Most of the time, I'll compare if the character has a counterpart, though there are some instances where they simply don't and we have to improvise.
Daughter of the Dark Fairy;
Mal vs. Faybelle Thorn
I was prepared to immediately give Faybelle the win by virtue of being my favorite Ever After High (EAH) character.
But Mal can turn into a dragon, and there's nothing in the EAHverse that suggests Faybelle can do the same. Mal is wholeheartedly trying to be a "good" person, while Faybelle is learning that her role as The Dark Fairy doesn't have to be her entire identity, and she can be a bit nicer without totally losing her acerbic personality.
Disney's Descendants came out in July of 2015, to about as much acclaim as a Disney Channel movie can get that's not called High School Musical.
Simply put, the sons and daughters of certain villains are chosen to go to Auradon Prep with the children of heroes and good princesses. It has (had?) webisodes and books.
Sounds familiar (& more competently distributed, maintained, and diverse) to a certain Mattel property, doesn't it?
With any property like this, Disney will push one of the stars to be the Next Big Thing. Here, it's Sofia Carson, who plays Evie (the blue girl). Disney loves reusing it's stars though - Dove Cameron (Mal; The purple girl) stars in Liv and Maddie as...both of them, and China Anne McClain was the lead in ANT Farm.
(China voices a completely different character than Uma in the animated show. My friend just informed me that her sister voices Freddie in the show now. I have no idea when that happened. If there's one thing this franchise royally messed up with, it's the continuity between mediums. There's plenty of characters with dolls and webisode and book presence that have no mention in the movies.)
Interestingly, quite a few characters ended up being written out - there was a son of Aladdin and Jasmine who was even cast and costumed but never made it into any film, a daughter of Rapunzel, and Audrey, daughter of Aurora - The Sleeping Beauty.
She was actually the "antagonist" of the first movie. I say that, lightly, because villain is too strong. Audrey was simply upset and confused at a bunch of uncouth kids showing up to her doorstep without even trying to fit in or learn...and then her boyfriend falls for the lead? Hoo boy.
She doesn't appear in any capacity in the sequel. I think they say she's on a carriage ride through a forest for the duration.
I'm not here to recount the stories of either movie to you too deeply - it's so nonsensical and foolish that I'd have to refresh my memory to be accurate - but they are both very good fun, goofy times.
Why am I looking at the soundtrack of this instead of the first movie? Well...I only like two songs from the first movie - Evil Like Me and Rotten To the Core. Technically, it's just one, seeing as the latter is a cover of one of the songs by Sofia Carson.
There were also songs that didn't make the final cut - covers of Poor Unfortunate Souls and Kiss the Girl, from The Little Mermaid.
Personally, I'm not fond of them. I think if they let China do a simple cover of PUS (ha) instead of embellishing it with modern day noises, it would have been pretty good. This? No.
Actually, I don't think any covers of old Disney songs make it into this movie.
The first one...blessed us...with a very strange cover of Be Our Guest. Perhaps the director heard our confused cries and gratefully let these stay on the soundtrack but out of the film.
So, with all that said, let's go. I'm going to try and do these in the order they appear - but the soundtrack involves songs that were webisode-exclusive, and I've got to remember what those are to avoid them. The only one worth listening to is Rather Be With You anyway.
The first song - and first song released period for this soundtrack - is by far my favorite. Premiering an entire three months before the movie or the rest of the soundtrack, here's Ways to Be Wicked;
