Book Review of Fairy-Tale Films beyond Disney: International Perspectives (original) (raw)

The Fantastic and the Real: Fairy-Tale Films in the 21st Century

Dzieciństwo. Literatura i Kultura, 2021

This article provides a critical examination of Pauline Greenhill’s monograph, Reality, Magic, and Other Lies: Fairy-Tale Film Truths (2020) and situates it within her larger body of scholarship. The title reflects the contradictory nature of fairy tales, which often contain moral and social truths beneath their fictional surfaces. Though related to her previous work, this book represents a departure from her earlier collections. Here, she provides close readings of various films, employing a sophisticated and detailed analysis of film techniques, and supplying a relevant social commentary. She asserts that fairy-tale films are multi-layered works that do more than simply convey aesthetically pleasing imagery. She breaks downs scenes into minute details, and occasionally provides diagrams that allow readers to understand and visualise scenes of films that, perhaps, they have not even seen. While these characteristics are present in her previous works, here they coalesce to form a pe...

Fairy Tales Transformed?: Twenty-First-Century Adaptations and the Politics of Wonder

2013

This analysis by Cristina Bacchilega offers an updated and challenging approach to the study of fairy tales in contemporary societies. Cristina Bacchilega is professor of English at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa, where she teaches not only folklore and literature, but also cultural studies. She is the author of Postmodern fairy tales: gender and narrative strategies and Legendary Hawai'i and the Politics of Place: tradition, translation and tourism, and the co-editor with Danielle Roemer of Angela Carter and the Fairy Tale. Along with Donatella Izzo and Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada, she edited the Anglistica's special issue on "Sustaining Hawaiian Sovereignty". This paper, which discusses relocating and creolizing fairy tales, reflects her academic profile. The author's aim is to explore the transformative possibilities of fairy tales as a wonder genre. By mapping connections on a global scale, Bacchilega analyzes the poetics and politics of fairy tales and their adaptations, in an intertwining of folklore, literature and cultural studies. Her proposal, as explained in this book, is to "provincialize" Euro-American fairy tales as a way to decolonize fairy-tale studies. As a point of departure, the author examines the stakes of adapting fairy tales in the twenty-first century. She points out the relevance of considering the gender politics of fairy-tale adaptations in relation to other dynamics of power and she articulates her argumentation in different chapters. Her goal is to contest the hegemony of Euro-American fairy-tale magic by remapping the fairy-tale genre onto a worldly web. The Preface raises the main questions of the approach: that is to say, how are fairy tales being adapted and what are the stakes of adapting fairy tales in the twenty-first century. Both the Introduction, "The Fairy-Tale Web" and the four chapters: 1. "Activist Responses", 2."Double Exposures", 3. "Fairy-tale remix in film" and 4. "Resituating The Arabian Nights" give answers to these questions, summarized in the Epilogue "The Politics of Wonder". Thus, Bacchilega's journey begins in "the fairy-tale web", characterized as a set of intertextual and multimedia practices in a globalized culture. This point of departure leads her to consider "adaptations and relocations" of the fairy-tale, and to study its recreations and remixes in filmic discourse. All these steps converge in situating The Arabian Nights in a new mapping of fairy-tale transformations. This journey through the fairy-tale web-with its relocations, adaptations, remixes and translations-allows her to identify a "poetics and politics of wonder" contained in contemporary fairy tales. Bacchilega argues that fairy-tale adaptations circulating in the early twentyfirst century globalized culture are the result of the "geopolitics of inequality". She analyzes the global cultural practices reflected in "the fairy-tale web" as indexical

The Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of a Genre

Common Knowledge, 2013

if there is one genre that has captured the imagination of people in all walks of life throughout the world, it is the fairy tale. Yet we still have great difficulty understanding how it originated, evolved, and spread-or why so many people cannot resist its appeal, no matter how it changes or what form it takes. in this book, renowned fairy-tale expert Jack Zipes presents a provocative new theory about why fairy tales were created and retold-and why they became such an indelible and infinitely adaptable part of cultures around the world. drawing on cognitive science, evolutionary theory, anthropology, psychology, literary theory, and other fields, Zipes presents a nuanced argument about how fairy tales originated in ancient oral cultures, how they evolved through the rise of literary culture and print, and how, in our own time, they continue to change through their adaptation in an evergrowing variety of media. in making his case, Zipes considers a wide range of fascinating examples, including fairy tales told, collected, and written by women in the nineteenth century; catherine Breillat's film adaptation of perrault's "Bluebeard"; and contemporary fairy-tale drawings, paintings, sculptures, and photographs that critique canonical print versions. While we may never be able to fully explain fairy tales, The Irresistible Fairy Tale provides a powerful theory of how and why they evolved-and why we still use them to make meaning of our lives. Jack Zipes is professor emeritus of German and comparative literature at the university of Minnesota and the author, translator, and editor of dozens of studies and collections of folk and fairy tales. His recent books include Why Fairy Tales Stick:

The Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of a Genre by Jack Zipes (review)

Children's Literature Association Quarterly, 2013

List of Illustrations ix Preface xi Acknowledgments xvii Chapter 1: The Cultural Evolution of Storytelling and Fairy Tales: Human Communication and Memetics 1 Chapter 2: The Meaning of Fairy Tale within the Evolution of Culture 21 Chapter 3: Remaking "Bluebeard," or Good-bye to Perrault 41 Chapter 4: Witch as Fairy/Fairy as Witch: Unfathomable Baba Yagas 55 Chapter 5: The Tales of Innocent Persecuted Heroines and Their Neglected Female Storytellers and Collectors 80 Chapter 6: Giuseppe Pitre and the Great Collectors of Folk Tales in the Nineteenth Century 109 Chapter 7: Fairy-Tale Collisions, or the Explosion of a Genre 135 Appendix A: Sensationalist Scholarship: A "New" History of Fairy Tales 157 Appendix B: Reductionist Scholarship: A "New" Definition of the Fairy Tale 175 Notes 191 Bibliography 209 Index 227