Reversal of the Heart
2011 · 13m · Estados Unidos
Directed by Carolyn Chrisman
Genres: adventure, animation, fantasy
A cowardly prince commits a terrible crime by refusing to face his prey directly, and his fiancée must pay for it. The princess is transformed into a dragon until the curse is broken and the crime avenged, and she searches for a way to become human again.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Gender-flipped vengeance narratives are a dime a dozen, but Chrisman's refusal to make the princess's dragon form a power fantasy—instead keeping her monstrous, searching, diminished—is genuinely perverse in a way that feels earned rather than contrarian for its own sake.
The film sits confidently in the lineage of dark fairy-tale retellings (Grimm, Perrault's subversions), but its formal restraint—favoring mythic weight over spectacle—and the precise animation choices that render the dragon's suffering as something almost elegiac mark it as a work aware of its tradition and pushing against it with rigor.
The singular choice here is the decision to animate the princess-turned-dragon in muted, almost watercolor tones while keeping the court in sharper relief—a budget constraint weaponized into a visual metaphor for her exile that makes the whole film feel designed rather than merely rendered.