In response to Alexandra Scott's post, I did not find this movie to be sweet. In fact, I was a little disturbed. While it is clear that her world view is shaped by fairy-tales, Laura-Anne seems very bent on the fact that she will not be happy if she does not have a man to protect her and love her. She goes through 3 boyfriends (Ben, she dates twice), despite the fact that they do not treat her well at all. Perhaps watching this movie was so strange because she is only ten, yet she feels her happiness depends on having a man in her life, and that she knows she is set for motherhood. This might not be so weird if she wasn't so young. Maybe I was also shocked by the very adult like demeanor behind these children's actions, but I feel like living in such a poor town as Siddick means that innocence is left behind very quickly, and I feel like this is where I felt there was a conflict. Obviously Laura-Anne has childlike fantasies of love and being a princess who is loved by a strong and handsome prince, yet the thing is that her "childhood" fairy tale is not innocent at all.
This makes the film more interesting, and I think Laura-Anne's entire worldview is summed up when she says on Halloween, "Laura Anne was too old for the children's party, and too young for the teens, she was stranded somewhere in between." (Or something to that nature.)
Laura-Anne lives in a place where there is no escape from the harshness of that life, but it is whenever she is outside playing in the surf or on the tree that you remember that she is still mostly a child, and that is why she dreams.
I believe that her fairy-tale fantasies are created because if she can't make her life seem like a fairy tale, even in its simplicity, the reality of her situation becomes very clear. However, she makes the story fit into her life, so that it is possible for her fairy tale dream of finding love to become a reality in the small and poor town that she lives in. The beauty of the movie is that her simple life can be transformed into a fairy tale with a few rhyming words.
It is clear that Laura Anne developed some strange and negative ideas about herself from fairytales, but we must be reminded that she is in the working class in the British Isles, where culture has reached its absolute low in the world. The options for such people seem to be becoming a mindless "Chav" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chav or to follow terrific role models like Amy Winehouse or Cheryl Cole who are deliberately put out as celebrities to teach young children terrible life lessons and morals. In relation to that, Laura Anne is clearly developing very healthy beliefs and is hopefully representative of young British women rebelling against the sewage of their cultural brainwashing.
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