#A FAIRY TALE REFLEXIVE ENTERTAINMENT MOVIE#

2 However, many other recent fairy-tale films do not presume an audience mainly or even primarily comprising children. 1Д®specially in its recent live-action works, Disney-like its hitherto rivals, including the Shrek films and Pixar Animation Studios (which Disney now owns)-codes visual and verbal content for sly, alternative reading by the adults who take their kids to the movies, paying equal attention to the grown-up and to the ostensibly innocent, apparently primary child viewer. They range from Walt DisneyвЂ™s own bizarre 1922 short animation of Little Red Riding Hood to the game-changing 1937 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which installed the well-made fairy-tale film as a sequence of incidents, songs, experiences, conflicts, and reversals, with a magical resolution to the racist, sexist literary fairy-tale renditions of Peter Pan in 1953 and The Little Mermaid in 1989 to the 1991 attempt at a strong heroine in Beauty and the Beast to the moves to live action in the reflexive 2007 pastiche Enchanted and the 2014 (faux) feminist re-vision Maleficent. Yet even these works are by no means univocal or identical. This article uses the example of director Tarsem Singh DhandwarвЂ™s The Fall (2007), which draws on and references fairy-tale magic to collapse, expand, and generally fictionalize time and space to invoke the postmodern and postcolonial as well as the transnational and transcultural.ДЇairy-tale filmsвЂ™ continuing appeal may be illustrated by the Walt Disney CompanyвЂ™s many highly successful adaptations, though they do not comprise, define, or even set the standards for fairy-tale films internationally. Scholars of fairy-tale film often consider adaptation and intermediality in cinematic versions of tales. Most examples are from English-language media.ДЄlthough classic works like director Jean CocteauвЂ™s La belle et la bГЄte (1946) have received considerable attention from cinema studies and the fairy-tale structural analysis of Vladimir Propp (1968) has greatly influenced film analysis, only since the beginning of the 21st century has fairy-tale scholarship merged with film scholarship.

This article focuses on the cinema-movies made for theatrical and/or video release-but draws on television and Internet films when they offer telling illustrations. Alternatively, filmmakers may re-vision a story, sometimes with new spin, as when Matthew BrightвЂ™s Freeway 2 (1999) relocates вЂњHansel and GretelвЂќ to 1990s America, with two delinquent teen girls fleeing to Mexico, or may create an entirely new tale-like PanвЂ™s Labyrinth, not based on any specific previous literary or traditional fairy tale.

Using Kevin Paul SmithвЂ™s classification for literary fairy tales, fairy-tale filmic intertexts can include explicit reference in the title-for example, Duane JourneyвЂ™s Hansel & Gretel Get Baked (2013) implicit reference in the title-for example, Tarsem Singh DhandwarвЂ™s Mirror Mirror (2012) explicit incorporation into the text-as when Micheline LanctГґtвЂ™s Le piГЁge dвЂ™Issoudun (2003) includes a play of вЂњThe Juniper TreeвЂќ implicit incorporation into the text-as when Steven SpielbergвЂ™s A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001) has the mechanical child DavidвЂ™s human mother abandon him in the woods, as do Hansel and GretelвЂ™s parents discussing fairy tales, as in the вЂњOnce Upon a CrimeвЂќ episode of the American television show Castle (2009вЂ“2016), when the writer and police talk about what fairy tales really mean and invoking fairy-tale chronotopes (settings and/or environments)-as in the portions of Guillermo del ToroвЂ™s PanвЂ™s Labyrinth (2006) set in the heroine OfeliaвЂ™s fatherвЂ™s magical kingdom.

#A FAIRY TALE REFLEXIVE ENTERTAINMENT MOVIE#

Short and feature length, animated and live action, produced in film stock, video, and digital formats, fairy-tale films have appeared in movie theaters and more recently on television and computer screens. They concern the fantastic, the magical, the dark, the dreamy, the wishful, and the wonderful. While the Disney formula of innocent persecuted heroines, handsome princes, and happy-ever-afters has dominated popular understandings of such narratives (at least in the English-speaking world), fairy tales need not contain these elements. Fairy tales can be oral (told by people in different geographical locations and at various historical times up to the present) and/or literary (created by known authors) in origin, but they manifest in numerous media, including film.

Films incorporating fairy-tale narratives, characters, titles, images, plots, motifs, and themes date from the earliest history of the cinema, beginning with director Georges MГ©liГЁsвЂ™s Le manoir du diable made in 1896, the year after Auguste and Louis LumiГЁreвЂ™s first public showing of their вЂњcinematographвЂќ in Paris in 1895.

A fairy tale reflexive entertainment