human face, the sisters grow suspicious of their sister's suitor and convince her to take a candle. They tell her to light it and look upon her lover's face.

Well, if you know the story of Cupid and Psyche, you know what happens next. The polar bear was a handsome prince under the curse of a witch. If the princess had waited but one month more, everything would've turned out right. The curse would be broken and the witch would have no power. Unfortunately, the princess didn't wait and now the Prince had to marry the witch.

What does the princess do? She goes and rescues her prince, of course!

That's the crux of why I loved the story. The beginning was all Beauty and the Beast with implied sex (but not bestiality) and mostly romantic drivel. If it kept on being boring, I would've hated it. But once the prince leaves to marry the witch, it gets interesting. Suddenly you have the helpless waif-flower of a princess tricking the evil witch and climbing castles with magic boots.  It was bad ass!

And in the end, good conquers evil and everyone lives happily ever after!

It's one thing I never understood with Disney. The Polar Bear King is loosely based off the fairytale White-Bear-King-Valemon. In addition to that one Norwegian fairy tale, there are at least ten others of a similar nature and origin (from the same general region). That's not even counting The Snow Queen and Cupid & Psyche. So, there are at least twelve fairy tales or fairy-tale-like-stories where a girl goes on a quest and wins, usually with a bit of help but most fairy tale heroes have help too. Unfortunately, Disney decides to adapt two fairy tales where the heroine falls asleep, one fairy tale where the heroine sells her soul, one where the heroine gets others to do the work for her while she waits around acting meek and poor, and then completely rewrite several others so the heroine is actually worth something.

Hello! There are ready-made action heroines WAITING to be adapted to a fairy tale!

So, why is it that the only version of them that I've seen is in The Snow Queen, a made for TV movie that no one will watch unless bored or The Polar Bear King, which doesn't even have it's own Wikipedia page and has it's flaws? There's a ton of untapped potential here and it's so sad to see it, because I love fairytales and I'd love to see them adapted to movies rather the same old tired ones getting adapted over and over and over again. I mean, how many Snow Whites and Cinderellas are there now? How many Beauty and the Beasts?

It's just a shame that people complain about Hollywood doing the same thing because there are no new ideas when there are plenty of good old ideas that are being ignored.

What's wrong with them?

Update 2/1/2013:

By the way, guess who totally called it in this area? ME! I found out recently that this year Disney is releasing an American 3D Animated movie called Frozen based (loosely) on The Snow Queen. Who's Awesome? Me!