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Monday, July 8, 2013

Fairy Tale Roundup: Disney's The Beast, New Frozen Trailer and Culturally Diverse Fan Art, NEW FABLES VIDEO GAME, and Fairy Tale Scholarship

by Anne Lebovitz

Disney's The Beast Movie
Yes, folks. ANOTHER Beauty and the Beast movie. Once Upon a Blog is amazing as always, catching us up to the 3 Beauty and the Beast adaptations either currently running or in the works. This version focuses on the Beast (obviously). It is live-action, and supposedly a "darker" retelling, but honestly, how dark will Disney go? But it apparently has a few good things going on for it! Click the link to find out! I honestly hope that they try something new, rather than create a live action version of the animated feature from a different POV. No yellow dress, no talking furniture, no inventor father. I'd love it if they did an adaptation of Donna Jo Napoli's book Beast, but it doesn't look like that is happening.

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By weepingrockrock
REAL Frozen trailer
Well, an international Frozen trailer is here, and it looks slightly better than the Moose and Snowman Comedy Hour. I am a little disappointed with the Rapunzel look-alike, though I LOVE that the community is speaking out, creating their own ethnically diverse versions of the hero and heroine. Perhaps Disney will listen, and make better choices in the future. (Click the link for the pics Once Upon a Blog's aggregation of the controversy!)



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Telltale Games (who brought us Monkey Island and The Walking Dead episodic animated games) brings us a Fables video game, called The Wolf Among Us, set before the Fables comic book series begins. Ichabod Crane is deputy mayor, and the story follows our beloved Bigby as sheriff investigating a murder. AND [SPOILERS] you get to see stirrings of his feelings for Snow White. It seems to be very character driven, and the choices that the player makes will lead you down different paths. The creators say the game is different each time you play it. There will be fights, but they will all be narratively motivated. And actions have consequences: if you take too many punches, you will be bloody and bruised. If you pick too many fights, it might effect your relationships with those you care about. The art is also stunning! The lead writer, Pierre Shorette, has immersed himself in the world of Fables, making the art his computer background, even digging into the original fairy tales that inspired the characters. SO EXCITED! (Also, Once Upon a Blog speculates about the Fables movie)

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And now for a little meat and potatoes after the wonderful pop culture confectionery delights above. Tales of Faerie, a brilliant and scholarly mind as always, has compiled for us a list of different ways to examine fairy tales: Fairy tales as myth, psychoanalytical, gender politics, structural, collective unconscious (Jungian), etc. Though I am surprised that it did not include anthropological, the study of fairy tales as they related to the time and place they were told?

4 comments:

  1. Hi Megan! Thanks for your kind words once again! I was just going off of another author's list of basic ways to interpret fairy tales, but would you be willing to create a small summary of anthropological and I would add it to the original post? Giving credit where credit is due, of course :)

    After I published the post I thought of another thing I should add too but now I can't think of what it was...

    If you so desire, you can email me at currerbell26@yahoo.com.

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  2. Hey Kristin!

    I'm not even certain that is what it is called? My favorite way to look at fairy tales is in the context of the time in which they were written or adapted, to see how the cultural, political and historical environment influenced the story and how it was told, or how the story itself speaks to the time. So maybe historical? Or sociological? It is much broader than psychological, but much more specific than fairy tales as myth. It is closer to the collective unconscious thing, but that seems to be more about how mankind is all the same, rather than the vagaries of time and space. I do love collective unconscious, though, and how we play out fairy tales and myths in our every day lives. I tried to find a legit source on the interwebs that talked about the historical/sociological/anthropological way of looking at fairy tales, but I haven't had any success.

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    1. Thanks for looking at least! I think Jerry Griswold uses the term "socio-historical" and that seems to be along the lines of what you're describing. Maybe this is the new direction fairy tale scholarship is heading?

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    2. I hope more people start doing that! I think it is a really interesting perspective to mine.

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