A weirdly formative movie for me was "The Slipper and the Rose" (1976), which is a live-action movie adaptation of the Cinderella fairy tale set in some made-up European country. It is also a musical. I think it's fun and funny and sometimes quite sweet and I really like it as a comfort movie. It's kind of long and a little slow and old-fashioned, but there are several songs that are just... about various logistical and humorous realities of being royalty... and I thought that was just fascinating as a young teenager who liked historical fantasy fiction.
(I excitedly tried to show it to a friend once and she was like, "WHAT am I watching?" She was bored during the dance sequences. It's quite different to the "(Rodgers and Hammerstein's) Cinderella" movie from 1997 starring Brandy. They're entirely different Cinderella musicals.)
The king and queen (and the dowager queen and the prince's cousin who will inherit if he doesn't marry) have a song sung to the prince called: "What Has Love Got To Do With Getting Married?"
The prince has a manservant named John and they have a really funny song together in the royal family's mausoleum, where the prince is like, "No matter what I do, I'm just going to end up buried next to these fuckers. Let me tell you all about how much they sucked as people." (It's called "What A Comforting Thing To Know" and it's probably my favorite song.)
The king and his ministers have a song all about the protocol for throwing a ball ("Protocoliogorically Correct"), because they don't want to offend anyone and accidentally start a war (again).
The prince's manservant, John, is in love with Lady Caroline, who is the lady-in-waiting / companion to the dowager queen, but they can't get married because they're apparently too far apart in status. After the ball, when the prince is failing to find Cinderella, there's an entire song ("Position and Positioning") where John, the castle servants, and guards and civilians explain to the prince that there are ranks among servants and servants aren't as free to marry for love as the prince thinks they are. They even take the prince into the kitchens and are like, "Here are a bunch of other servants that you never see and barely knew existed, dude. They're going to do an extended dance number about this."
There are other musical numbers in this movie, including the romantic ("He/She Danced With Me") and heartbreaking ("Tell Him Anything") songs you would expect from a Cinderella story, but I mostly remember the humorous songs that actually engaged with the worldbuilding. I hadn't really seen a "fairy tale" movie do that before to that degree. (I'd seen books adapting fairy tales do it many times, but they don't have musical numbers.)
I think both "What A Comforting Thing To Know" and "Position and Positioning" are both worth watching by themselves, just for how unique they are among the many different Cinderella adaptations, and the movie clips are easy to find online. Go look them up if any of this sounds neat to you!
