Happily N'Ever After
Happily N'Ever After is a 2007 animated film set in a troperiffic fairy tale land. Cinderella's Evil Stepmother gains control of the land's magic and uses it to cause all the fairy tales to have unhappy endings.
The film was critically panned, and failed to make its budget back at the box office, but made enough in home video to justify a Direct to DVD sequel.
Tropes used in Happily N'Ever After include:
- Abnormal Ammo: The Dwarves use diamonds as ammo.
- Adorkable: Mambo
- All-Natural Gem Polish
- All-Star Cast: Sarah Michelle Gellar as Ella, Sigourney Weaver as the Stepmother, Patrick Warburton as the Prince, George Carlin as the Wizard, Wallace Shawn and Andy Dick as the bumbling sidekicks, ...
- Freddie Prinze Jr as Rick, the main character...
- Apple of Discord: The hero causes the wolves to fight over who is stronger with this.
- Blondes Are Evil: The Stepmother.
- Completely Different Title: Both films were retitled in Brazil to fit the same format as the Completely Different Title that had already been given to (the completely unrelated) Hoodwinked.
- Damsel in Distress: Played with. Prince Humperdink hopes Ella is one, but in the end she kicks more ass than he does.
- Disney Villain Death: Subverted: the stepmother is pushed in a bottomless fiery pit, but she flies back to the room thanks to the scepter. She's defeated when Ella push her in the dimensional portal.
- Evil Stepmother: Ella's stepmother.
- For the Lulz: The Evil stepmother Frieda decides to take over the Wizards' wand and give a bad ending to all the various fairy tales... for fun...
- Fractured Fairy Tale: The whole point of the film. Even when evil is vanquished and everybody gets a happy ending, not all of them are traditional (Ella, for instance, decides not to marry the Prince).
- Greek Chorus: Mambo and Munk.
- Impossible Hourglass Figure: The Stepmother.
- Indecisive Deconstruction: Happily N'Ever After is a Partial Deconstruction; it comes close to deconstructing the typical Disney fairytale storyline, but since it's a kids' movie couldn't go all the way.
- Limited Animation: Largely due to sending animation to several studios even though it had a moderate budget.
- Name's the Same: Prince Humperdink is also the name of the villain in The Princess Bride.
- Non-Indicative Name: The Italian title ("Cinderella and the 007 Dwarves") implies that the dwarves are important to the plot. They're not.
- Off-Model: The Film had three Canadian studios and one Japanese studio. This is the result.
- Orcus on His Throne: Notable aversion: as soon as her mooks fail to capture Elle, Frieda decides to go after her herself.
- Our Trolls Are Different: Huge, dumb monsters with bunny ears.
- Pimped-Out Dress: Cinderella's magically made dress, which is Pink Means Feminine.
- Prince Charmless: Prince Humperdink.
- Title Drop
Happily N'Ever After 2: Snow White Another Bite @ the Apple provides examples of:
- Art Evolution: Inverted. The animation is much worse, on par with or worse than fellow sequel Space Chimps 2, Captain Power and the early Transformers Generation 2 commercials.
- Ascended Extra: The 7 Dwarfs. They appeared in a scene in the first film.
- Bishonen Line: The Evil Stepmother of this movie starts out ugly and is turned beautiful.
- Black Best Friend: Bo Peep to Snow White. Also, Little Red Riding Hood seems to be Snow White's Arab Best Friend, complete with headscarf-esque hood.
- Continuity Nod: A picture of Ella and Rick.
- Dance Party Ending: The song even has "dance party" in the lyrics.
- Franchise Killer
- Heel Face Pirouette: In Happily N'Ever After, Rumpelstiltskin starts out evil and later turns good. In the sequel he's back to being evil, with no explanation given.
- The Other Darrin: None of the voice actors returned. Kirk Thornton replaced Wallace Shawn.