The charming Juliet & the King has a pair of Parisian artists stage Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in 19th-century Middle East. The animated film is playing at the Fantasia Film Festival 2025.
Director Ashkan Rahgozar has created a charming, animated feature in Juliet & the King that feels right at home beside Don Bluth’s charming Anastasia. Though Rahgozar’s film is more impressive given the fact that he did not have huge studio backing.
Julie, a would-be actress, and Jamal, a would-be playwright, cannot catch a break in the tough business of the theater in Paris of the late 1800s. Their dreams of being artists with their names ablaze on the marquees of the theaters of France are all but a pipe dream. That is, until Jamal’s benefactor, the Shah, comes to visit him in Paris. After seeing a performance, the Shah demands that Jamal come back home to put on a production of Romeo and Juliet starring himself (that’s the Shah) and Julie. Julie agrees and enters a world that she is not prepared for, one with customs and culture that she must find ways to learn and accept. A place where her presence draws the ire of the real source of power. Not the Shah but his overbearing, strict mother.
Juliet and the King, much like Shakespeare in Love, takes the aforementioned work of the Bard and uses it as a framework for a light adventure into cultural mores and understandings. The film is as nimble and light on its feet as a Disney animated musical, with its comedy coming out of human nature and not necessarily cultural. Keep in mind, this is a film that liberally uses Shakespeare’s ghost as a character and mentor of sorts to both main characters in keeping.
The fact that the antagonist of the film is an overbearing mother stuck in the dogma of tradition is interesting and not your normal animated “villain”. That she almost kills/poisons a character is, though, shades of Snow White does line up with that Disney tradition. How they deal with the antagonist speaks to the film’s always gentle nature and is almost anti-Disney in its ‘retribution’ for that antagonist (it’s hard to call them a villain).
Juliet & the King is a wonderful entry into animation that takes those Disney touchstones and repurposes them for non-Western Culture. The results are a fresh take on an old genre, the animated musical.
Juliet & the King plays the Fantasia Film Festival 2025, July 26st
The charming Juliet & the King has a pair of Parisian artists stage Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in 19th-century Middle East. The animated film is playing at the Fantasia Film Festival 2025.
Director Ashkan Rahgozar has created a charming, animated feature in Juliet & the King that feels right at home beside Don Bluth’s charming Anastasia. Though Rahgozar’s film is more impressive given the fact that he did not have huge studio backing.
Julie, a would-be actress, and Jamal, a would-be playwright, cannot catch a break in the tough business of the theater in Paris of the late 1800s. Their dreams of being artists with their names ablaze on the marquees of the theaters of France are all but a pipe dream. That is, until Jamal’s benefactor, the Shah, comes to visit him in Paris. After seeing a performance, the Shah demands that Jamal come back home to put on a production of Romeo and Juliet starring himself (that’s the Shah) and Julie. Julie agrees and enters a world that she is not prepared for, one with customs and culture that she must find ways to learn and accept. A place where her presence draws the ire of the real source of power. Not the Shah but his overbearing, strict mother.
Juliet and the King, much like Shakespeare in Love, takes the aforementioned work of the Bard and uses it as a framework for a light adventure into cultural mores and understandings. The film is as nimble and light on its feet as a Disney animated musical, with its comedy coming out of human nature and not necessarily cultural. Keep in mind, this is a film that liberally uses Shakespeare’s ghost as a character and mentor of sorts to both main characters in keeping.
The fact that the antagonist of the film is an overbearing mother stuck in the dogma of tradition is interesting and not your normal animated “villain”. That she almost kills/poisons a character is, though, shades of Snow White does line up with that Disney tradition. How they deal with the antagonist speaks to the film’s always gentle nature and is almost anti-Disney in its ‘retribution’ for that antagonist (it’s hard to call them a villain).
Juliet & the King is a wonderful entry into animation that takes those Disney touchstones and repurposes them for non-Western Culture. The results are a fresh take on an old genre, the animated musical.
Juliet & the King plays the Fantasia Film Festival 2025, July 26st
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