Donkey Skin

Donkey Skin is a French musical fantasy comedy written and directed by Jacques Demy. It follows a widowed king whose late wife made him promise to remarry only a woman more beautiful than she was. When no suitable bride can be found, he settles on his own daughter, and the princess, with help from her fairy godmother, tries to avoid the match. She asks her father for a series of seemingly impossible gifts, and when he fulfils them, she flees the palace disguised in the skin of a donkey, taking work far from home. Her path eventually crosses that of a prince from a neighbouring kingdom.

The film is based on the fairy tale by Charles Perrault. It arrived in 1970, between The Young Girls of Rochefort and A Room in Town, as the sixth of the director's seven features, and Demy also wrote the screenplay. Catherine Deneuve plays the princess, Jacques Perrin the prince, Jean Marais the king and Delphine Seyrig the fairy, with Fernand Ledoux and Micheline Presle as the rulers of a neighbouring realm.

The film runs 90 minutes and was produced by Mag Bodard through Marianne Productions and Parc Film. Its 7.8/10 critics' rating from 19 reviews is higher than its audience scores of 7/10 on IMDb from 7,700 votes and 7.2/10 on TMDB from 567 votes, pointing to stronger approval among reviewers than among general viewers.