We're Curious About "The Curiosity"!

And you should be too, especially after seeing this trailer that was released just one week ago #selkies! It's an independent film done by a very experienced movie maker and crew.
Take a look:

The elevator description? A tale of shapeshifting mermaids and teslapunk magicians. From writer/director Travis Beacham (Pacific Rim) & starring Caroline Ford (Once Upon a Time).

Yes - that's right. Not just shape shifting mermaids (aka selkies, because apparently a lot of people still do't know what a selkie is) but TESLAPUNK!

Why is this not on everyone's radar? (And why does this not have a distributor yet?)

There's tantalizing concept and development art from the director's Tumblr and Twitter.

Click to enlarge

Fauna concept for part of the magical world of The Curiosity

A selkie is a faerie creature from Scottish lore who appears to be a seal in the water but can go about as a human on land. This is an abstract little selkie drawing I did as a first read-through gift for Caroline Ford, the first one to sign up for this madness I’m calling The Curiosity.

There's no distributor or release date yet for this film though it is, at last (after a long process) complete.

Here's a note from the director about what we can expect:

Thanks for your excitement! I can assure you that The Curiosity is pretty overtly about Spindle from the start. It’s very much told from her POV. It’s also a somewhat smaller story than Pacific Rim. It’s set in a rather fanciful world, but the stakes are much more grounded and intimate than you’d find in a summer studio release. It’s quite like a folktale in that respect, and more of a scale akin to something like The Prestige or Pan’s Labyrinth. That is to say — an atmospheric, character-driven genre piece. And I’d want the marketing to reflect that. Fortunately, it was independently financed and I still control it, so I have a lot of freedom to pursue the options that make the most sense for it. It may even turn out that we look at what we have and decide it’s half of a first episode for a series. That’s certainly a realistic possibility. But whatever happens, you’re going to see this thing in some form or another. Bottom line is that it’s a passion project, it’s about her, and I’m not going to put it anywhere that won’t do that justice.

All involved seemed very caught up in the magic and fairy tale of the film, despite being part of the process. It bodes well for when we can finally watch this!

Timeless Tales Magazine Celebrates 1 000 Facebook Fans with a Royal Makeover

Here's some great news from Timeless Tales Magazine's Editor, Tahlia Merrill. See her personal message below: 

 

   We're celebrating hitting 1,000 fans in a big way! 

All summer we've been seeing the number of our facebook fans increase, thanks to our crazy talented social media dragon tamer, Carina Bissett. We're so excited about all our new readers and wanted to celebrate in a BIG way. So all this week, we'll be opening our basket of goodies and sharing the treats with you. 

Let's start with the biggest reveal first...*drumroll*...

A royal makeover for our Pandora's Box issue:

I can't even begin to tell you how lucky we are to have found Ugly Tree Graphic Designs to help us design a 2nd Edition for this issue. 

First off, let me show you the gorgeous new cover:

Previous readers of this issue have had to endure clunky formatting and a sad lack of graphics, which is why we asked Ugly Tree to redesigned the entire issue, including a complete overhaul of all the pages. For the first time ever, our stories look like something you'd find in an actual magazine.

                  

But wait, there's MORE!

Thanks to Write Jobs each story is now fitted with a custom designed mini-cover:

You can read all our Pandora's Box retellings in their newly restored glory HERE.

What do you guys, think? We're hoping it's not only our most attractive issue yet, but also the most user-friendly. If you notice anything that is less that ideal, though, that we may have missed, please email me (Tahlia) with your feedback at timelesstalesmagazine@gmail.com

There's even more new stuff on the website that we'll be blogging about later this week. Stay tuned!

Tahlia Merrill

Editor Timeless Tales Magazine

Attachments area

Graphic Novel: A Noir 1930's "Snow White" by Matt Phelan

Set against the background of Manhattan in the 1930's Depression era, this newly released graphic novel retelling (released September 13, 2016) by award winning graphic artist Matt Phelan, is just lovely. Our only complaint is that we felt the book could have been quite a bit larger, to better view and enjoy the artwork.


The title is simply Snow White: A Graphic Novel and the images hark back to the golden age of black and white cinema, making you feel like you've seen this before, except each reveal is somehow also unexpected and fresh.

Our brief look convinced us it was a delightful find, with shades of detective noir via the chapter titles of "A Drop of Blood" and "Detective Prince Oversteps His Bounds". Interestingly - and relevantly - the Sock Market crash that triggered the Great Depression, is also the inciting incident to set this version of the fairy tale in motion. While vanity is still a driving force of the Queen, there's a large motivating force of money too, and the combination, especially in that era in which big city life suddenly has as much danger as any dark forest, make it seem a natural setting for a Snow White story.

Here's the blurb:

The scene: New York City. The dazzling lights cast shadows that grow ever darker as the glitzy prosperity of the Roaring Twenties screeches to a halt. 

Enter a cast of familiar characters: a young girl, Samantha White, returning after being sent away by her cruel stepmother, the Queen of the Follies, years earlier; her father, the King of Wall Street, who survives the stock market crash only to suffer a strange and sudden death; seven street urchins, brave protectors for a girl as pure as snow; and a mysterious stock ticker that holds the stepmother in its thrall, churning out ticker tape imprinted with the wicked words “Another . . . More Beautiful . . . KILL.”  

In a moody, cinematic new telling of a beloved fairy tale, extraordinary graphic novelist Matt Phelan captures the essence of classic film noir on the page—and draws a striking distinction between good and evil.

Author and illustrator Matt Phelan was interviewed about why this fairy tale that's been retold so many different times. he had this to say:

“Snow White” has always been my favorite fairy tale. Like most kids of the past few generations, the Disney version was my introduction to the story. I loved it then and still do.“Snow White” has more layers than many fairy tales. It has the stepmother element, the jealousy, and the murder attempt, but it also has the help and friendship of the seven dwarfs, which sets it apart. Unlike other characters in fairy tales, Snow White is not alone. She has the seven dwarfs. The Huntsman spares her. That always interested me.

It was always going to be set in the late twenties/early thirties. The idea sparked from sketching apple peddlers for a short story I wrote about Herbert Hoover for the anthology Our WhiteHouse. One day, I drew a hag-like peddler holding an apple up to a smartly dressed young woman as everyone on the crowded street rushed by and I thought: “Snow White” in 1930s NewYork. Once I had the idea, I started playing with how to translate the rest of the tale to that particular setting. Who was the Queen? She was the Queen of the Ziegfeld Follies. Who are the dwarfs? They could be seven street orphans, like in those old Dead End Kids movies, and so on.The noir tone came naturally, especially after I focused on the inheritance as the main motivation. I’ve always been influenced by old movies. For this book, I thought about the noir films of the 1940s, but also earlier atmospheric films such as Fritz Lang’s M and John Ford’s The Informer, not to mention the Thin Man movies and the first ten minutes of King Kong . The opening sequence of Citizen Kane was also an inspiration, but then again Citizen Kane is always a creative touchstone for my graphic novels. 

My research tends to be image-based: books, movies, or online photographs. I have a wonderful book on the Ziegfeld Follies that I had originally bought for Bluffton: My Summers with Buster. There are a ton of great art deco books out there (they tend to be oversize so they may actually weigh a ton). I wanted some of that art deco in Snow White, but I was more interested in the darker visions of the Great Depression, such as the photographs of Walker Evans and Margaret Bourke-White.  I also took some trips up to New York City to photograph locations in Central Park and Macy’s,as well as to find a stand-in for the White mansion. It’s always good to physically walk in the setting, even if it has changed considerably.  

One thing that I didn’t do was seek out other versions of “Snow White,” aside from rereading the edition I’ve had since I was a kid (Sixty Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm with Arthur Rackham’s great illustrations). I wanted to approach this story fresh. Lisbeth Zwerger once said that “to illustrate a fairy tale is not an intellectual, scientific interpretation, but a transposition of internal pictures and feelings.” That was my approach.

You can read the entire interview HERE.

There's a lot of praise for this book so we thought we'd include a notable one to give you more of an idea, of how this retelling is unique.

Phelan (Bluffton) delivers a spectacular 20th-century update of “Snow White,” transplanting the story to Jazz Age and Depression-era New York City, where themes of jealousy, beauty, and power find a comfortable home… 

Moody gray and sepia panels carry the story forward, punctuated by splashes of lurid red—for an animal heart, procured at a butcher’s shop, or an apple tainted with a syringe. Snow’s affectionate relationship with “the Seven,” a group of street children, is among this adaptation’s most potent elements. The boys are hesitant to tell Snow their names, but readers will want tissues on hand when they finally do. —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

There is also a book trailer to give you a good idea. Our only issue with it is the music is very repetitive, but the book itself, the visuals, the layouts, the characters - all make for a Snow White retelling we'll be aiming to add to the Once Upon A Blog library soon. Take a look:

Lastly, a little bonus we found: a great discussion guide and the whole interview with the author from Candlewick Press which for any language arts teacher, or at teacher, might find very useful. You should be able to scroll within the embedded window, as well as enlarge the text of shrink with the magnifying glass icons below it. There is also the option to download it from the site as well (linked below).

Snow White by Matt Phelan Discussion Guide by Candlewick Press on Scribd

Film: "The Red Turtle" (And Its Fairy Tale Roots)

“Washing up on the shores of Cannes after nearly a decade of painstaking under-the-radar toil, Michael Dudok de Wit’s hypnotizing, entirely dialogue-free ‘The Red Turtle’ is a fable so simple, so pure, it feels as if it has existed for hundreds of years, like a brilliant shard of sea glass rendered smooth and elegant through generations of retelling...” (Variety Chief International Film Critic Peter Debruge)

Popping up on our fairy tale radar this past week, a new animated film, The Red Turtle. It's a new Ghibli film, released this last Friday (September 23, 2016) and, a first for the Japanese studio, an international co-production, directed by Dutch animator Michaël Dudok de Wit, and animated in France and Belgium by a series of animation companies.

Here's the trailer:

With rave reviews coming from the Toronto International Film festival and critics around the globe, it isn't necessarily obvious that a "castaway and desert island survival" film would have fairy tale connections, but our radar blipped insistently so we went digging and found it did indeed!

But first, what is this film? It's an almost-dialogue free celebration of both Nature and man's indomitable Nature, surviving and thriving against the odds. It's also, reportedly, an immersive film which the viewer just needs to experience. While possibly a risky venture, it's clear the team achieved their intent as we only seen glowing reports about people being very moved.

So where do fairy tales fit here? Reviewers and critics have been intuitively connecting the film to fairy tales in that they say "it's easy to believe this is an adaptation of a little known Hans Christian Andersen classic or perhaps a rare tale from some remote Pacific Island", even though it isn't, it's original. They're right, it is original but there is a also a fairy tale connection, though not perhaps the type that most readily spring to mind.

The fact that there's a magical turtle might initially be misleading, so we had to dig a little deeper.

We found an interview with writer and director Dudok de Wit, in which he said this:

On the inspiration for the magical turtle in the film: 

As a child, I was a voracious reader of fairy tales and myths and legends. When I started on this, Takahata sent me a book called Kwaidan, by Lafcadio Hearn, which has Japanese traditional fairy tales about transformations of people and animals. 

Subconsciously I had a basis [for the story]... [the protagonist] wants to go home, the island is not his home. But he can't. Why can't he? I wanted a sea creature [to stop him], a shark, etc. Hang on — a turtle. Intuitively, it felt really good. My rational side looked at it a bit later, and the color came later, but at that moment, I thought, "Not only do we have our main character, but it's probably going to be the name of the film." So rationally, I can say I needed a mysterious sea creature that gives the impression of being immortal. It's a peaceful animal, non-aggressive, it's solitary, it disappears into infinity, which I find very important in this film. There's something very moving about a turtle leaving where she belongs, the sea, and going on the beach with a lot of effort, digging, laying eggs, filling the pits, and going back. I've seen one doing it — I've seen umpteen video clips. It looks like they can't make it, because it's such an effort. For a moment, they become like us, mammals who breathe, with arms and legs. And then they disappear [into the sea] again, and become part of infinity. So that all clicked together beautifully.

(You can read the rest of the interview HERE.)

Kwaidan can be translated as Japanese Weird Tales, or Tales About Strange Things (Sometimes you see it titled Stories and Studies of Strange Things.) Although Japan has more "fairy tales" as we might define them than China (which have more supernatural tales), Kwaidan is definitely a mix, and includes ghost and supernatural tales in addition to what you would find in a book specifically titled Japanese Fairy Tales. If you read both, however, you see overlaps and how they often exist in that same "fairy tale place". We highly recommend reading the volume if you haven't already!

So keep an eye out for The Red Turtle. It's clear that among filmmakers, at present, there's a big interest in going back to the "old" fairy tales, legends and myths and creating new works inspired by them. Although this won't be considered a "fairy tale film", it's already widely regarded as a fable, and it's refreshing to see creators explore new narratives (even if they're mostly silent), spring-boarding from old tales, instead of just retelling familiar ones. It brings a nice balance to the storytelling people are engaging in, in the 're-boot' age, with nods to both history and the future.