How to Wake a Princess

After a long wait King Dalimil and Queen Eliška finally have a daughter, Princess Růženka. The queen's sister Melánie is consumed with envy and lays a curse: on the day the princess turns seventeen she will prick her finger and fall into a deep sleep along with the whole kingdom. At the palace every possible way of preventing that day is tried. Václav Vorlíček's Czechoslovak fairy tale film takes Sleeping Beauty and turns it into comedy. Vorlíček is counted a master of the form and his films were shown on television in Central Europe for generations. The cast is full of well known Czech actors of the period: Jiří Sovák, Vladimír Menšík, František Filipovský. The telling makes fun of the fatalism of the fairy tale; the people trying to break the curse keep doing the wrong thing.