and all the tagged posts will list automatically for you to peruse and enjoy.
Make sure you click "latest" instead of just "top",
so you see all the posts as they appear).
Everyone has the opportunity to chime in with their two cents and it's a good way to discover ones you haven't heard of, as well as see awesome artwork and fairy tale trivia and facts, all thanks to the enthusiastic folklorists and fairy tale aficionados who spend their days chasing and musing on tales - popular through the obscure. Just make sure you add #FolkloreThursday to your tweet so everyone will see it (especially on Thursday, people tend to follow hashtags first, then look up people afterward).
We are so much looking forward to this, we have it on the calendar and are organizing our day around it. Hope to see you there!
Note: #FolkloreThursday begins in the morning UK time, so US folks, you can start enjoying the posts on Wednesday night and early Thursday, but it does continue through to the end of Thursday (and sometimes trickles on a little the day after too).
Answer to header question: “The Witch in the Stone Boat" aka "The Giantess in the Granite Boat", found in Andrew Lang's Yellow Fairy Book, and in Icelandic Fairy Talesedited by Mrs. Angus W. Hall. Here is a storytelling video of the tale:
Disney Palaces and Castles in Movies by M.K. Reddington
(note: Tiana's restaurant is included - not a palace but still a key building)
You can probably get a quick overview of the bias referred to in the post title, just by looking at a selection of the different styles of Disney castles together (created a couple of years ago). Even this small selection of iconic Disney buildings tends to lean very... "West". (They're beautiful but they're not particularly diverse.) The referenced infographic is ENORMOUS (you can see a small version of it near the bottom of the post) and very interesting to look around in. It's a map of the most popular animated movies - also known as, the most influential children's films - from a variety of studios, showing the locations each of their films are set in. Disney's films are color coded red. Why am I putting this on Once Upon A Blog? Because a large percentage of these films are considered fairy tales or overlap with people's definition of fairy tales, this is the overall impression many children are getting of story in general (especially if they're not being read to, or told other tales by family and carers).
At least 50 animated movies are set in North America and close to 40 in Europe.
It should come as no surprise that Disney's movies are "Western-centric, as The Independent calls is, since the people who created them initially were largely American and of European descent (meaning the stories they themselves were most influenced by were European). BUT as time has gone on, society has changed and the workload been distributed more evenly across the ethnic board, little has changed in this representation. Again, not a huge surprise considering the story influences perpetuated in American (and Disney) publishing BUT as more and more animators, story tellers, artists, designers, CG wizards and all round production people making these movies have hailed from places more and more distant and diverse, you would expect the stories being made to reflect that too. Instead it hints largely that the people in charge are making the decisions and what their (narrow) world view is. Interestingly, the rest of animated cinema reflects the same trend, though not to quite the same extent.
There is a notably heavy concentration of movies in Europe and North America, clearly showing how Western-centric cinema remains. Just four of the most popular animated films of all-time have been set in South America and one of those, Rio 2, is a sequel.
Only seven are based on African soil and most draw on common perceptions of the continent – The Lion King, Madagascar,Tarzan and The Wild for example.
Australasia also fares badly, with four films set down under, while Asia boasts a relatively small proportion for its size with eighteen, including Mulan, The Jungle Book, Big Hero 6, Kung Fu Panda and Aladdin.
(FTNH Edit: I don't count Big Hero 6 as taking place in Australasia at all. It's clearly an alternate San Francisco - officially an urban mash-up of Tokyo and San Francisco aka "Japanamerica" - and is discussed that way in the 'making of' interviews as well. The university where key story points are set is likely an alternate MIT as well, so definitely very American).
It's a very telling infographic and should make people sit up and take notice. Thankfully we are seeing some signs of change recently, and, as with any giant machine, a little change can be the start of a big one. It's just been a long time in coming. For instance:
Disney is making moves to address the skewed representation of countries in its films, with the first Latina princess, Elena of Avalor announced in January and another, Moana from Oceanarevealed last October.
The infographic was created by Slovakian designer, Martin Vargic, known for his Map of the Internet and Map of Stereotypes projects on Halycon Maps. He pinned the 124 most popular animated films onto a world map, color coding each film for the studio that created it (there is a key at the bottom of the map).
Each location mapped was either explicitly stated or shown in the movies, such as in Madagascar, derived from evidence within them, as in Frozen and The Lion King, or taken from the original work in which the movie was based, as in Snow White and Pinocchio.
Vargic researched the films in detail by reading fan theories and studying where various animal species are geographically distributed. He did not include movies set in radically different worlds such as Treasure Planet and Wreck-It Ralph.
Disney Palaces & Castle Part 2 by M.K. Reddington
(including Elsa's ice castle)
One thing that is very odd to me is to see almost NO animated films set in Russia. I realize this is a "popular animated films" list, and therefore selective, but considering how very many animated films have been made there, (particularly fairy tales! - so very many) with a large percentage of those focusing on Russian tales and literature, it either shows how underexposed the rest of the world is to their animated filmmaking or how insular the industry there is. Click HERE to read the list of films and their locations. You can also see a huge version of the map there (just click on the link, which will take you to a new page but you will see there's a magnifying glass on that page too. Clicking on that will show you the map at 100% and you will need to move the blue scroll bar at the side AND the bottom of the window to see it all. As I said, it's HUGE.) There's also this map below with most of the Disney animated movies (ie. just Disney movies) and their locations. Click HERE to read the list of exact locations.
Oof! I just realized all the content up today was rather dark and serious so I'm throwing this one post in as a bonus. :)
This might seem like an absurd title for a blog entry here but this is what many fans of ABC's Once Upon A Time appear to be worrying about.
Considering Once Upon A Time is planning to stick around for a long time (think multiple seasons - the producers have ideas for at least three right now) are there enough fairy tales and fairy tale creatures to keep the series going?
We know Red Riding Hood will need to tell her story soon and there's been a lot of leaks about Beauty and her Beast/Gaston appearing soon (note: slight spoiler at the link). In Mr. Gold's pawn shop on Sunday night's airing we saw Aladdin's lamp and a tea set that looked rather Alice-like. There are calls on fan boards for appearances by Aladdin and Mulan but after that, what??! (Not my punctuation. :D )
E! Online grilled Jane Espenson (a producer and writer on the show) for details:
There will be fairy tales that branch out of the central European folklore: "I wouldn't be surprised to see fairy tales from other traditions coming in as well," consulting producer Jane Espenson teases. "So keep your eye out for some stuff that's maybe not quite so Swiss looking."
In addition to Hansel and Gretel, this certainly opens the doors for Greek mythology, Middle Eastern folktales, perhaps enough material for 50 seasons and two movies? We can only hope.
Regulars of this fairy tale blog and others are already very aware that this is one aspect fans should not worry about. For starters there are over 200 tales in the Grimm collections alone. That doesn't even exhaust the European options. This is one aspect of NBCs Grimm that is really solid - Grimm's producers are well educated in worldwide fairy tales (as are the actors, as it's mentioned in a lot of their interviews) and have planned to explore different tales and various folkloric creatures from all over the world since the beginning.
To Once's credit they have already gone beyond the Disney vault and included Rumpelstiltskin, Red Riding Hood and King Midas so there are plenty of indications that they're already looking around.
Of course there are still quite a few of the Disney canon characters yet to appear (don't forget Disney's live action films too!) and there's a good chance they throw in some characters Disney has had gathering dust in their ideas box too (Snow Queen anyone?). It still makes me want to anonymously gift the Once producers with all the Andrew Lang color fairy books though.
Source for graphics HERE. It's a fantastic almost-daily Tumblr blog dedicated to all things Once Upon A Time but I can't quite bring myself to type the blogs title. :/ I DO recommend you visit though. Some truly gorgeous stuff here.
