Au royaume des fées

This is a great old short. The backgrounds are very intricate, fun and colorful. This is a perfect double feature with A Trip to the Moon (1903), especially if you're the kind of person that likes watching these extremely old films on youtube, like me.

This is the most beautiful production I've seen from Melies. The visuals will have you mesmerized - simply stunning!

It's about a princess that is taken away from her home by and evil witch... a prince and his men will journey to rescue her.

Yes this film is worth the 15 minutes or so to watch!

9/10

This short fantasy feature is quite interesting and creative, with an involved story that is enjoyable to watch despite the somewhat unrefined nature of the production. Méliès made "Kingdom of the Fairies" just a year after his gem "Trip to the Moon", and it uses many of the same skillful techniques, with some different and equally imaginative settings.

The story starts with a princess taken captive by a witch, and from there the plot is quite detailed and interesting. You have to pay close attention, since there are no inter-titles to explain the action (it seems possible that the picture may have had a spoken narrative that was intended to be read while it was running), but there is enough detail that the main events are not that hard to figure out.

Méliès creates several interesting little worlds during the course of the action, and most of them work well. Even the few visual effects that are less convincing cinematic ally are still interesting to look at. Even aside from the story, it's interesting just to look at all the details and the possible associations that they suggest.

This is the kind of very old, pioneering film that might only be of great interest to silent film fans or historians, but anyone who appreciates the more widely-known Méliès features would probably find "Kingdom of the Fairies" well worth taking the time to watch.

Following on the heels of his hugely important A Trip to the Moon, Georges Méliès directed this feature. Like its predecessor it was another narrative film. It was one of several that the director made that fell into the fairy tale category. A princess is abducted by a witch and a gallant prince embarks on quest to save her. His adventure takes him to the ocean floor where he encounters fairies from the court of Neptune and is subsequently taken on a journey inside a giant whale. He then battles the witch and her minions in the final conflict.

There is a lot of great imagery here and it exists in a great colour tinted print. The fantastical underwater world is particularly nice. There are a lot of different sets for a film of this age. Many of them are quite elaborate and detailed. Like other films of the time it has no inter-titles, so it wouldn't be very easy knowing exactly what is going on without a narrator. Fortunately there are versions of this with a voice-over, which was how the feature was meant to be presented in any case. But even without this it is consistently very interesting visually and is a great little fantasy adventure. Méliès was easily the most important director of the earliest years of cinema and this feature quite clearly indicates why.

There's a lot of Gilliam and Kubrick to be found in Georges Melies fifteen minute phantasmagoria epic A Kingdom of the Faires made 30 an 40 years before they were born. Melies pulls out all the stops with this wildly color tinted happily ever after nightmare featuring hallucinogenic compositions and early experimentation with miniatures and fish tanks between camera and set.

A King insults a witch who exacts revenge by abducting the princess to a far off lair. The Prince pursues, has to undergo a series of challenges including a stop in Atlantis but ultimately vanquishes the witch with enormous assistance from the good fairy Aurora by drowning her.

Melies moves everything but the camera in this multi set-up (backdrop) picaresque struggle between good and evil lush in opulent design and color; epitomized in the stunning turn of the century pop-out book finale. Despite its creaky look Kingdom is filled with wildly etched compositions of audacity and comedy all from the mind and eye of the neglected pioneer Melies.