skygiants

YES about the Baker's edges. One of the small things that infuriated me most is at the end, when the Baker and Jack are in the tree, and Jack says he's going to kill the Steward -- in the original, the Baker says don't, and Jack argues, and the Baker, completely numb from grief and exhaustion and over his head, just washes his hands of the whole matter -- "FINE, then kill him." And then he pauses and says, "No, don't," and you get No One Is Alone. But you need that moment of exasperated failure -- just total inability to cope, even after he's come back, even after he's decided to to try. And this film cuts that; it's such a little line, but it's so important! And he doesn't hesitate about having Red and Jack live with him at the end, either. He doesn't even have that gleefully avaricious moment of imagining everything the five gold pieces can buy. All those little human edges, sanded away.

THE BAKER'S WIFE DOESN'T EVEN GET SQUASHED. She falls off a cliff, because Disney decided it wanted to go all the way with Disney death cliches, and also, who cares about the metaphor?

The rap about the rampion is still there! "Giant's just like us, only bigger," is not, which is relevant for MORE REASONS than just the Witch's characterization. The entire opening to the second act is sliced away wholesale -- we basically go straight from Cinderella and the Prince's wedding to everyone in the forest, arguing with the giant.

I knew from ages back that there wasn't going to be a Narrator, and I was ALMOST resigned to it. I had braced myself for that going in! And in the first act you can almost get away with it, but the second act is SO HOLLOW WITHOUT HIM. (I really need to see Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson.