Obituary: Fairy Tale Scholar Prof. Bill Gray, Founding Director of Sussex Centre, Has Passed

Mourning Sand Dwarves in the Forest (China 2009) -photography by joeinchinatown

Professor Bill Gray (July 30, 1952 - April 8, 2019)

We are saddened to learn that William Gray, known as Professor Bill Gray, founder of the Sussex Centre for Folklore, Fairy Tales and Fantasy at the University of Chichester in 2009, considered one of the world's top fairy tale scholars, recently passed away on April 8th, 2019. 

"Bill’s work validated the importance of studying fantasy, which has a long yet often trivialised history in literature and folklore. His published scholarship used multiple perspectives to reveal the existential depth of fantasy and fairytales, and the rich intellectual substance in their study." (From an obituary in The Guardian, written by Donald Haase, published July 12, 2019)

Professor Gray was not only a scholar of fairy tale, fantasy and folklore, encouraging new thinking be applied to further studies in the field, but his interest and influence extended beyond academia as well. He put effort into making his knowledge, vision and enthusiasm for the field accessible to the public and himself available for the conversation. He's been a bridge between academic studies and pop culture, appearing in the media and making himself available to consult on theatrical projects (such as The Light Princess adaptation with Tori Amos for The National Theater in 2013), and was called by Universal Pictures to "serve as mythic and folklore advisor" for the blockbuster film Snow White and the Huntsman (2012).

The Sussex Centre is now called the Chichester Centre for Fairy Tales, Fantasy and Speculative Fiction, so a quick reminder if you have been following "The Sussex Centre for Folklore" (for short) but are now seeing "Chichester Centre" on social media, be assured it's the same folks. The Sussex Centre/Chichester Centre is also known for the biannual scholarly journal Gramarye, of which Professor Gray was also Founding Editor in 2012 - a wonderful and continuously relevant journal which we highly recommended subscribing to.  We've included some recent covers at the end of the post which you can click to enlarge to see the content overview. (Do call Chichester Centre in the UK directly if there are problems subscribing from non-UK bases. The folks there are lovely and helpful.)

From The Guardian:

"The (Chichester) centre reflects (Bill's) vision for the study of fantasy and wonder on an international and interdisciplinary scale, as does its scholarly journal Gramarye, which he launched as founding editor in 2012. As a site for conferences, symposiums, lectures, exhibits, concerts and other public events, the centre has become a mecca for scholars and artists from the UK and abroad."

Snow White and the Huntsman (2012 Universal Pictures)

While Professor Gray's work in the field of fairy tale, folklore and speculative fiction can't easily be summarized, the obituary in the Guardian gives an overview which shows how important his work has been, and we recommend you click through to read it HERE.

And we have yet to look forward to more of his work:

World Treasure of Fairy Tales & Folklore
Compiled by Prof. William Gray (2016)

Bill’s transcultural approach informed his book Robert Louis Stevenson (2004), which elucidates the Scottish writer’s biography as a “literary geography”, reflecting the contexts in which Stevenson wrote, from Europe to the Pacific Islands, where he traded tales with the indigenous islanders. Bill’s forthcoming edition of Stevenson’s fables and fairytales will, for the first time, give access to all the author’s fantastic works in the order and form in which he intended them to be read.

We are so thankful for all his work and enthusiasm. Through Sussex Centre and Gramarye Professor Gray influenced Once Upon A Blog for the better. Though we never had personal interaction with him, we are grateful to all folks at the Chichester Center who followed his lead and engaged willingly in conversations about fairy tales, and gave social support to the fairy tale enthusiasts in our corner, over the past ten years. We have no doubt he will be very missed.

We extend our deepest sympathies to his family, and to his students, friends and colleagues.

Note: For those wishing to learn more about his work, please click on the image below to go to Professor Gray's website. It has a lot of wonderful information on his work in fairy tales as well as fantasy and includes links to his public writing, pieces in the press, interviews, a list of his books and other publications (with links where possible). The website now also includes a page dedicated to remembering Professor Gray. We recommend taking some time to read them.

http://www.williamgray.org/

Obituary: Isao Takahata, Animation Master & Creator of 'Princess Kaguya' Has Passed

I won't forget you. Thank you for the stories, Isao Takahata. (Tribute art by Trungles)

We were very sad to learn of the passing of Animation Master Isao Takahata today (Thursday, April 5, 2018).

May your spirit be free and have peace Takahata-sensei*.

Takahata was best known for his heart wrenching, and beautiful film Grave of the Fireflies, and of course, the Oscar-nominated The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, though many of his other films (eg. My Neighbors the Yamadas**, Only Yesterday, Pom Poko) prove him worthy of the title of Animation Master as well.

Our Fairy Tale News Hound, Gypsy, was introduced to his (and Miyazaki's) work at a very young age without even realizing it, through the TV series Heidi - A Girl of the Alps, while she was in Latin America. Takahata was the director, as well as a storyboard artist for the series. He eventually made a Heidi movie too, though the series holds a dear place to Gypsy as the beginnings of that magic Ghibli touch can be seen even then.

After Heidi and some other early films, Takahata became the co-founder of the beloved Studio Ghibli, always pushing the medium of animation as an art form and defying tradition as a true artist does - something clearly present in Princess Kaguya.

"I want to make sure that we don’t forget the great power of paintings drawn by lines on paper to stir our imaginations and memories." (Isao Takahata 2015)

Takahata also had revolutionary ideas about his Princess Kaguya too, something which we will be eternally grateful for in portraying this complex view of the Japanese princess of legend:

An adaptation of a Japanese folk tale about a mysterious princess discovered in a glowing bamboo tree, the Oscar-nominated film follows the princess as she struggles to free herself from both the demeaning customs of a patriarchal society, and the insatiable men who want to control her.  

“I have sought to refrain from projecting onto the young girls who are my main characters any wishful thinking from the male point of view about how women should behave,” Takahata tells us via email. “I also like to put myself in a women’s position as much as I can and think about things. Despite being a man, I love vibrant women, not only to fall in love with, but as friends and human beings.” And Princess Kaguya is certainly a human being. Not only does she cheekily relish the opportunity to set the men vying for her hand in marriage impossible challenges, but she hates the way men talk about her behind her back at her naming ceremony, and her emotions suddenly rush to the surface. 

Takahata uses the scrappy visual style to reflect these emotions in a way that wouldn't be possible in a more traditional animated film. “Rather than paintings that declare ‘I am the real thing’,” he says of his choice of style, “I prefer paintings that say ‘As you can see, I am not the real thing, but please use me as a means to imagine or remember in a vivid way the real thing that is behind me’.” 

“My intent was to have the viewers be there at the moment when the sketches were being drawn and to have them share in the emotions,” he continues. “I want to make sure that we don't forget the great power of paintings drawn by lines on paper to stir our imaginations and memories.”  

(Interview with Takahata by DazedDigital, during promotion for The Academy Awards, 2015)

We know Takahata still had many plans for projects and stories he wished to tell on film and look forward to seeing what those ideas were, when the family feels able to release them. Even without reaching their final form of a finished film, we know there is still wonder to discover, as seen through his eyes and mind. (He told reporters in 2016 he had a few he was working on simultaneously.)

His love of the history, cultures and tales of Japan always came through in his work and he will be sorely missed, not only in his home country, but in the world over.

Takahata reportedly had some heart issues recently, but even with the wealth of his artistry, his many amazing and multi-award winning films, and his work having been recognized globally, his passing is too soon, especially for a storyteller.

He was only 82 and will be greatly missed.

“Why must fireflies die so young?” — Grave of the Fireflies

(Isao Takahata 1935-2018)

*Here we are using the Japanese honorific 'sensei', to denote the respect we have for him as artist, teacher and recognized expert in his field of storytelling and animation filmmaking.

** In Takahata's 1999 film, My Neighbors the Yamadas, the birth of the Yamada’s second child, Nonoko, is rendered as a scene from the classic story of the Princess Kaguya, who was found in a bamboo stalk. Princess Kaguya was released in Japan in 2013.

In Memorium: Günter Grass

"Ich bin dabei gewesen" by Günter Grass (lithograph)

Günter Grass October 16, 1927 - April 13, 2015

Günter Grass, a Nobel Prize winning novelist who was fond of using fables and fairy tale motifs in his work, died this morning, aged 87.

He was Germany's best known post-war novelist and his most well known work is The Tin Drum. He's not the sort of author you can read lightly, despite his humorous turn of phrase and observations. His stories are difficult, layered, visceral and sometimes difficult to process.


Grass also wrote - and illustrated!* - a small novel based on the fairy tale The Fisherman and His Wife, titled The Flounder, or, in German, Der Butt. It's an eclectic work, certainly not for everyone and is the sort of novel you might recommend to someone, only to find they hate it, then be surprised that someone else you'd never think would read it, likes it as much as you do. (At the very least, it's good for discussions!) Here's the description:

It all begins in the Stone Age, when a talking fish is caught by a fisherman at the very spot where millennia later Grass's home town, Danzig, will arise. Like the fish, the fisherman is immortal, and down through the ages they move together. As Grass blends his ingredients into a powerful brew, he shows himself at the peak of his linguistic inventiveness.

Since the above doesn't really describe what the book is like, I'm going to post a brief but informative review I found on Goodreads by "Jos":

Deftig (ribald)! This would be the one-word review. Grass is explicit in his extensive descriptions - mostly of food, in parts sexuality or other body functions and sometimes violence. 
The story:Der Butt has three narrative dimensions. 1. Today, the narrator and his wife Ilsebill - who is of legendary fame due to an old fairy tale - are receiving a child. The book is divided into nine chapters, one for each month of the pregnancy.2. The second dimension consists of the narrator's multiple reincarnations through time, starting from neolithitic age. The focus is on his relationships, nine in the past plus two parallel to his current life.3. The third dimension is the tribunal (feminal) against the flounder who is accused of helping the male case, hurting womanhood through all ages. 

Grass uses these dimensions to tell the history of the area around his home town Danzig through time, to criticize nowadays (the 70's) society coined by the male dominance throughout history, to make a case for feminism while parallely dissembling the 70's women's movement and to celebrate the joys of a primary sensual life - natural food, uninhibited attitudes, simplicity. In parts, it's a book of its time, especially the 'politics' are outdated. At the same time the conflict of the sexes never gets old. The sensual pleasures he celebrates were as far away from the 70's as from today.
Grass certainly knows how to write. Some paragraphs are plain brillant. But he also doesn't know when enough is enough and he's fond of preaching. Still, an extraordinary book.

I also found this note in a fairly long tribute by The Guardian today:

His third and final memoir, Grimms’ Words: A Declaration of Love (2010), took the fairytales of the Brothers Grimm as the starting point for an exploration of the political and social side of his life, noting, for instance, how the figure of Tom Thumb lay behind that of Matzerath.

Gunter Grass self-portrait

From an older Guardian article on Grass' final memoir:

Growing up with the fairytales of the Brothers Grimm, Grass said the pair went on to influence his own creative work: Tom Thumb "lives on" in Oskar Matzerath from The Tin Drum, and the brothers themselves play a role in many of his manuscripts. "In The Rat, for example, they are portrayed as a minister and a deputy minister who try to stop forests dying (from acid rain)," he said.

After my experience with The Tin Drum (amazing book but I couldn't get through it, it was so brutal, and the movie version - also amazing but I can never watch it again), I'm reluctant to pick up The Flounder, to read the rest of it (I've read the first few pages via a preview), even though it's a fairly short work in comparison (about 500 pages). Still, I am completely fascinated by the premise and how Grass came to write this in the first place. Clearly, he was the sort of writer we need, asking those difficult questions, examining life from different angles, finding different resonances in tales. He will be missed.

*27 difference drawings, some of which are in this post.

In Memorium: Miyoko Matsutani - Thank You For All The Tales

On February 28th, 2015, one of Japan's leading folktale scholars, collectors and writers, passed away. We lost a fairy tale hero that day  - a woman who made it her mission to preserve the folktales of Japan before they were lost to memory - and whether you know her name or not, we fairy tale folk have benefitted greatly from her life's work. I feel it's only right that I pay tribute to her memory and help her name be remembered.

She began writing fairy tales after graduating high school and wrote over 300 books (picture books, children's and juvenile literature) and was the first Japanese author to make the Hans Christian Andersen honor list (Award of Excellence) for Taro the Dragon Boy and won numerous awards before and since. A committed peace activist, her original works often used themes of war and peace.

She was also the head of, what I've seen described as "a folklore laboratory" which, although is probably only due to a weird translation, sounds awesome. (The real name of the organization is The Miyoko Matsutani Folklore Research Center.) Matsutani herself traveled all over Japan collecting folktales from ancient storytellers, as well as being a storyteller herself - something which, she seems to have done right up till she passed away. She has been instrumental in reviving the fading practice and art of storytelling in Japan, which diminished greatly when the Industrial Age began. Due to her traveling, storytelling, publishing and working with community centers, women's groups, schools and more, the practice is coming back, and although she alone can't take credit for it, she has been one of the key instruments in making that happen.

Her work hasn't been restricted to Japanese fairy tales and folktales either. She worked with Asian tales in general (in addition to her Japanese focus), publishing retellings of Chinese tales and fables as well as Korean, Vietnamese, Philippine, Indonesian and World Folklore collections. (Busy lady!)

Cover by Piotr Fąfrowicz

Here's a little summary extract on her scholarship contribution, from Books of Japan:

As head of the Miyoko Matsutani Folklore Research Center she collects and retells folktales from throughout Japan, and her Gendai minwa ko (Thoughts on Modern Folklore; 12 volumes) has earned praise for its compilation of folklore from the Meiji period (1868–1912) on. She is one of the true giants of contemporary children's literature in Japan, and her complete works have been published twice.

One thing I noticed in trying to search for her books, is that many of her picture books ended up being translated to Russian but are unfortunately difficult to find in English (apart from Taro the Dragon Boy).  You can however, see a whole lot of her Japanese covers HERE. It also seems like tracking down her multi-volume works and her collections of ghost stories and folktales isn't very straight forward either - something I hope will be remedied in the near future, especially since her passing has made it clear how valuable her work was.

There is a new book of hers due to be released in April, titled Shinano of Folklore (honestly - I haven't a clue how to read Japanese so I'm completely at the mercy of an online translator here. I'm not certain this title is correct..) Here's the synopsis, which sounds like a wonderful edition to looking at modern use of folklore and fairy tales in modern Japan and I'm not even going to try moving words around so it makes more sense to our English sentence construction. It has a wonderful charm reading it as is:

Japanese mind hometown revives now of the response with former TBS TV anime "Manga Japan Folk Tales" Mirai Inc. version proven caused a "folklore boom" and "Japanese folklore" series to many years of requests, outfit new We will. Illustrations are intact, the Kuminaoshi the print. "Shinano of folklore" is located in the knot of east and west, folklore that has been handed down among the natural Shinshu which is said to be Japan's roof. Crystal of wisdom, desire ancestors gave birth natural and human battle. 

A knot of East and West. I like that. We're all knots really...

I've done my best to track down the titles of the twelve volume series Thoughts on Modern Folklore (or Modern Folklore Considered) and have listed what I could find/understand below, along with most of the cover pictures. It will give you an idea of how wide her range of study and thinking was, which is pretty wonderful, especially when you realize in order to do this she was tracking the same thing we are here: fairy tale news and use of fairy tales in pop culture and entertainment.







1 Kappa Tengu - God hidden
2 Military conscription inspection and recruits of time
3 Laughter of ghost train, ship and automobile and ghost stories
4 Dream of news fireball missing out soul
5 Story went to news - underworld
6 Home front, thought suppression, air raid, Battle of Okinawa
7 Schools, laughter and ghost stories
8 Laughter of radio, television and ghost stories
9 Echo snake, tree spirits, war and wood
10 Wolf jackals, cats
11 Raccoon mujina
12 Photos of Kai civilization

Here's link to the WHOLE SET.

Here are some other folktale books:

                            

                         Modern Folklore:
                        You Narrator, I Also Narrator

Folklore of the World

Japanese Mythology

Just a few of her "Momo-chan" (peach-chan) books, so beloved by Japanese parents and children. They were based off of her motherhood diary she began keeping when she had her first child.

These don't even begin to cover her books for children and teens with series such as "Story Gems", "Once Upon A Time", a "Thriller Restaurant" series for teens, illustrated folklore collections for children and babies (yes, babies), a huge Japanese folklore series and many, many more. Have a look HERE to see a massive range of titles at Amazon Japan.

Rest in peace Miyoko Matsutani.

Thank you for all the tales.

Additional sources: HERE & HERE

Gabriel García Márquez, Thank You For The Wonder. Rest In Peace.

Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez
March 6, 1927 - April 17, 2014

Often called the father of magical realism, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's work is beloved all over the world. His stories are everyday tales of ordinary people, with shadows of the impossible appearing everywhere around them, just as they do any other ordinary day. He credited his grandmother with influencing his writing and view of the everyday with her oral tales and the way she, as he put it, “treated the extraordinary as something perfectly natural.” He readily acknowledged her influence on him and his most famous books certainly reflect that style. In this way his stories share much with fairy tales and it's because of his writing that I've seen people come to respect fairy tales more as well. 

He sadly passed away after a long illness on Thursday, April 17, 2014 at the age of 87 and, as I write, right now, I am seeing responses and touching tributes from all over the globe flood the web, mourning the loss of our "conjuror of literary magic". (You can read the Wikipedia entry for a life, works and awards overview HERE.)

A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings is the title of one of Señor Garcia Marquez's short stories and the images he created within his pages are certainly close to us today. 

by MauroIllustrator

Written by the great Gabriel Garcia Marquez in 1955, “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings” is one of his most beloved and anthologized stories. The short story is an example of magical realism, a narrative in which characters and setting are “real world” but which also includes a convincing and straightforward element of magic. The reader must agree to temporarily suspend disbelief in order to understand and appreciate the story. Marquez is often cited as the father of this literary technique. (Source)

Mr. García Márquez was a master of the literary genre known as magical realism, in which the miraculous and the real converge. In his novels and stories, storms rage for years, flowers drift from the skies, tyrants survive for centuries, priests levitate and corpses fail to decompose. And, more plausibly, lovers rekindle their passion after a half-century apart. (NYTimes)

You will no doubt see a myriad of articles, special presentations and much more over the next few days and weeks. Take advantage and watch and read... If you don't know his work I suggest you find out. There's a good chance if you love fairy tales that his work will speak to you too. 

To start, there's a great overview of his life, love, work and writing HERE at the NYTimes, from which the above is excerpted and the BBC has a special slideshow 'His Life In Pictures' HERE. 

Closer to our hearts here in the fairy tale community is information in the entry from the Greenwood Encyclopedia of Folktales and Fairy Tales G-Z, edited by Donald Haase:

If you know and love Garcia Marquez's work, now is a great time to celebrate having lived during his era and to recall favorite stories, phrases and images and perhaps discover some more.

Dear Gabo,

Thank you for all the wonder. Rest now.

We won't forget.

Sincerely,

The World & Me