Fairy Tale Roundup: Cinderella Movie, Snow White and Rose Red, English Censorship, Werewolves vs. Little Red, and the OUAT Wonderland Trailer

Catching up in the fairy tale world, here are several highlights from the blogosphere!

1) Robb Stark is cast as Prince Charming in the Kenneth Branagh/ Cate Blanchett Cinderella
Intreguing. Very promicing that he is much more than just a pretty face. And Cate Blanchett as the stepmother is phenominal. Kenny directing? Not sure. There are few films he has directed recently that I have been thrilled with. Sure, Much Ado, Henry V and Midwinter's Tale are amazing! But after that, his movies seem to tip from passionate realism into melodrama. Love's Labor's Lost was charming and had some excellent moments, but a bit ridiculous, and Thor was interesting, but certainly not all that it could have been. Hopefully he will do what he does best: keep the camera rolling and let the amazing actors loose to do their thing.

Don't forget, this was the Cinderella Mark Romanek (dir. Never Let Me Go) was going to direct before his concept was deemed too dark for Disney. Let's hope Ken doesn't swing in the opposite direction. Or at least sticks to his artistic guns and does not pander to Disney execs.

2) Snow White and Rose Red by Kelly Vivanco
Kelly Vivanco, one of my favorite artists, has written and illustrated an adaptation of one of the strangest and most interesting fairy tales, Snow White and Rose Red. She has a way of capturing a question in a painting. You are always compelled to ask "Why?" There is a fox in a top hat. Why? There is a girl sitting in a field with flowers, but she doesn't look happy. Why? Click here for more of her beautiful work.

3) Tales of Faerie has recently come out with two excellent posts. The first one, When Grimms' Fairy Tales Came to England,  is about how the English, nostalgic for "authentic" old traditions and values in the throws of the industrial revolution, took the Grimm's fairy tales and adapted them for 19th century England, cleaning up the morals, making them appropriate for children, and emphasizing the often false idea that the tales were collected from folksy German peasants.

The second, Werewolves and Little Red Riding Hood, is an exploration of the relationship between werewolf legends and Little Red Riding Hood tales. She draws connections between tales of werewolf trials in the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries and the folktales of the little child accosted by the wolf in the same towns a century or two later. She examines common elements of those tales and extrapolates on their meaning, free from any morals or edits Perrault may have imposed.

4) Lastly, we finally have a trailer for Once Upon a Time in Wonderland, and you know what? It looks pretty good!

It begins by embracing the darker traditions of the Alice in Wonderland story that have sprung up in popular culture and analysis, exploring the idea of Alice's madness. I love that it is taking a darker route. I am a bit confused by the genie, and how that fits into Wonderland, and the CGI looks mostly pretty sub-par as I feared, but overall, I'm excited!

Radio: NPR's On Being with Maria Tatar

While I often post about radio interviews with fairy tale experts, few of them come close to this NPR interview with Maria Tatar. In the NPR series, On Being, which explores the big questions in human life, Tatar explores the world of fairy tales with Krista Tippet, an excellent and incredibly knowledgeable interviewer. They discuss the origins of fairy tales, the structure of fairy tales, fairy tales in popular culture, and fairy tales and children, all topics we have heard before, but they bring an immediacy and relatability to the discussion, bringing everything back to the big ideas we explore in our lives. (Click Here to Listen)

They discuss the idea of "Once Upon a Time," and how that phrase gives us permission to explore, to do things you would be afraid to do, to question things you wouldn't normally question because you are in a new and theoretical place.

They explore the "operatic beauty and monstrous terror" and the promise of "Happily Ever After" that combine to create fairy tales. The "Happy Ever After" is important, because it promises that there will be a way out. This, Tatar says, is why we can read them to children. No matter how dark it gets, there will be a happy ending.

Maria expounds upon her idea that fairy tales are not sacred texts. They are part of the "great cauldron of story." There is no original version, and each generation and culture changes the tale to speak to what they value and fear.

She states that there are no morals to fairy tales. The morality is highly ambiguous. However, there is wisdom to be gained from the tales. They discuss big ideas: sexuality and innocence, poverty and wealth, action and inaction, etc. She laughs that, in our modern cultures, we adapt the fairy tales so that we befriend the monsters, rather than defeating them. Fairy tales allow us to explore our values and ideas in a safe place.

She reflects on the fact that fairy tale themes are everywhere, in reality TV, Sex and the City as well as the fairy tale themed tv shows. Fairy Tale tropes are so entrenched in our culture, so primal, that they pop up in almost all of our stories. She feels that, in this time of great transition, we need the ancient wisdom of old stories to guide us, make us feel rooted.

She also discusses the very personal power of fairy tales to help you face your inner and outer demons. They are full of mysteries and puzzles that fascinate our brain that we use to help us figure out the world.

She tells of how she asks her students what books from childhood they brought to college. Most of the students don't remember the exact plot of the stories very well, but they always have a nugget of story that they cling to, something they strongly related to, a talisman they carry with them into this new place.

Finally, they talk about children, and how the liminal moment of bed time is a perfect meeting of generations, where those carring the nostalgia of fairy tales meet those who are hearing them for the first time. It is a co-storytelling, a time for asking questions and exploring what ifs, and what the story means for the world, and if it means anything at all.

It is an excellent interview, well-crafted and personal, bringing out the intimate and human nature of fairy tales.

And it ends with a clip from Game of Thrones, which is a mark of excellence in my book.

End of the Year Roundup: Cinderella Movie, Cinderella in the News, and Maria Warner on The Brothers Grimm

Chadwick Tyler's photo of Imogen Morris Clarke

Well, well, ladies and gentlemen. I have kind of dropped the ball for the end of the year! And I am ok with that. Rather than focusing on trying to get every little bit of fairy tale news that comes down the pike, this year, I am going to focus on the things that really spark my interest, that I really feel passionate about. This will mean that my posts are fewer and farther between, but it will also mean that I will be able to devote some quality time to the posts I decide to write.

Here, however, is a digest of some other news items we missed in the mean time:

Cate Blanchett to play Evil Stepmother in New Cinderella Movie
While, yes, I still feel that we need a greater diversity of fairy tale movies, I love me some Cate Blanchett. Here's hoping that her endorsement of the movie means it has a good script. The director is Mark Romanek who directed One Hour Photo and Never Let Me Go, so here's hoping he does it as awesome as those!

We Are the Folk, Volume II: Cinderella in the Closet and Blood in the Shoe
Something to Read for the Train examines two more news stories that smack of fairy tales in modern life, and not in a happy ending kind of way. She explores schadenfreude in a way that shed new light on the idea for me (the comfort not only that we are not getting shat upon by life like those guys over there, but that we are not the crazy ones so we will be ok). She also delves into a horrible case of child abuse as a parallel to Cinderella, insisting that the marriage and the slipper do not a Cinderella story make; it is about a girl who rises from the ashes of abuse. She goes on to discuss why we shouldn't shy away from the scary or the gory in fairy tales (a favorite tune of mine): "What I would claim is that a child who hasn’t been sheltered from fairy tales is going to have a little bit more in her mental arsenal when the shit hits the fan, if only because they might have just that much more faith that all will turn out well, and that help, in whatever form, is on the way."

Maria Warner's 10-Part BBC Broadcast about Fairy Tales
While I have not listened to all of them, the topics look fascinating! She traces the ancient origins, discusses those who contributed to the tales, examines the fate of the tales in the hands of Nazis, delves into the psychology of the tales, the history of their censorship, and the future of the tales. All topics we here at The Dark Forest love to talk about!

That is all for now. For anyone who wants to know, yes I did love Once Upon a Time's midseason finale. They know how to do a finale. I do think that Mulan and Aurora should get together, and damnit Regina is awesome and deserves to be happy, but from what I have seen of the clips from "The Cricket Game," this is not going to happen any time soon. Here's Io9's recap/review.

Interview: Fairy Tale Darwinism

The Huffington Post recently did a live hangout with Jack Zipes (preeminent fairy tale scholor), Tim Manley (fellow fairy tale blogger of Fairy Tales for 20 Somethings, and teacher/ writer), Donald Hasse (Editor of Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies), and Susan Kim (Writer and Filmmaker). They discuss the evolution of fairy tales, how fairy tales are a reflection of the culture, and what makes a fairy tale stand the test of time. And Jack Zipes goes off on how the original fairy tales are not good for children. You know how I feel about that. Though Adam Gidwitz says it better. 

He does also touch upon something we have discussed before, how modern interpretations have a faux-feminism, saying that all you have to do to empower women is have them swing a sword around. (See The Empowerment of Snow White). Should women have to "become masculine" to have power. Is wielding a sword (or fighting in general) masculine? Personally, I think if you have a weak female character whose only empowerment is having a sword, then yes, it is a sham. However, if the character herself is strong, no matter what she does, sword or knitting, she will be empowered. Any thoughts, viewers at home?

While the discussion is a bit all over the place, and it seems like the moderator wanted to tackle a bit too much for such a small time slot, it is an excellent interview! It is so great to see such different perspectives on fairy tales together in one (virtual) room. I just wish there was more time for them to argue.

Movie: Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters Trailer

Oh this movie. I will say, I am very glad that it is not Hansel and Gretel as adults finding a gingerbread house and kicking it's ass. However, with Peter Stormare as Ambigiously Germanic Official and the saving of the villiage children from the evil witch that is taking them, I got huge Brothers Grimm flashbacks. Even whatever filter they use looks similar to Brothers Grimm; the "it's about to rain" filter. And the vaguely olden times but still get to wear tailored tight leather outfits aesthetic. 

That being said....

I love me some Jeremy Renner, thought not as much as a fellow blog mistress I know (cough- Drown My Books-cough). And I love me some kicking supernatural ass. I am a bit worried that it doesn't seem to be much more than that? Aaaaand I have the same feeling as this when ALL WITCHES ARE EVIL:

After watching the pretty witches turn ugly, and the sheer amounts of witches fighting, I started to feel like this was subliminally a conservative, "lets kill all the earthy-crunchy people!" movie. For some reason, for me, one evil witch, all good. ALL THE WITCHES, I have troubles. I have less trouble with vampires or werewolves in that regard. But in general, I feel like it's better storytelling if you don't say "all if this race is ____" and give it some variety. 

Anyhoodle, the trailer was kinda bad at telling us anything other than "We are witch hunters because we were traumatized as children, all witches are evil, my sister gets captured and there is something more going on than just witches." Hopefully, the movie will be more complex than that! I am happy for Jeremy Renner to prance around in leather for two hours, but good storytelling/ characters would be awesomer. 

Article: Why The Brothers Grimm Sanitized their Fairy Tales

 

(From Myths and Monsters' article on the Sanitation of "Little Red Riding Hood")

An interesting article about how the Grimms sanitized the fairy tales from the first edition to the second, and how most of the tales were given to them by women.

From the Business Standard (March 2012), via Akond of Swat on Censorship:

"The brothers Grimm were also the first bowdlerisers of the fairy tales, setting off a process of sanitizing these dark materials that continues today in Disney’s prettily bland retellings. “We like them,” Wilhelm Grimm wrote of fairy tales, “without reflecting why.” 

The versions he and his brother Johann set down were drawn direct from the deep well of folklore. In the first edition, for instance, the story of the frog prince is frankly carnal—the princess flings the frog from her in disgust, he lands on the bed and transforms into a handsome prince. She joins him—but by the second edition, their meeting is much more chaste. 

The scholar Maria Tatar chronicles the true nature of the fairy tales in detail. In the original, Rumpelstiltskin tears himself in two, ripping his body apart; Briar Rose’s unsuccessful suitors, trying to break into the castle where the princess lies sleeping, are caught by the thorny hands of the briar bushes and torn to bits. Rapunzel’s dalliance with the prince is discovered when her belly swells; fathers try to marry their daughters, the violence of the world is unmasked. 

Perhaps the most representative was a chatty disquisition, excised from future editions of Grimm’s tales. It was about a group of children who, playing a game in imitation of the village butcher, end by butchering their playmates. The original fairy tales were guides to a bloody, brutal and bestial world, as most stories that start with “once upon a time” and end with “happily ever after” usually are at their core." (Full Article)

In her book, The Hard Facts of the Grimm's Fairy Tales, Maria Tatar goes in depth about this editing process. It seems that Jacob and Wilhelm were trying to please two separate audiences. Originally, the brothers collected folk tales to record the colloquial language of the region for scholarly reasons. They remained relatively true to the original tellings, even going so far as to include dialect (though they still may have taken creative license, choosing one version of the same story over another, etc). This did not sell very well. 

Those who bought the book, ended up using it to tell stories to their children, but complained about the graphic nature of the tales. Since the Grimms were poor, they figured a commercial success might be better than an academic one. Wilhelm, at least, started to smooth out the tales, giving them more narrative structure and imbuing them with Germanic values. He took out fairy folk, and put in angels and devils, and whitewashed all the sex. However, he left in, and even enhanced, the violence. Why? Kids love violence. 1) If violence is being done to someone evil, the kids learn that evil people are punished. 2) If violence is being done to good characters, kids, who often see themselves as abused and neglected, relate more to the good characters, and give them sympathy. 

From the Business Standard (March 2012), via Akond of Swat on Female Storytellers: 

"This may have been because few of the tales were conceived by the brothers Grimm, or indeed told by men at all. The genius of the brothers Grimm, who were later to make their reputations with a path-breaking grammar and dictionary, lay in their ability to locate and listen to the women who were carriers of the tales.

“Women teach babies and children to speak, which is the same as teaching them to think,” writes Germaine Greer. The women who shared their stories with the Brothers Grimm were an extraordinary bunch, acknowledged by most scholars as the true storytellers—even if their names don’t appear on the green and black covers of the original Grimm’s fairy tales.

Frau Dorothea Viehmann was a peasant woman in her fifties, who contributed many of the tales in the second volume of Grimm’s fairy tales, which came out in 1815. In their preface to the second edition, the brothers Grimm wrote of her with palpable admiration: “Her large eyes saw sharply and clearly. She preserved the old legends in her memory ... Her manner of storytelling was deliberate, confident, and uncommonly lively – she clearly took pleasure in it.” 

She could tell her tales twice over, first as a storyteller, and then again slowly, so that the Grimm brothers could transcribe them. The 40 tales she added to the collection may have come from her memories of growing up in her father’s inn; the Grimm brothers saw her as a natural storyteller."

Wilhelm Grimm was married to another wonderful storyteller—Dorothea Wild, the apothecary’s daughter, told him stories around “the stove in the summer-house” when they were children. She and her five sisters lived in the house next door; the Grimm brothers added many of Dorothea’s stories to their collection. (Full Article)

This article doesn't mention that a lot of these stories weren't originally meant for children. They were tales women told to each other while doing chores, or around the fire after the children had gone to bed, which may be why they had so many ribald elements in their original tellings. (Tatar)

For further reading on this topic, I recommend:
The Hard Facts of the Grimm's Fairy Tales by Maria Tatar
Clever Maids: The Secret History of the Grimm's Fairy Tales by Valarie Paradiz
The Brothers Grimm: From Enchanted Forests to the Modern World by Jack Zipes

Article: Into the Woods: A Whimsical Journey on the Brothers Grimm's Fairy-Tale Road

From Conte Nast Traveler (via Breezes from Wonderland):

"Once upon a time, the Fairy-Tale Road north of Frankfurt was known as a kitch- and schnitzel-strewn diversion. On the bicentennial of the Brothers Grimm's first volume of stories, Raphael Kadushin follows the breadcrumbs and discovers one of Germany's most underrated pastoral dreamscapes (plus what might have really happened to those lost children of Hameln). "

"The fact that the sucker punch of the Grimm's stories could survive even Disney's neutered translation suggests the way the tales can still throw down their own kind of curse. Sure, there is usually a happy ending. But before the wedding coems a cavalcate of our fears, marching out like the seven pitiless dwarfs: abandonment, infantacide, boiling caldrons, chopped limbs, witches warmped and creaking like old wood. And those missing children, where did they go?"

See the full article here: Into the Woods: A Whimsical Journey on the Brothers Grimm's Fairy-Tale Road

Map of the Fairy-Tale Road:

From CNTraveler.com