TV: OUAT Spinoff of Alice in Wonderland to feature Paul Reubens

First, OUAT has a spin-off, apparently called Once Upon a Time in Wonderland (according to IMDB). Deadline states:

 "[The series takes place before the curse in Wonderland] The story is told through the point of view of Alice (Sophie Lowe) who has a generous heart but carries the scars of a long hard life. She is joined by Cyrus (Peter Gadiot), Alice’s love interest, and the Knave of Hearts (Michael Socha), a sardonic adventurer."

It will be lead by Ralph Hemecker, who directed some of the more interesting and meaty episodes of OUAT like "7:15am," "Hat Trick," "Broken," "Queen of Hearts," "The Miller's Daughter," and "Selfless, Brave and True." It will also be executive produced by Jane Epsenson, whose episodes of OUAT are some of the best written of the series.

Second, they have cast Paul Reubens as the White Rabbit.

Now, I have concerns. OUAT is known for it's shitty CGI, and it appears this series will take place in the green screen Barbie Palace that was Wonderland. Also, even though I watch it every week, OUAT is an incredibly uneven show. I worry that they are trying to capitalize on it's popularity, will spread themselves too thin, and not concentrate all their resources on making OUAT live up to it's potential consistently week to week and moment to moment. In addition, no one has got it right yet (at least in recent years). All the fairy tale shows and movies of recent years have had problems. None have solidly delivered a satisfying, quality fairy tale adaptation (whereas there are thousands of satisfying book adaptations. Take the hint, Hollywood and do what you do best. Adapt a book).

However, this team is definitely intriguing and I am looking forward to seeing where this goes! Especially alongside the sexy CW Wonderland tv show. With all the books being made into TV shows in the Fall, we could be looking a literary shitstorm, or a heyday for TV and books.

Roundup: Sleeping with the Beast, Disney and Gender Roles, and Why Hollywood Can't Get it Right

“La belle et la bete” by Julie Faulques

Hello Ladies and Jellyspoons!

This month has been crazy, so I have not had a chance to write as often as I like. Once May begins, everything should calm down, and I will be able to post more regularly. In the mean time, I give you a quick round up of fairy tale ephemera and news that has peeked my interest!

Jack Zipes on Disney's Snow White
Tales of Faerie takes on fairy tale scholar Jack Zipes, rebutting his view on Disney's Snow White. It chronicles a history of the film, lists what Disney changed from the original tale, and tempers Zipes' strong opinions on gender roles with a more middle of the road approach:

"I always come back to the fact that-whereas suppression of women was a real problem in the past, we can be grateful we live in a time where there is much more freedom for each gender to break beyond stereotypes. We don't have to resort to the opposite extreme and see all stereotypes as evil. I personally am not bothered by female characters who do housework. I currently earn my own living as well as taking care of my home, and it just doesn't occur to me to get offended."

I certainly enjoy traditionally female gender role activities as well as non-traditional ones. I feel it is just as limiting to say that women should not be seen cooking and cleaning as it is to say that they should only be seen cooking and cleaning. Thoughts?

Why Can't Hollywood Make a Decent Fairy Tale Movie?
Charlie Jane Anders at Io9 examines what he believes the recent fairy tales are missing. He explores the modern films that have flopped and the older ones (like Disney) that have stood the test of time and he finds those that last have "a sense of sincerity and good humor." Disney felt fairy tales should have this formula:

"To captivate our varied and worldwide audience of all ages, the nature and treatment of the fairy tale, the legend, the myth have to be elementary, simple. Good and evil, the antagonists of all great drama in some guise, must be believably personalized. The moral ideals common to all humanity must be upheld. The victories must not be too easy. Strife to test valor is still and will always be the basic ingredient of the animated tale, as of all screen entertainments."

Anders feels that modern fairy tale films "turn the strife into CG and the valor into banter." They are lacking that heart and sincerity that make us so attracted to things like The Princess Bride. Anders feels it is the perfect time for fairy tales because "fairytales become more relevant when people feel powerless — many of us actually are in the position of having made bargains with entities whose true names we're not allowed to know, thanks to the magic of mortgage securitization. At the same time, we still dream of being lifted up from our drudgery to noble status — and we dread having everything that makes us part of middle-class society taken away, if we fall through the cracks the way so many people have."

Perhaps the sincere story is what we need right now, without all the wink-wink, nudge-nudge that post-Shrek Hollywood thinks is necessarily for success.

Villeneuve's Beauty and the Beast: To marry or to sleep with?
Tales of Faerie challenges Jack Zipes again, this time on his translation of the "original" Beauty and the Beast tale (a novella by Madame Gabrielle de Villeneuve). She compares the original french to his translation. Zipes tells the story with the more well-known formula, where each night the Beast asks Belle to marry him, and she refuses. In the French version, however, it seems he was asking her each night to sleep with him. Which actually makes a lot more sense to me:

"Ce charmant spectacle ayant suffisamment dure, la Bete temoigna a sa nouvelle epouse qu'il etait temps de se mettre au lit. Quelque peu d'impatience qu'eut la Belle de se trouver aupres de cet epoux singulier, elle se coucha. Les lumieres s'eteignirent a l'instant. La Bete, s'approchant, fit apprehender a la Belle que de poids de son corps elle n'ecrasat leur couche. Mais elle fut agreablement etonnee en sentant que ce monstre se mattait a ses cotes aussi legerement qu'elle venait dele faire. Sa surprise fut bien plus grande, quand elle l'entendit ronfler presque aussitot, et que par sa tranquillite, elle eut une preuve certaine qu'il dormait d'un profond sommeil."

Strangely, it is not even "sleep with" in a sexual sense. He just wants to lay next to her, and when he does, he falls right asleep. It is kind of sweet, actually!

I will have a Once Upon a Time Review Dump coming soon!

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.

The Female Trickster and "Strong" Heroines

"What ya got in your basket, little girl?" "Weapons." - Buffy, "Fear Itself"

One of our favorite topics here in The Dark Forest is the idea of "strong female characters." In The "Empowerment" of Snow White, I wrote about if giving the leading lady a sword makes her "strong." In "Passive and Dumb" Heroines, I defended the more conventional fairy tale princesses. Recently, two articles came to my attention discussing very different angles of this issue:

Maria Tatar wrote an interesting article in the New York Times about two types of female characters: the Sleeping Beauty and the Female Trickster: While I find the Lady Gaga paragraph a little out of place, the rest of the article explores manifestations of both archetypes in popular culture:

"We've come a long way from what Simone de Beauvoir once found in Anglo-European entertainments: “In song and story the young man is seen departing adventurously in search of a woman; he slays the dragons and giants; she is locked in a tower, a palace, a garden, a cave, she is chained to a rock, a captive, sound asleep: she waits.” Have we kissed Sleeping Beauty goodbye at last, as feminists advised us to do not so long ago? Her younger and more energetic rival in today’s cultural productions has been working hard to depose her, but archetypes die hard and can find their way back to us in unexpected ways."

After listing many versions of the female trickster in pop culture from Buffy to Hanna to Lisbeth Salander to Katniss, she also makes a troubling observation:

"If male tricksters have traditionally been fixated on satisfying colossal appetites of all kinds, our new female tricksters—orphans, loners, and outsiders—are beleaguered and needy. At work, they become Cassandras, confident and shrewdly prescient women whose intuition and brashness cut through thickets of bureaucratic procedure. Yet, once work stops, they seem utterly lost. There is clearly something compensatory in the psychological fragility of these women warriors: their gains in intellect and muscle are diminished by moments of complete emotional collapse. Vulnerability continues to attract. Hence the intransigent presence of the sleeping princess, who remains central to many films and novels, despite the rising numbers of female avengers and investigators."

I wish I knew the heroinesTatar was thinking about when she said this. I do not think this "complete emotional collapse" occurs with all female tricksters. Hanna certainly never showed a loss of emotional control that was unwarranted. Certainly, there are some cases when this instance occurs, but there is a difference between voyeuristically delighting in a strong woman's vulnerability and creating compelling flawed characters. If a female trickster was a badass all the time, and never lost, and never wavered, she would be highly uninteresting. The same would be true of a male character. I do not think that moments of weakness of vulnerability diminish a character, but enhance it. The second article, published later, echos my feelings exactly.

The Hub's article,  "What We Talk About When We Talk About Strong Heroines in Young Adult Fiction," embraces all kinds of female strength:

"When we talk about strong heroines in young adult fiction, let’s celebrate the quiet(er) strength of realistic characters as well as the dramatic, death-defying strength of sci-fi, action/adventure, and fantasy heroines. Strength is more than physical prowess or fighting skills. There’s no universal way of being “strong,” and a character’s weaknesses are often what allows a reader to relate to him or her.

In my opinion, strong heroines are dynamic: they struggle, and through those struggles, they change. They are agents of action, rather than passive or reactive. Female characters can fall in love and still be strong. They can be bold or reserved. They can be feminine or they can be tomboys. There is no one way of being strong, just as there is no one way to be a girl. When we talk about what it means to be a strong heroine in young adult fiction, let’s make room for all the ways girls can exhibit their strength."

The article goes on to list many books that have female characters with other kinds of strength, not just the strength to fight and survive physically.

While I know this does not directly discuss fairy tales, it is an issue close to my heart, and an issue we encounter again and again as we see new fairy tale adaptations take the screen, and reread the originals. Is Cinderella not a strong female character for surviving years of physical and emotional abuse and then taking destiny into her own hands? Do movie executives think that the only strength needed to create a compelling heroine is to give her a sword? Don't get me wrong, I love me some chicks with swords, but we need to celebrate other strengths as well.

Movies: NPR's Bob Mondello on Fairy Tales for Millennials and Upcoming Adaptations

Molly Quinn in Hansel and Gretel get Baked

Bob Mondello over at NPR examines the new fairy tale movie adaptations that cater to teens and young adults coming out this year. He remarks upon Jack's lack of initiative in Jack the Giant Slayer, possibly commenting on or catering to the image of the millennial generation (I do not necessarily subscribe to this stereotype, being a cusp of millennial myself). They don't take destiny into their own hands, like Jack from the original tale, but are swept up in events beyond their control. This is perhaps appropriate for teens and young adults entering a work force that has no jobs for them:

"At age 6, as Disney long ago established, abandonment by your parents is terrifying. So is illness, so is the unknown, and so is that scary old dude down the street. But when you're 20, there's a whole new set of fears — fear of commitment, fear of getting pregnant, fear of unemployment. Or maybe of getting busted for drug use.

In the upcoming Hansel and Gretel Get Baked, a witch lures teens with marijuana, then eats them to stay young. It's a horror movie — clueless teenagers getting in trouble because they're clueless teenagers, just going with the flow, passively.

That's different from the more active tykes who populate storybooks. In the old English folk tale Jack and the Beanstalk, Jack is maybe 12, and a schemer. He steals gold from the giant, chops down the stalk, killing the giant, and lives happily ever after with his stolen gold. I'll leave it to parents to find a moral in that, but at least he went up the stalk on purpose; it was his idea.
In the new movie Jack the Giant Slayer, Nicholas Hoult is playing Jack as a 19-year-old who's kind of a slacker and is trying to impress a girl when the beans sprout under him and he gets carried up to Giant-land very much against his will. Once there, he proves less incompetent than you might expect, but he's basically reacting to things, not making them happen.

The girl is the one who's looking for adventure, though for plot purposes — she is a princess, after all — she'll spend most of her time getting rescued.

There's no real "risk" in any of this. The Brothers Grimm wrote stories that were actually grim — designed to scare children. Hollywood's new grown-up fairy tales may quicken your pulse a little, but they're centrally soothing. Yes, there's an army of giants coming, but pluck and optimism will carry the day — a reassuring thought if you're a 20-something and staring nervously at an uncertain, recessionary future. It's especially reassuring if that thought is couched in a fairy tale so familiar and comforting, you've half-forgotten it. So get ready for lots of grown-up bedtime stories."

He also updates us on the upcoming fairy tale movies:

"I was going to say we're not in Kansas anymore, but we kind of are. There are nine — count 'em, nine — Oz movies currently in the pipeline, including the prequel Oz: The Great and Powerful, a story involving Dorothy's granddaughter that's just called Oz, and a martial-arts oriented Oz Wars. Also dueling Pinocchios, from Guillermo del Toro and Tim Burton, the horror-masters behind Hellboy and Beetlejuice. Not to mention Angelina Jolie assaying the title role in Maleficent, which tells the Sleeping Beauty tale from the evil stepmother's point of view."

 NINE???? NINE Oz movies. Geeze, think of something original, people.

Books: YA Fairy Tale Reads from The Hub

Ladies and gents, many of you may know that in one of my lives, I am a YA librarian. The Hub is a fantastic blog that keeps me stocked with really awesome, high-quality YA books, recommended by both librarians and very articulate teens. Today, they gear up for "Fairy tale day tomorrow" (Is that a thing? Like Margarita Day?), by giving us some of their favorite fairy tale mash ups, and to my delight, I have read only two of them (Book of Lost Things is fantastic!)

"The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly (2007 Alex Award winner)
Set during WWII, The Book of Lost Things tells the story of David, a lonely and grieving boy who is drawn into the dark space between fantasy and reality. When he ducks into a dark crack in the garden wall while avoiding a bomber overhead, he’s sucked into another world, one where the characters from his favorite books are real. The world is being held hostage by a missing king with secret book, and David must find the king and the Book of Lost Things before he can return home. Familiar characters like Snow White, Red Riding Hood, and Rumplestiltskin are given new, often nightmarish life, in this Alex Award winner.

 

Kill Me Softly by Sarah Cross
Mirabelle Lively is a sheltered girl. Her guardians won’t talk to her about her parents or the way they died. Sick of half-truths and desperate for anwsers, Mirabelle runs away a week before her sixteenth birthday. Her destination is Beau Rivage, the town where she was born and where her parents lived and died. When she reaches Beau Rivage, Mirabelle finds a place that’s even stranger than she could’ve imagined. In Beau Rivage, fairy tales are real, and the stories are played out over and over again. Mirabelle has a part to play as well, but when she begins to fall for a boy who’s not the smug prince she’s destined to end up with, her feelings threaten the very existence of Beau Rivage and all who live there.

 

Into the Wild by Sarah Beth Durst
All her life, Julie’s heard stories of the Wild, the land her mother escaped from before Julie was born. Julie’s mother is Rapunzel, she of the long hair and the high tower. Rapunzel’s history in the Wild has been nothing but stories — until Julie gets home from school one day and her mother is gone and her house is disappearing into a deep forest. As the Wild threatens to take over her hometown, Julie ventures deep into the woods, determined to save her mother. On the way, she meets familiar fairy tale characters like Cinderella as well as characters from less well-known tales.

 

A Tale Dark and Grimm and In A Glass Grimmly by Adam Gidwitz
Gidwitz’s wonderful Grimm series is technically middle grade, not YA, but it’s a funny, wry mash-up with enough dark and gory moments to appeal to teen readers too. Hansel and Gretel are the stars of this story, but their quest takes them through eight other fairy tales, originally recorded by the Brothers Grimm and repurposed in all their bloody detail by Gidwitz. The sequel, In A Glass Grimmly, borrows from Jack and the Beanstalk, the Little Mermaid, and more.

 

Enchanted by Alethea Kontis (2013 Best Fiction for Young Adults Top Ten)
And finally, the book that inspired this post. I read Enchanted for the 2013 Hub Challenge, and I adored the cleaver way Kontis weaves together elements of familiar fairy tales into something new. Sunday Woodscutter is the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter, and like her siblings, Sunday is not even close to normal. Still, she manages to live a pretty normal life — until she meets a talking frog in the woods who turns out to be not a frog at all. Her kiss turns him back into a human, setting off a romantic adventure that features elements of at least half a dozen different fairy tales. The frog prince makes an appearance, obviously, as does Cinderella’s dropped slipper, Jack’s beanstalk (complete with fearsome giant), the old lady who lived in a shoe and many more." (Click here for Full Post)

Article: 10 Children’s Stories Guillermo Del Toro Needs to Adapt

This is an older article from the discerning folks at Flavorwire, but still very relevant! It seems that we are in an age where if you are a book, you need to become a movie. If you are a play, you need to become a movie. And in the case of something like The Producers or Hairspray, you need to be a movie, then a play then a movie of the play version. It was recently annouced that Guillermo del Toro was adapting The Secret Garden for the screen with screenwriter Lucy Alibar (Beasts of the Southern Wild). This lead to Flavorwire creating a top 10 list of children's stories they would like to see del Toro adapt. As we continue the fairy tale movie adaptation extravaganza of the past few years, (del Toro is also adapting Beauty and the Beast),  Flavorwire adds some alternative, and very exciting fairy tales to the list! Since del Toro believes that children's stories should “actually try and create a sense of darkness,” these would be perfect for him. (Complete post)

From the list:

Baba Yaga

"THE STORY: A recurring witch-like figure in Russian folklore, Baba Yaga, lives in the forest in a wooden hut standing on top of giant chicken legs and surrounded by a fence of human bones and skulls. Not content to be like other witches, she flies around in a mortar (using a pestle as her rudder, a broom to sweep away her tracks) and is not entirely good, nor evil, and is as prone to kidnapping children as she is to helping wandering souls.

WHAT DEL TORO SHOULD DO WITH IT: Baba Yaga’s living arrangements and mode of transportation alone are the kind of thing you wouldn’t be surprised to find in a del Toro movie. If he makes children the protagonists and keeps Yaga her morally ambiguous self (maybe less kidnapping, more tenuous team-up) this could be a good chance for him to make his own unique witch story and/or Hansel and Gretel reinvention. Because someone has to wipe Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters out of our minds."

The Red Shoes

"THE STORY: A spoiled and proud little girl gets fancy red ballet shoes that she refuses to take off in inappropriate places. As punishment when she starts to dance she can’t stop. Her adoptive mother dies, she injures her legs, an angel sentences her to dance forever even after she’s dead, and she has her feet chopped off to no avail. But she finds religious humility in the end, and it all works out.

WHAT DEL TORO SHOULD DO WITH IT: It might seem intimidating to share film title and inspiration with a Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger movie. Like The Archers’, del Toro will also have to find a way to navigate away from the basic repetitive “girl can’t stop dancing, just like Kevin Bacon in that Footloose scene” nature of the story. The overt religious message (she’s basically punished for wearing gaudy shoes in church) might need to be tempered too – though one can’t help but imagine the Angel of Death from Hellboy 2 being the one visiting the girl." 

 

The Wild Swans

"THE STORY: A witch marries a widowed king and proceeds to turn her eleven stepsons into swans and gives them the boot. She tries to turn the sister into a swan too, but it doesn’t work because she’s too good, so she has to settle for banishment. Her brothers whisk her away where she meets a fairy queen who tells if she takes a vow of silence and knits nettles into shirts, they’ll help her siblings become human again. A king falls in love with her, she’s suspected by his archbishop of being a witch, she’s almost burned at the stake, but then manages to finish the shirts in time to save her brothers and herself.

WHAT DEL TORO SHOULD DO WITH IT: We’re not even sure del Toro would have to do much here since it’s already so clearly right up his alley. Give it a modern setting in the same way he fused fairy tale with Franco-era Spain in Pan’s Labyrinth, tinge the whole thing with a bit more darkness, and you practically have a kind of spiritual sequel to Pan’s."