YMMV / Billy Elliot

This film provides examples of:

• Awesome Music: "A Town Called Malice."
• Memetic Mutation: "DANCE, BILLY!!!" and also "HE FUCKING DID IT!!!"
• Retroactive Recognition: Jamie Bell is much better known now for playing Tintin in The Adventures of Tintin (2011).
• Tear Jerker: "Give the boy a fucking chance..."

The musical adaptation provides examples of:

• Awesome Music: In a West End musical, this is a given. The show is notable for its blend of different music styles and dance-related tunes.
  • "The Stars Look Down" is a solemn and moving opening song, expressing the miners' hopes and the story's theme of solidarity.
  • "Shine" is a funny and rythmic hymn to dancing, daring, self-expression and art itself, ending up in an impressive crescendo.
  • "Expressing Yourself" is a very catchy and funny song to celebrate the story's theme of individuality and the age-old Be Yourself Aesop. Like "Shine" it starts up soft but the pace increases into a frenzied number.
  • "Angry Dance", fitting the trope it names is an extremely intense number perfectly illustrating the Darkest Hour, and Billy's rage-filled dancing, which ends in a gritting crescendo punctuated by the ominous sound of the cops' nightsticks and Billy screaming his heart out.
  • "Electricity" is as good in music as it is in choreography, successfully mixing the famous Swan Lake theme and modern electro-sounding music into a powerful illustration of Billy's emotions he expresses in dancing.
  • "Once We Were Kings" illustrate the downside of Billy's personal triumph by the strike's failure, with the miners' melancholic and moving lament about the end of their era, singing about being beaten but not down and having fought for what they believed, in a sort of reverse "The Stars Look Down".
  • The Finale is an impressive mix of the aforementioned "Shine" and "Expressing Yourself", and themes of solidarity and individuality.
  Chorus: ''The world's grey enough without making it worse. All we need is individuality."
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: "Expressing Yourself" features gigantic dancing dresses. No people, just dresses. It's supposed to be unrealistic, but that doesn't alleviate the weirdness very much.
  • Some performances of "Merry Christmas, Maggie Thatcher" feature a giant, puppeteer-esque INFLATABLE Maggie Thatcher◊ looming over the stage/audience like a Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon from Hell. She is nightmarish, captivating, horrifying... and never, ever mentioned again.
• Crosses the Line Twice: "Merry Christmas, Maggie Thatcher" is a venomous screed against Thatcher and Michael Hesaltine, that celebrates the thought of her death in an upbeat manner. Doubles for productions having little kids swearing.
• Moment of Awesome: "Electricity" is definitely this for Billy. His audition was a disaster, looking shabby and fearful, having trouble recording back his tape with a pencil, and now having hit a fellow student. And just as he could not sink any lower, he soars, pouring his heart out in a breathtaking, gorgeous choreography, wowing the jury as well as the audience. And so he earns himself his place in the Royal Ballet School.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Tom Holland is now best known as Spider-Man.
  • David Alvarez won a Tony for playing Billy before he'd go on to star as Bernardo in West Side Story (2021).
• Tear Jerker: The "Angry Dance" is intense, emotionally gripping, conveying both Billy's and the miners' anger, distress and frustration reaching their breaking point.

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