Maleficent Soars in New Trailer

Have you been wondering about the fairy but no wings aspect of Maleficent? The latest trailer gives us a little more backstory...

"All the other fairies fly. Why don't you?"

I thought we might see wings for Maleficent at one point but I wasn't expecting the full-sized version. I also find it interesting that the wings are raven-like, yet claw-tipped. Shades of a dragon-to-come methinks - which I couldn't be more pleased about.

It might take me, personally, a bit to get used to the winged Maleficent shown here but it would seem first responses across the board are ecstatic over the reveal.

It's going to be very interesting to watch the response to this movie - not to mention the resulting impact on the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale variants. THAT I can't wait for. *rubs hands together in glee* From the looks of the fairy discussion, I wouldn't be surprised to see a few more varied fairy properties in the works after this as well. (Or valkyries, because she definitely has shades of a valkyrie in this teaser!)

What do you think?

Sprite Symphony (Fairy Installation) by Davy & Kristin McGuire (Do NOT Tap the Glass!)

Not specifically a fairy tale but it might be the sort of thing you'd find in a fairy tale, here's a lovely little film of an inspired installation being hosted and exhibited by the RSC (Royal Shakespeare Company), made with holograms (and fairies!).

Thank you to the ever-creative and tuned in Lisa Stock of InByTheEye for alerting me to the magic.

The team, Davy and Kristin McGuire, were the creative geniuses behind another "projected project" I love, titled The Icebook, (you can see my post on it HERE), and they've done many more since.

Take a look at this lovely, lovely thing!

From the Vimeo description:

Commissioned by and developed for the Royal Shakespeare Company and later adapted for the Enchanted Parks, Sprite Symphony is a magical installation using projections and sound to create a beautiful yet dark display of fairies that have been trapped in jam jars and are trying to escape their glass cages. 

The fairies knock and tap on their jars and thereby create a polyphonic musical composition. 

The sprites are currently exhibited in a Victorian display cabinet in the RSC theatre foyer in Stratford upon Avon, (and) they also featured in the windows of the park keeper‘s shed at the Enchanted Parks in December 2013.

I'm thinking the fairies are drawing people to them with this magical sound and display, in order to persuade you to let them out. Trouble is, I don't entirely trust fairies. No matter how pretty they are, they tend to bite.

And just to underscore my wariness, this RSC exhibition also has a piece titled 'The Haunted Dress'. Worn by the Faerie Queen, it has a life of it's own.. and possibly teeth. (You can see the trailer for it HERE.) *shudder*

The Haunted Dress is an installation using theatre couture, projections and sound to tell the gruesome story of a beautiful but savage fairy queen who seduced a man into madness.

The exhibition, which opened in November last year, will run until March 2, 2014.

Press release from the RSC (and I'm including the artists' info & credit below as well, because these guys are just amazing!):

Sprite Symphony. By Davy and Kristin McGuire  

PACCAR Room, Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon  

16 November 2013 – 2 March 2014 

Sprite Symphony takes you on a journey around the theatre into a world of magical fairies and sprites. Follow the trail to find enchanting fairies trapped in jam jars and the Queen of the Fairies' haunted dress. Discover a cabinet of curious sprites in the foyer and listen to their enchanting music.  

Created by award winning artists Davy and Kristin McGuire, Sprite Symphony combines animation and projections with costumes and props made by the Royal Shakespeare Company, recomposed to invent a brand new contemporary fairy tale.

Davy and Kristin McGuire: Winners of this year's Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust Award, Davy & Kristin McGuire are multidisciplinary artists whose work has included The Icebook and an atmospheric stage adaptation of popular fantasy novel, Howl's Moving Castle. Their latest commercial commission for Courvoisier was displayed at Harrods and their new theatre production The Paper Architect premiered in July 2012 at the Barbican. The McGuires critically acclaimed theatre projects have toured to 12 different countries over 3 continents and their art work has been exhibited, published and screened internationally. 

Breaking News: Tinker Bell & Other Neverland Characters Coming to OUAT Season 3 (Spoilers Hidden)

Real Life Tinkerbell by Jirka Vinse

Breaking news from TV Guide's Announcement today regarding Once Upon A Time Season 3.

While the addition of Tinkerbell to the cast shouldn't be a surprise for anyone who saw the fairy tale characters heading for Neverland as the credits closed Season 2, the way she'll appear and what types of other Neverland characters there will be, might.

The rest (and possible spoilers) detailed after the jump:

✒ ✒ ✒ ✒ ✒ (click the "Read more" link below this line) ✒ ✒ ✒ ✒ ✒ 

Wicked Lovely Film Back On Track

From faerie and fantasy YA author Melissa Marr on Facebook this morning:

I'm told I can finally share: the Wicked Lovely film is back on track thanks to the ongoing work by my producers (Vince Vaughn's Wild West Picture Show Productions) & the addition of IM Global. (For those following YA film updates, you'll recognize IM Global as the company also behind Richelle Mead's fab Vampire Academy film.)

I can say that we are getting near an announcement of a director for the Wicked Lovely film. I'll share THAT news as soon as I can.

In 2011 the Director was set to be Mary Harron (best known for American Psycho) and before that it was going to be Kimberley Pierce (Boys Don't Cry) so I'm very curious to see who's taking the helm now, being that things are the most solid they've ever been to start shooting. 

Here's a link to Melissa Marr's dream cast - the real one still being a big unknown at this point.

"The Windvale Sprites"

When a storm sweeps through the country, Asa wakes up the next day to find that his town is almost unrecognisable - trees have fallen down, roofs have collapsed and debris lies everywhere. But amongst the debris in his back garden Asa makes an astounding discovery - the body of a small winged creature. A creature that looks very like a fairy. Do fairies really exist? Asa embarks on a mission to find out. A mission that leads him to the lost journals of local eccentric Benjamin Tooth who, two hundred years earlier, claimed to have discovered the existence of fairies. What Asa reads in those journals takes him on a secret trip to Windvale Moor, where he discovers much more than he'd hoped to...   

WATERSTONES CHILDREN'S BOOK PRIZE 2012 The Windvale Sprites has now been nominated along with 17 other children's book titles for the prestigious Waterstones Children's Book Prize having been shortlisted in the fiction category for readers aged 5 to 12.

I realize there are a lot of children's and middle-grade books being released all the time with lovely and inventive fairy stories but I thought this one was worth commenting on as it has a good chance of drawing attention to other similar books, especially those based on (or similar in tone to) Victorian fairy tales.

The book is written and illustrated by The Office actor, Mackenzie Crook (also from the Pirates of the Caribbean movies) who wanted to write a fairy tale like those he loved when he was young. The book is titled: The Windvale Sprites.

From The New Zealand Herald interview HERE:

After his home was hit by the great storm that ravaged southeastern England in 1987, the then-teenage Crook imagined there was a deceased fairy in his garden pond.
"That was when the story first came to me, but I just wanted to write the sort of book I would have read when I was a kid," he says. 

...Set in the fictional Cottingley Woods, Crook's book pays tribute to the young cousins Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths, who astonishingly convinced many so-called experts - including Sherlock Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle - that they had actually photographed fairies in the countryside near their Bradford home. 

"That's a reference for anyone who wishes to pick up on it," says Crook. 

"I loved that story as a kid. It's astonishing that these girls could fool such eminent scholars and important people, because you look at those pictures now and it's pretty obvious they were cardboard cut-outs. But at the time, people didn't see that and it's strange that their eyes saw so differently from us. The idea of 'what if they had actually 

found a fairy?' was a big influence on the book and while they admitted they faked the photos, one of them still claimed they saw things in those woods." 

Instead of charming Tinkerbell-style creatures, Crook's sprites are dragonfly-esque insectoids that definitely aren't human. "I was fascinated with the myth of the fairy and where it could have come from," he says. "It's like the myth of the mermaid, which, it's said, came from mannites or sea-cows, which were spotted by sailors and, through Chinese whispers and hazy memories, were turned into these beautiful, voluptuous women. I was thinking of what could be spotted fleetingly or from a distance that could be turned into this myth of a magical fairy with a wand. It's like the root of that myth."

Read the whole article and interview HERE.

The descriptions remind me of a number of other books (particularly Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black's The Spiderwick Chronicles and Gregory Maguire's What the Dickens) but citing the Cottingley Fairies as a main source of inspiration, I can easily see how this book might have grown mainly from that concept. As long as it's unique in the telling and presentation, which this seems to be, we can't really have too many books telling of discovering fairies at the bottom of the garden, can we? ;)

Mackenzie Cook's website, with more details about the book and his other creative work, is HERE. All illustrations shown in this post are by Mackenzie Crook for The Windvale Sprites.