The Proud Princess

Since I was little, this has been one of my favorite fairy tales. Generally, it is one of the best fairy tales ever made. It touches me how beautiful the story is, and it saddens me how as time goes on - the older you get - you realize that it just doesn't work like that. It's simply not that beautifully simple. You can't do anything about it, that's just the way it is. But it's nice to go back to the time when you think it could be different. (07/12/2013)

Although Bořivoj Zeman's The Incredibly Sad Princess was even better, it doesn't mean that I had a bad time watching The Proud Princess. The fact that it makes a lot of people annoyed, and makes candy-laden Christmas TV viewers reach breathlessly for the TV remote, is, I think, mostly due to its more-than-frequent reruns. I have to laugh at the people who find ideological ambiguities in The Proud Princess and consider it communist propaganda of the coarsest kind. Not that I deny their observations (at least the less paranoid ones), I can simply ignore them, they don't interest me. I'm watching a fairytale, not a newsreel. Moreover, it suits Alena Vránová and Vladimír Ráž so well, and Dalibor Vačkář's music is undoubtedly one of the best that has been created for domestic cinema. (23/12/2014)

There are many interesting things about The Proud Princess. What is attractive is the phenomenon of doing it first, as if no fairy tales had been made before the war. But this refined Krasomila was a new opening phenomenon for a renewed genre that had become so typical of the entire State Film period that it was simply impossible to miss. It’s a very successful film from the problematic years of Czech cinema, a very popular fairy tale that should have had a sequel in the 1970s. So we are left with the immortal story of the brave King Miroslav and the princess from the Midnight Kingdom, who was no longer proud after meeting him... I don't bother watching the rerun every year, but it's interesting to watch the dual story of a love tale that changed several lives of its creators, but also the face of the genre in the Czech context. I'm also quite amused by how the film has been praised regularly since its inception and mentioned with every new Czech fairy tale. (01/01/2017)