Willow (1988)
Directed by Ron Howard
The evil Queen Bavmorda hunts the newborn princess Elora Danan, a child prophesied to bring about her downfall. When the royal infant is found by Willow, a timid farmer and aspiring sorcerer, he's entrusted with delivering her from evil.
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7 films that influenced Willow
What critics say influenced Willow
Davis is terrified of his mission for Daikinis are in the midst of a war with the forces controlled by the sinister and all-powerful sorceress Queen Bavmorda–Marsh, made up as the spitting image of the evil queen in Disney’s “ Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs .”
It is shamelessly derivative, raping countless sources to come up with what is essentially a limp riff on the Tolkien quest married to things as divergent as The Living Daylights, all three original Star Wars films, all three Indiana Jones films, Gulliver's Travels, The Bible, Masters of the Universe, and Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
So already we have the story of Moses, cross-pollinated with “ Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs .”
Warwick Davis , who looks like a cross between his former Ewok self and Linda Hunt’s Billy Kwan in The Year of Living Dangerously, is Willow Ufgood, a little person from a whole colony of little people.
This relationship was so curiously fun to watch, because it reminded me of Shakespeare's "The Taming Of The Shrew," when Petruchio proved to be the only one who could tame Kate.
George Lucas ’ and Ron Howard ’s box office bomb of 1988, Willow is a tepid and all-effects-no-story fantasy that was done far better in Wolfgang Petersen ’s The Neverending Story.
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Lucas wanted another Star Wars with Willow but he enlisted a weak cast and a hack director who could not see his vision the way Irwin Kershner (The Empire Strikes Back) and Richard Marquand (Return of the Jedi) had.
Other movies like “Excaliber” just had a grungy feel that seemed plucked from the filthiest scenes of “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.”
"Willow" is medieval mishmash from George Lucas, a sort of 10th-century "Star Wars" tossed together with a plethora of elements taken from numerous classic fables.
This is a sword-and-sorcery epic produced by George Lucas , whose “Star Wars” portrayed the same kind of material in outer space, and directed by Ron Howard , whose human touch made “Cocoon” one of the best recent science-fiction movies.
It is shamelessly derivative, raping countless sources to come up with what is essentially a limp riff on the Tolkien quest married to things as divergent as The Living Daylights, all three original Star Wars films, all three Indiana Jones films, Gulliver's Travels, The Bible, Masters of the Universe, and Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
There's no more violence in this film than a child sees in Harry Potter or Star Wars , in fact, probably less.
The studio was hoping it would be the next “Star Wars,” and there was a certain degree of reasoning behind it.