Jack Zipes, Pauline Greenhill, Kendra Magnus-Johnston (eds.): Fairy-Tale Films beyond Disney: International Perspectives. 2016 (original) (raw)
Related papers
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 Fairy Tale and Its Uses in Contemporary New Media and Popular Culture Introduction
Humanities, 2016
Ever since the beginning of the 21st century, the fairy tale has not only become a staple of the small and silver screen around the globe, it has also migrated into new media, overwhelming audiences with imaginative and spectacular retellings along the way. Indeed, modern fairy-tale adaptations pervading contemporary popular culture drastically subvert, shatter, and alter the public's understanding of the classic fairy tale. Because of the phenomenally increasing proliferation of fairy-tale transformations in today's "old" and "new" media, we must reflect upon the significance of the fairy tale for society and its social uses in a nuanced fashion. How, why, and for whom have fairy-tale narratives, characters, and motifs metamorphosed in recent decades? What significant intermedial and intertextual relationships exist nowadays in connection with the fairy tale? This special issue features 11 illuminating articles of 13 scholars in the fields of folklore and fairy-tale studies tackling these and other relevant questions.
More than a millennium after the earliest-known version was committed to text, fairy tales continue to occupy our bookshelves and airwaves. The current popularity of fairy tale-based television programs such as Grimm and Once Upon a Time offer continued proof that the appeal of these tales is not lost on 21 st century audiences. Beginning with the rise of fairy tales in the ancient cultures of China and India, this paper will follow their journey through Asia, long before these tales reached their traditionally recognized European birthplace. In this examination of the multicultural variations of a single tale-the Cinderella story-we begin to understand just how these stories have evolved. By means of textual analysis, I will examine the familiar French literary version (Perrault) of Cinderella using Propp's (2008) morphology of "function" and character, and semiotic theories advanced by Berger (2000). I will then apply this structure to three television adaptations of the Cinderella story: the 1957 live-television broadcast of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella, the 2006 pilot episode of ABC's Ugly Betty, and the 2007 Mexican production of La Fea más Bella. Likewise, I will examine the ways that the