Back in June, I wrote for publication this month what I thought was a good review of the Disney XD series, Star vs The Forces of Evil. Then Disney aired the Battle for Mewni 2 hour movie and I had to throw that review away. The reason? The earlier review didn’t do justice to this show. You see, my earlier review treated the show as a typical “fish out of water” program. It is not. It is a Disney Princess story and that story is Brave.
Star vs The Forces of Evil is the story of 14 year old Star Butterfly, who is a Princess in a land called Mewni located in another dimension. She is a magic user in a land where magic is part of her royal heritage. She was sent to Earth as a “foreign exchange student” after she accidentally set her castle on fire after getting her wand and for the first season most of the stories were typical “stranger in a strange land” type stories. Living with her Earth family, Star had problems with idioms, learned to ride a bike, tried to be a matchmaker for her teacher and ended up turning her teacher into a troll. She also developed a crush on her Earth house and classmate, Marco Diaz.
Like most heroes, Star has a nemesis. His name is Ludo. He is inept and for the first two seasons was really more comic relief than a real threat to Star and her Earth family. However, Ludo is not the big bad threat to Star and her royal family. That distinction belongs to Toffee, a reptilian humanoid. Toffee killed Star’s grandmother and was thought destroyed by Star’s mother, the reigning Queen of Mewni, Moon Butterfly. Toffee’s return, has boosted the drama level of this show by tenfold which is why I’m mentioning it in the first place.
Moon Butterfly, after the death of her mother made a deal with Eclipsa 
Butterfly who is considered the “black sheep” of the family because she practiced dark magic. Moon used this dark magic to defeat Toffee and scatter his Monster army.
But the practicing of dark magic is not the only reason Eclipsa was considered the family black sheep. She committed adultery and left her Mewman husband for a Monster lover. Ultimately, this resulted in her being frozen in crystal for 300 years by the Magic High Commission before Moon temporarily released her. Unlike most of the royal family and Mewni nobility, Eclipsa did not automatically consider all Monsters evil (and neither does Star). This led to her downfall and royal disgrace.
We learn in the episode Face the Music, that Ludo and his family are Monster nobility. Ludo’s father and mother wear crowns and may have been the rulers of the land before the Mewmans arrived, making Ludo a prince. We learned in the episode Mewnipendence Day that Star’s family invaded the land of Mewni generations ago and drove the inhabitants (Monsters) off their land (just as what was done to the American Indians). We get to realize as Star does later in the episode, that the Monsters were defending their home, but they were over-matched by the invading magic users. Star has an epiphany as she realizes that in the eyes of the Monsters, she and her family are the bad guys.
In Raid the Cave, Buff Frog reads his tadpoles a fairy tale of a knighted monster who rids the kingdom of Mewmans. But in Diaz Family Vacation, we see that not all of the humans of Mewni live as well as Star and the royal family. There is abject poverty in Mewni meaning that there are social segments of the Mewni society that haven’t benefitted from the magic users of the royal family and court. Star is starting to see that the kingdom she will rule one day is not fair to all of the inhabitants of Mewni.
Star and her family ultimately prevail against Toffee and Ludo, but at a great personal cost. Moon Butterfly may end up paying the highest price of all in later episodes. Star vs the Forces of Evil started out being about Star Butterfly and her adventures on Earth, but the story is bigger than that now – much bigger. It’s about the Butterfly family and the things they’ve done to protect their kingdom. It’s about a future queen coming to grips with the things that the current queen had to do in order to keep her people safe. It’s not Game of Thrones, but it is good and interesting storytelling.
By kicking up the drama level and character development, Disney XD has taken a somewhat average cartoon and put it on my “must watch list.”