The seven dwarfs are identical brothers named Sunbeam, Toadstool, Fawn, Hedgehog, Robin, Cricket and Tadpole – Snow White has trouble telling them apart, and they sometimes can't tell each other apart either. Having heard of the Queen's beautiful stepdaughter, he visits the castle to enquire, but the Queen, disgruntled that she herself isn't the Prince's object of admiration, sends him away with the half-truth that Snow White was lost in the forest and is presumed dead. Though he only sees her for a moment, the Prince falls in love at first sight and resolves to find her.
As Snow White is running through the forest after the Huntsman spares her life (with every tree seeming to turn into a monster – the one sequence this version blatantly borrows from Disney), she bumps into the Prince, who is hunting in the woods. She has a large collection of mirrors, and when she speaks to the magic one, her chant is possibly the most elaborate in any Snow White adaptation: "Magic Mirror, tell me, do/Tell your mistress, tell her true/Answer me, obey my call/Who's the loveliest of all?" She also interacts with the Prince around the middle of the story. A voiceover narrator reveals that after the Queen became the kingdom's ruler following the death of Snow White's father, she oppressed the people, taxing them in order to spend their money on beauty treatments. The plot closely follows the familiar tale, but with some room for creativity here and there. Felicity and Richard live happily ever after, and are last shown with their own two children in the castle garden, where the narrator says that their favorite flower was the primrose. With this, Odelia dissolves into thin air, and her spells are broken. When the thorns stick onto her chest, Odelia is frozen in place, giving Richard the chance to kiss Felicity's lips. But just before the spell can kill him, Primrose's voice urges Richard to throw the rose that was once her body at Odelia. But just as he reaches Felicity's bedside, Odelia appears and casts a spell to slowly turn him to stone. Primrose's spirit speaks to him (still as feisty and no-nonsense as ever), and with her advice, he conquers all the obstacles. But at long last, the brave Prince Richard arrives, having had many dreams about the sleeping beauty. and, as it turns out later, contains a giant named Valdar at the bottom. First she surrounds the castle with impenetrable briars, and later she surrounds the briars with a magical pit that opens to swallow up anyone who comes near. There's a reassuring child-friendly ending that doesn't quite jibe with my memories of the tale's conclusion from childhood readings.As the hundred years pass, Odelia makes every effort to prevent a prince from finding Felicity. While the level of imagination is not as high as we'd get in a Japanese-originated production, I thought this one offered a concise 50-minute telling of the Hercules story, from childhood to adulthood, with the famous Twelve Labors condensed considerably.
I thought the action animation, particularly the battle with the Nemean lion and the encounter with the shape-shifting sea god Nereus, was quite well done. The character design here may be a tad simple for my tastes, but the backgrounds depicting the mythical era of Mount Olympus and ancient Greek legends are quite meticulously drafted and rendered.
The other films in these sets all tend to lean heavily on cartoonish designs and voices, while HERCULES is more serious and straightforward.
HERCULES also boasts a Japanese director and a number of Japanese animation personnel employed for a production that originated in the west. The others, which included ROBIN HOOD, TOM SAWYER, THE THREE MUSKETEERS, and BLACK BEAUTY were all from Burbank Films Australia, while HERCULES is from a different company, Jetlag. It turned out to be the best in terms of animation, design and storytelling. I recently picked up two Mill Creek DVD sets containing eight animated literary works for children and HERCULES (1995) was the only one in the bunch that wasn't made in the 1980s.