Jezerní královna (1998)

In a kingdom, King Richard ruled with his wife, and they had one son, Victor. In a lake lived the evil and cruel Lake Queen, who wanted to marry Prince Victor. She had also kidnapped the other princesses from the surrounding kingdoms so that the prince would have no choice but to marry her. Using a magic wand, she turned the princesses into swans. A swan keeper watched over them to stop them from flying away. Nevertheless, Princess Odette managed to escape and fly off. It ended badly for the keeper, who was thrown to a large predatory fish as food. The escape also ended badly for Odette: while she was a swan, Victor’s servant Stephen shot her in the wing with an arrow. The princess changed from a swan into a girl, and the prince took her, wounded, to the castle. The princess recovered, but she could not speak to Stephen—she was mute. Before she could write down who she was and where she came from, the Lake Queen, aided by her servant Redbeard, kidnapped her from the castle and took her back to the lake. But the prince had fallen in love with her and intended to free her from her enchantment. All that remained of her at the castle was a small swan feather. Prince Victor had no choice but to set out on a journey to find his beloved Odette and free her from captivity. By chance, he met a hermit sorcerer in the forest, who sold him two magic potions. One of them later helped him meet Princess Odette in a dream. Eventually, by the lake, he met the water spirit’s wife, whose husband, a water spirit, had been turned into a shell by the Lake Queen. She helped him find the Lake Queen in her underwater castle in the middle of the lake. The Lake Queen also dragged children underwater, where they had to serve her as slaves and gather pearls from the lake bed. She pronounced a cruel sentence on Odette: day and night, she had to sort the pearls the children collected at night. The water spirit’s wife eventually helped her with this, and later Prince Victor did too, disguised as the servant Stephen. The shells opened only at night and only a tiny crack; only a thin child’s hand could fit through, so the cook was not allowed to feed the children too much. On his journey through the forest, Prince Victor also rescued his friend Prince Eugene from a band of robbers. Prince Eugene, the brother of Prince Mark, who was engaged to the kidnapped Princess Margaret, was sent back home to ask all the kings—the fathers of the kidnapped princesses—for help. With the aid of a magic potion, Victor met Odette in a dream, and she then told him what awaited him at the Lake Queen’s castle. The water spirit’s wife also advised them to switch roles with Stephen: Stephen would pass himself off as Prince Victor, and the prince as his servant Stephen. They did so, but in the end the Lake Queen saw through the disguise using magic and punished Prince Victor and Princess Odette. She also learned that the kings were coming with their armies to free their daughters. But the queen said the lake was the best fortress: no one could get underwater without her permission, except as a drowned person. With the help of the water spirit’s wife and all the children, Victor, Odette, and Thomas escaped from the cell where the Lake Queen had imprisoned them as punishment, and locked the Lake Queen and her adviser, Redbeard, in their place. But the queen slipped through the bars of the cell and got away. She mounted a horse and fled through the forest from the lake, where the servant Stephen happened to see her. The Lord Chamberlain found the water spirit transformed into a shell and, using the Lake Queen’s magic wand, restored the water spirit and all the remaining enchanted princesses to human form. He briefly turned Stephen into a horse so that Stephen could help him catch the fleeing cruel Lake Queen and bring her back, which he managed to do. The freed water spirit took the queen’s magic wand and turned the Lake Queen to stone, and Prince Victor turned Stephen back into a human. Everything ends happily, with the engagement of Prince Victor and Princess Odette.