RAT KING NUTCRACKER FOUR REALMS SERIES

RAT KING NUTCRACKER FOUR REALMS SERIES

It doesn’t help that, per Nutcracker ballet tradition, the protagonist learns about the world through a series of dances presented to her in a pageant. One unnecessary makeover later, Clara is embracing her role as a princess of the realms.įor a clever girl, Clara is not very curious about the cultures or logistics of the land she now co-rules over. This information is mostly relayed to Clara via her aggressively friendly co-ruler: the saccharine-sweet Sugar Plum Fairy ( Keira Knightley, hamming it up). We’re calling it the Fourth Realm now as its leader, Mother Ginger (a delightfully over-the-top pirate played by Helen Mirren), has gone rogue. Once there, she learns that her mother ruled over the land alongside four other monarchs, one from each realm: The Land of the Flowers, The Land of Snowflakes, The Land of Sweets, and The Land of Amusements-er, scratch that last one. The mystery of the egg leads Clara to another world: The Four Realms. For Clara, it is a locked egg sculpture, sans the key that opens it. She gifts the kids posthumously with one last present each. Marie’s absence lingers heavily over the narrative as the family prepares to celebrate their first Christmas without her. Clara’s mother, Marie, has died, leaving behind three children and a bereft husband (Matthew MacFadyen, playing the kind of bumbling, emotionally stunted character he does so well). Mackenzie Foy ( Murph in Interstellar) makes for a wide-eyed, determined, and charming Clara, the teenaged girl with an engineer’s mind and a grieving family. One part The Chronicles of Narnia, one part Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, and one part The Nutcracker ballet (complete with an updated score arrangement of Tchaikovsky’s iconic music by James Newton Howard), and with a dash of Hugo thrown in for good measure. The Nutcracker and the Four Realms is a fantastical amalgamation of what has come before. Hoffman’s “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King.” So it’s no surprise Disney wanted to get a piece of that public domain action. While the Tchaikovsky music was never apiece with previous animated Disney classics that have become an open mine for unending live-action remakes, The Nutcracker and the Four Realms taps into a similar kind of collective nostalgia with its (very) loose adaptation of E.T.A. Originally choreographed by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov to a score by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky back in 1892, countless theaters and ballet companies around the world mount productions of The Nutcracker every year. The Nutcracker ballet is a longstanding holiday tradition.

Rat king nutcracker four realms