The New "Fairy Tale TV" Website & Searchable Database Has Launched!

There is now a brand NEW online resource for fairy tales used in television and streaming media programming!

The site is called 

FTTV: Analyzing Fairy Tales in Television 

and looks like this:

(the FTTV letters standing for Fairy Tale TV) 

It's based on (but will be continually expanded from) the teleography of the wonderful 2014 scholarship book, Channeling Wonder, edited by Pauline Greenhill and Jill Terry Rudy, printed by Wayne State University Press. The book is not just an excellent study, it is also very accessible to read and useful for all types of educators. This is both a fun read and educational! We highly recommend this book, as we do with anything Pauline Greenhill and Jill Terry Rudy are involved with. These folks make it their job to keep up with shows and media from all over the world, to keep track of how people are using fairy tale narratives and motifs. (A pretty awesome job, if you ask us!)

And yes, the aim is to make the website as currently useful as possible, so you will be able to find shows that appeared after 2014, and are airing now, too. 

We also want to be sure to point out that this website includes an excellent blog too, carrying over from the original Visualizing Wonder blog, with interesting articles and musings on how fairy tales are being used in TV and media. We'll return to this shortly. First let's explain what the main website is for.

The new FTTV website gives this brief description on the front page, so that people looking to use the database, have an idea of how to use it in their own work and studies:

Database of Fairy Tales in TV Shows, Movies & Other Media
The Fairy Tale TV database is our collection of TV shows, movies, and other media that fit the description of both fairy tale and television. It is a searchable database that categorizes the media by series and episode title, genre, broadcast date, and tale type. 

It can be used to see all instances of a single tale type, sort through different series’ use of fairy tale and genre, visualize the relative distribution throughout the decades of tale types and fairy tale television, and provide data for many other research questions. The database is most useful when analyzing FTTV across time and tale type in pursuit of either a broad view or in looking at specific examples of FTTV in certain genres or tale types. 

Jill Terry Rudy reading her co-authored book - check out how that book came to be HERE. The article simply explains how this area of study began and has revealed just how widely fairy tales are used in TV

It also gives a brief summary of the Data Visualization used on the site (interactive and accessible graphics! charts! correlating data points with fairy tale types!) as well as the Teleography of the project, which is still under construction.

If you're studying tales in the media, or trying to hunt down those shows that have influenced your own fairy tale work, then you're probably already excited to dive in. 

If you're an artist, writer, or other creative (instead of, or in addition to being a scholar) and wondering if it might be useful to you too, the answer is also YES! (The awesome illustration t the head of the post, used on the cover of Channeling Wonder, is a gigantic hint of the treasures available here.)

Let's tease you a bit with some of the current articles available to read on the blog, to give you an idea of how this information is, and can be, used, as well as why it's important to pay attention to how fairy tales are being used in media today:

Can Black Fairies and Mermaids Save the Remake Machine?

Halle Bailey as Disney's new Little Mermaid & Yara Shahidi as the new Tinkerbell

Why You Miss Mushu So Much in the New Mulan

The site gives a great example of how the database can be used, and we're adding it below:

Say, for example, you’re interested in looking at every episode that has to do with the tale type “Cinderella.” Click “filter by tale type” from the drop-down menu next to the search box at the top, type the query into the box, and hit search. Alternatively, type directly into the box next to the heading title above the “Tale Type” column. Both return the same 10 pages of Cinderella-related tv shows. That’s a lot of Cinderellas! Maybe too many. Let’s try narrowing the search by filtering by genre. Type “animation” into the little box next to the “Genre” heading. Now you only have the Cinderellas that have been animated. You can further refine your search with the “Show Date,” “Episode,” and “Series” columns in the same way.

Let’s try searching for something a bit broader. Clear your search preferences with the red “Clear” button on the top right. We’ll use the “Refine Search” box on the left to search for both Cinderellas OR Little Red Riding Hoods. Click “show more” under “Tale Types” in the box, and select all tale types you are interested in. The search will return all episodes that are tagged with either fairy tale. That’s a pretty big list. Filter the search to only shows produced in the 60s and 70s by typing “1960” and “1979” in the “Date Range” box. You can further refine the search with any of the filters for genre or series. Try searching for a specific episode or series within the filtered results by using the large search bar. Clicking “Clear Filters” will clear filters from the left box but will keep results from any search bars.

 

Hansel & Gretel in "The Simpsons" (TV series) and "Disenchantment" (Netflix series), both created by Matt Groening

You can start your search with any of the tagged categories—episode, series, genre, date of production, or tale type. Don’t be afraid to get specific or go exploring for more obscure series or tale types.

If you're thinking this would be great to explore for fun, you'd be right! This database, because it is working with fairy tales and tale types, is like an idea generator and connector, and a great way to find those shows and episodes you know you've seen but can't remember which series they came from or when. 

(Note: Don't be like us when you do a search and immediately start trying to type in the search box. Nothing will happen - and you'll look as silly as we did! When you click on the database link and a new search page comes up, click on the FILTER button FIRST and select it to ALL, or a different preference to get started, otherwise, it will seem like it's not working, even though it is. We don't want you to feel as foolish as we did when we finally figured it out...)

One note we want to address, as the question came up in a special online launch on Friday this week, of the newest book in the series, Fairy-Tale TV (also by Jill Terry Rudy and Pauline Greenhill, published by Routledge): 

The term "television" or "TV" might not seem relevant or correct in these streaming platform days, but in reality, people still talk about "what we're watching on TV tonight" so the term has stuck. 

Since the term "TV" is also attached to the series of books published so far under this specialized area of fairy tales studies, it helps to underscore this is an established, and developing area of study as well, and, as media becomes ever-more integrated into our daily lives, a very important subject for ongoing fairy tale study.

Art Film: A Post-Truth Pinocchio In Venice

That title. We can't decide if it's ironic or tautological, nevertheless, Pinocchio - known the world over for his lies and the biggest tell on the planet - is having a revival, of sorts.

While Pinocchio has been associated with (almost) every President in the US (in fact, someone could probably create a book of Pinocchio POTUS', there have been so many images made with the telling long nose), our current era is more concerned in associating Pinocchio with fake news, specifically, fake news originating from the office of the Presidency (whether POTUS himself or his staff and entourage). With all the 'alternative facts' and 'post-truths' still constantly barraging the news and media, Pinocchio is fast becoming the poster boy for US politics (no matter which 'side' you take) and he, President of Fake News Pinocchio is cropping up more and more in writing, cartoons and contemporary works of art and film.

One of the most recent appearances is in a festival film, titled "Spite Your Face: A Dark Venetian Fairytale", by artist and filmmaker Rachel Maclean, where alt-Pinocchio is essentially displayed in a de-consecrated church in Venice, for the 57th Venice Biennale, a unique contest, "like the Eurovision song contest for art. People represent their countries." 

Fittingly, the film was created in a large, portrait format -something unusual, even for art films, and the constant impression that you're looking at a portrait, reinforces the sense of Pinocchio's importance - to himself and to those watching.

We've assembled a partial synopsis by combining two sources (both cited after their extracts):

Spite Your Face, transforms the 19th century Italian tale of a wooden puppet who wants to be a real boy into a dark and disturbing satire of the era of celebrity, fake news and reality television... and Maclean plays all the characters herself, (aided by) costumes elaborate costumes and the help of prosthetic designer Kristyan Mallett, who has worked on the Harry Potter movie franchise.

The film tells the rags to riches story of an urchin called Pic. His life is transformed when he is catapulted into "The World Above", a consumer heaven where money equals power. (BBC News)

Pic (full name Pinocchio Gepetto) is a street kid in a grey, hopeless world. He makes a wish on an iPad in the Other World Offerings temple – a digital recreation of the Chiesa di Santa Caterina – and finds himself transported by the blessing of a fairy godmother / Virgin Mary figure to a golden heaven where (through the application of a perfume named Truth) he is able to become a gilded hero punting rubbish perfume (named Untruth) to the masses. 

Standing atop a golden plinth, Pic rants and raves to an adoring crowd. "Smell that? This place used to smell great. Now it stinks. The facts aren't known because the media don't report them." (TheSkinny - we recommend reading their whole article)

As the face of a perfume brand called Untruth, Pic becomes a rich and famous media personality, and a political demagogue, at the expense of his ethics and happiness. 

... "I was interested in how lies had played out in the Brexit campaign and the Trump campaign. Journalism exposed the lies but that didn't affect the outcome. I was interested in how democracy works. We are less rational than we like to think we are and driven by belief systems." (said Maclean - BBC News again) 

Venice is a city that still exudes luxury. Things glint and glitter, look expensive, of high status, and that adds to the setting of Pic, aka, alt-Pinocchio's journey. Perhaps the fact that it was written 'in situ' helped capture that.

The Herald (Scotland) got a preview of the film, and additional comments by Maclean are so very relevant, we had to include an excerpt to give readers a better idea of why this film has caught so many people's attention:

The Herald had a preview of the film - which also features song, satire, special effects and parody - and afterwards Ms Maclean said of the disturbing assault scene: "I've been disturbed and troubled by the recent rise and confidence in misogyny, the rise in anti-feminism, and reactionary attitudes to feminism, and that coupled with a feeling that we are immune, as a culture, to violence against women in images and the exploitation of women, images of women's bodies used to sell perfume or cars, and it is so ingrained we are not shocked by it anymore. I wanted the film to feel jarring, to make it uncomfortable and difficult to watch, and didn't want it so sit at that level of immunity." 

The film does not directly make reference to either Trump or Brexit, but the artist said: "I was processing a lot of the sense of how these lazy lies that were used through the Brexit campaign and the Trump campaign, and that didn't effect the result. 

"I got interested in how difficult it is to penetrate a narrative that has gained political currency, and how easy it is to use lies to substantiate ideas that already have currency. 

"The rags-to-riches tale is so much in our culture, you see it in things such as Britain's Got Talent...I was inspired by how compassion-less those [rags to riches] narratives are, and generate a lack of compassion for other people's suffering."

And so Pinocchio meets Cinderella - and neither look good because of it.

We became even more interested in how this film came to be, knowing it had its genesis well before Trump campaigned or before Brexit rose its head. We found that fairy tales were always a part of her exploration but things evolved quite differently when finishing writing it at the end of 2017.

From TheArtNewspaper:

...Maclean anticipated (the film) might be an extension of her earlier films and photographs exploring fantastical, fairy-tale and clichéd images of Scottish identity, The Lion and the Unicorn and I ♥ Scotland. Presciently, the latter, made in 2013, included a Donald Trump-like figure. Back then he was merely symbolic of corporate greed—a golf-club wielding, saltire-faced, frightwig-sporting ogre, enacted, like all the figures in her work, by Maclean herself.  

But in early December, Maclean visited Venice and her ideas shifted: Spite Your Face (2017), her film for the Biennale, has a wider political target. “Because I went to Venice for about a week or so to write a script for it, and it was shortly after Brexit and shortly after the American election, I was quite interested in this political landscape and the rise of nationalism and the ‘alt-right’ and something that was larger than specifically Scottish nationalism,” she says.  

...Does her Trump-like character reappear? “It’s more allusive,” she replies. “You can pick up on certain things or certain tropes in political characters, but I didn’t want there to be somebody who, for example, directly referenced Trump or directly referenced a recognisable political figure. I wanted the characters to feel a little bit more like an amalgam of different characters and different ideas.

And so they do. But they can't help but mirror the most obvious public examples either, and the images - both the public one of Trump and, in the film, Pic, are such strong ones, it takes a while to see the other characters woven in, characters like Cinderella, Jack and the Ugly Duckling and perhaps a Midas who has yet to learn his lesson.

The show will be on display in Venice from 13 May-26 November then will be shown at Talbot Rice Gallery at the University of Edinburgh from March 2018 and at Chapter, Cardiff from Oct 2018.

#RRR

Theater: "Neck of the Woods" Tells the Wolf's Story Like You've Not Heard Before

I will admit, I was skeptical too when I first read this claim: haven't we seen Red Riding Hood and every incarnation of the Wolf and wolves, done to death? But Neck of the Woods promises something a little different, and certainly, the approach is quite unusual.

Here's the description:

MIF (Manchester International Festival) has invited Turner Prize-winning artist Douglas Gordon (Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno) and celebrated pianistHélène Grimaud to create Neck of the Woods, a portrait of the wolf brought to life in a startling collision of visual art, music and theatre. 

On the stage of HOME’s intimate new theatre, legendary actor Charlotte Rampling (The Night Porter,Broadchurch) will recite and perform the story of the wolf as never before. 

Grimaud will curate and perform a series of works for piano, while Gordon will create the visual world. They have collaborated with Rampling and New York-based novelist and playwright Veronica Gonzalez Peña, weaving together stories, music, motifs, phrases and fragments to build this lyrical and beguiling work. 

In a new partnership to support their ongoing creative development, the Sacred Sounds Women’s Choir, first formed for MIF13, will perform as part of the soundscape to the production.

The Guardian has a lengthy and in-depth write-up on the show and the creators, (wonderfully titled "What Large Teeth You Have!") something which those who are interested in exploring the darker themes of fairy tales and LRRH in particular will find very interesting. (Note: this article does get a little dark with it's language and descriptions but also talks about the wolf as portrayed in literature and myth - why so negatively and the nature of man in contrast. It's a very interesting, recommended read.) Here are some excerpts:

Helene Grimaud working in wolf preservation

“For me, the most important thing is to be as close to the dark as possible, and then, when the lights come up, it should be the same as when you’re a child, when you have a nightmare and then you wake up and you feel safe and then you’re frightened to go back to sleep.” In his gravelly, laconic Glaswegian voice, the Turner-prizewinning artist Douglas Gordon is painting me a picture of a new play about the Big Bad Wolf that he is directing, designing and performing in at this year’s Manchester international festival. 

Entitled Neck of the Woods, it is a retelling of the Little Red Riding Hood story, and brings together an impressive group of talents: Gordon, the concert pianist and wolf conservationist Hélène Grimaud, Charlotte Rampling and the acclaimed Mexican-born writer and film-maker Veronica Gonzalez Peña. 

...For the story, Gordon asked Gonzalez Peña for something “very loosely based onLittle Red Riding Hood”. Her script will draw on the many different takes on the wolf myth in literature, bringing them together in a collage of narrative, sound, lighting and singing. 

The wolf has not had a good press in literature. For Aesop, writing 600 years before the birth of Christ, it is a creature without virtue. It is insatiable. It is deceitful and selfish. It eats children.

Gustav Dore 

...in western culture the rapacious reputation has conquered all others. And so the wolf, and its humanoid incarnation the werewolf, has stalked its miscreant way through legend and literature, from the tales of Perrault, the brothers Grimm, De La Fontaine and Hans Christian Andersen, through Dracula, Tolkien, CS Lewis and Prokofiev. When film came along it took up the baton and countless werewolf ripper movies have been inspired by Guy Endore’s 1933 cult novel The Werewolf of Paris. 

For all this negativity, the last century has seen a change in attitude to the wolf. Kipling casts the wolves in a benign role in The Jungle Book, as the saviours of Mowgli. JK Rowlingoffers a sympathetic portrait of a man fighting his inner werewolf in the character of Remus Lupin in her Harry Potter novels, while Stephenie Meyer’s tribe of shape-changing werewolves are warriors against the forces of evil in her Twilight novels. And of course there is the short story by Angela Carter, “The Company of Wolves”, which subverts traditional sexual attitudes to Little Red Riding Hood and ends with the girl stripping off to take her pleasure with the beast.

"Neck of the Woods" 

It is against this backdrop that Gonzalez Peña, in conversation with Gordon, has woven her script, bringing in references to Freud and the little-known but influential early 20th-century American writer Sherwood Anderson. I ask her whether, with a mind to Grimaud’s conservation activities, the play will try to right the malign image of the wolf. No, she says, it’s not going to be a polemical piece. Grimaud acknowledges that a didactic approach would not work artistically: “In the beginning, I suppose a part of me thought, ‘Great, we’re doing a piece about the ecology and the behaviour of wolves. We are rectifying the story and telling the facts,’ and, of course, it couldn’t be that.” 

For Gordon, it’s not about real wolves at all. “It is more to do with the metaphor of the wolf. There is the history of the she-wolf, but mostly wolves represent a bad man. One of the things I wanted to explore with this project in Manchester was that there is badness, there are bad reputations and they’re not without any foundations. I think men are worse than wolves, for sure.”

And a note from the actress Charlotte Rampling, who narrates the play, as the "third wolf", via the Manchester Evening News:

Charlotte Rampling, Douglas Gordon & beloved arctic wolf (preserved)

..Rampling would be the first to admit that she was once a child scared of the big bad wolf. 

“When you re-read those stories when you’re older - the Hans Christian Andersen ones, the Brothers Grimm - they really are terrifying, they teach you really wild things,” she laughs.“You might say, ‘Oh gosh, children can’t hear this!’, but children do need to get a handle on primitive violence and the difference between right and wrong, who’s going to get eaten and how we’re going to adjust to rather terrifying situations.“Those stories have been read to children for so long there must be something essential in them that we believe children do need. And nursery rhymes - they’re pretty cruel too.” 

Cast by Turner Prize winning artist, writer and director Douglas Gordon and co-writer and pianist Hélène Grimaud in Manchester International Festival production Neck Of The Woods, Charlotte will be tackling the topic of the wolf in fiction - in particular, picking apart the reputation of this majestic woodland beast. 

...Charlotte is a multi-part interpreter of the story: as narrator and actor, she switches between the role of parent reading to their child and the protagonist of the story.

I want to include this final note from Rampling's interview as it speaks to storytelling today, something which is (unfortunately) often run over by film, TV and 'moving image' entertainment. I think what she says speaks to an re-emerging interest in live storytelling once again, albeit in a different form of multi-media. It's something I think we, as people who watch fairy tales continue to live in being told and going from one incarnation in popular thinking to another, as they're told, retold, spread, discovered and re-discovered, should take note of:

Charlotte Rampling

Having the innovative creative environment of MIF to transform into this multifaceted character is what encouraged Charlotte to take the role. “It is enabling these forms of creation to happen,” she says about the festival. 

“If everything is filmic language, we don’t give people a chance to express where they really are in the world. With experimental language, it means you can really research areas that you won’t at all be able to do in the theatrical system.”

"Neck of the Woods" plays in Manchester at HOME, as part of the Manchester International Festival, from July 10th-July 18th 2015.

Art Classics Stories - Teaching Art With Classic Fairy Tales (& Fairy Tales with Classic Art!)

A few of you may know that one of the things I do is teach Art on a voluntary basis at my son's elementary school. The weeks where I get a little erratic with my posting times and frequency, are usually my 'art weeks' as I call them. They are the weeks where I do my last minute run around town and country to gather materials, prep everything (times as many kids as I will have), create my video resources (in which I usually try to sneak in some stories and pop culture they will relate the art and lesson to later), do my real time lesson trials until I smooth out the bumps and other random things, make sure I've covered all the nationwide art teaching standards and have worked in at least one or two connections to their other regular school subjects and lessons, along with a bit of science, a dash of history (not just art history) and every day practicality... and then, despite being process focused and not display oriented, I still have to put together a presentation that presents everything we did in the best light possible...

It's intense, crazy, draining, and worth every second when I see a kid begin to believe they really are creative, or discover how art is applicable - and helpful! - in every day life. (This past week-plus has been one of those!)

You may have guessed I'm not one of those who is good at taking a basic paint-by-numbers sort of lesson plan and being happy with that. I'm not. I'm a big believer in immersive learning and multidisciplinary approaches to hands-on experience and teaching, in being about process not product, and most lesson plans I come across simply don't take those into account. I'm always on the look out for different resources that are useful for tying art into other subjects, to connecting art to everyday school, and for combining it with stories and showing how it's useful in daily life.

The books I'm posting on today are one of these gems. These are classic stories, mostly fairy tales, that have been retold and 'illustrated' in the style of art masters, to teach, not only the story, but about the style of art.

I nearly fainted with delight the first time I saw these!

Here's the description of the series:

Art Classic Stories (with CD (with CD)

These are unique books that combine classical art with the most loved children's stories. Each book features a famous artist, with story illustrations in the artist's style. The exquisite pictures capture the children's eyes and guide them to the world of art. They offer a different aspect of art and using a delightful story format that makes it enjoyable as well as educational. These books can be used in reading tutorials, discussion class, art immersion courses or even for drama. 

• A delicate rhyming style to capture the essence of the story 

• The delightful tales of classical stories 

• The exquisite pictures to showcase the specific technique used by each artist 

• Discussion of the story and the art, which can take comprehension to a higher level 

• Moral lesson sections 

• CDs with Narrative voices (adult and children) and come with sound effect, excellent for play and dramatic lessons 

• Suitable for children from Elementary, Year 1 to 3 

And I'm going to say these are suitable for use well beyond third grade - for creative teachers at least. 

Here's the lovely list, sized so you can see how the art style is adapted for the story and which artist is matched with which fairy tale:

           

 

           

 

           

 

           

 

           

 

           

 

           

 

           

 

           

 

           

 

           

 

           

 

           

 

           

 

           

 

(My only complaint is they seem just about impossible to track down separately - and afford, yikes! - but I shall persist, if it takes me many iron shoes and climbing ranges of glass mountains!)

I did manage to find the Munch Musicians of Bremen book, for just a few dollars (minus the CD unfortunately), and am dually impressed. From what I've been able to see online and by the example I have, these have been wonderfully produced.

If you see these, snap them up! They're definitely in the treasure-resources category.

 

Note: If any of you come across any of these books and feel like donating to a good cause, I'll happily take the donation, put them to very good use and you'd be assured of enriching the lives of many kids.(Just email me at fairytalenews AT gmail DOT com.)