If you’re planning to pop the question to your partner, there’s something you should know before you begin: The bar has been raised — a lot.
Filmmaker and self-described “hopeless bromantic” Lee Loechler just pulled off the ultimate fairy-tale proposal, and it’s going to leave any Disney lover hoping their own Prince Charming will follow his lead.
“It's not every day you get to propose to your High School sweetheart,” Loechler wrote in the YouTube caption that accompanied his video. “For the past six months, I've been working with an illustrator to animate my girlfriend and myself into her favorite movie, Sleeping Beauty.”
And the result of all that work is nothing short of epic.
Illustrator Kayla Coombs transformed the ending of Disney’s 1957 animated feature for Loechler, casting his girlfriend, Sthuthi David, as the drowsy princess and Loechler himself as the man who woke her with a kiss (who’s actually named Prince Phillip — Charming is Cinderella’s fella).
Video of the special moment shows the couple watching a screening of the classic film in a packed house at the Coolidge Corner Theater in Brookline, Massachusetts, when suddenly David seems taken aback to see the story’s leading lady suddenly sporting long dark locks, like hers.
Looking confused, she continued watching as the prince, with an altered hairline and a five o’clock shadow, pulled out an engagement ring and tossed it off the screen to the real-life Loechler.
“Oh, my God!” David said as Loechler got down on one knee. Then, suddenly remembering that there was an audience being interrupted in the theater, she added, “These poor people!”
The “poor people” turned out to be their friends and family — as well as some local Redditors Loechler enlisted to fill the seats.
“I love you with my whole heart, including all of its ventricles, atriums and valves,” he told her. In an aside to the camera, he noted, “She’s a cardiologist.”
And now she’s also a fiancée, because she said yes. As they embraced, the characters onscreen, including a trio of fairies, applauded.
But with six months of preparation behind the proposal, Loechler had a plan B scene ready to roll. At the end of the clip, in an extra titled “Sthuthi Says No,” dwarfs from “Snow White” shed pools of tears.
“The only thing better than seeing the smartest person I know completely dumbfounded was knowing we’d get to live happily ever after together,” Loechler wrote in a post to Instagram after it was all over.