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| King Golden Hair (from von Schönwerth's rediscovered tales) by Barbara Stefan |
The discovery in Regensberg of 500 long-hidden German fairy tales assembled by Franz Xaver Schbnwerth (1810 – 86), which was reported in The Guardian on Monday, is potentially excellent news for Hollywood. At the current rate with which the studios are racing to reformulate the fairy tales of Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, and other writers and collectors into modish, mostly live-action films, they will exhaust the familiar canon in two years tops.
[FTNH edit: May I just quickly interrupt to point out that one of the coolest things about these rediscovered tales is their rawness. Unlike the Grimm's who edited, revised, polished and essentially turned told tales into literary ones, these 'rediscovered' tales were faithfully recorded in their incomplete inaccuracies as retold by common folk, almost complete with "um's and ah's". While I would hope - would be excited to know - that there are directors, writers and creators in Hollywood who would happily be inspired and/or mine a story for a movie or series out of such stories, it's a lot harder than finding a book of tales [which is conveniently out of copyright] and remaking a version of those and so quite unlikely we're going to see these tales spawn Hollywood-happy material. I would love to be proven wrong on this.
After summarizing what's coming to the screen Reporter Graham Fuller goes on to mention the two Little Mermaid projects that I haven't seen anything on for quite some time and speculates what else may be coming:]
Joe Wright (“Atonement”) will direct a live-action film of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid.” Shana Feste (“Country Strong”) is prepping the film of Carolyn Turgeon’s comparatively dark 2011 novel “Mermaid: A Twist on the Classic Tale.”
Thirty-six years after the flowery British musical “The Slipper and the Rose” and 14 after the limp “Ever After,” a new “Cinderella” can’t be far behind, whether it’s based on the Greek version recorded in the first century B.C., the ninth-century Chinese one, the 1634 Neapolitan one, Perrault’s, the Grimms’, or Turgeon’s 2009 “Godmother: The Secret Cinderella Story.”
[FTNH edit: I greatly appreciate that there was quite a bit of research that went into this article but I especially like what he has to say toward the end as it's a point of view I haven't seen put forward before. :]
The fairy-tale craze – which TV, too, has exploited with ABC’s “Once Upon a Time” -- was triggered by the massive success and prestige of Jackson’s “The Lord of the Rings” and the three films adapted so far from C.S. Lewis’s “Narnia Chronicles.” After a wave of bland but violent period adventure films in the nineties, “LOTR” and then “Narnia” opened the doors to “romance” cinema – by which I mean medieval or medievally inflected stories and their ilk, as opposed to stories of romantic love. They depicted great deeds of heroism, invoked mysticism, deployed state-of-the-art special effects, and, crucially for grabbing the attention of female tweens and teens, had women or girl warriors. “King Arthur” (2004), with Keira Knightley as an aggressive proto-feminist Guinevere, extended this idea less convincingly, though the film was a global hit.
You can read the entire Hollywood Fairy Tale Frenzy article HERE.While sifting through Von Schönwerth's work, Eichenseer found 500 fairytales, many of which do not appear in other European fairytale collections. ... However, the collection also includes local versions of the tales children all over the world have grown up with including Cinderella and Rumpelstiltskin, and which appear in many different versions across Europe.
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| Mr. & Mrs. Vinegar at Home by Arthur Rackham |
There is some interesting work being done my anthropologists on the cultural life of street people. And there, the oral tradition is very much alive. As a source of entertainment and as an education to those entering that world.
Very much like fairy tales once did for children.
Theater company called Cardboard Citizens well worth looking out for.
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| The 'homeless children' aka Hansel & Gretel, of ABC's Once Upon A Time |
The Ice Book is a miniature theatre show made of paper and light. An exquisite experience of fragile paper cutouts and video projections that sweep you right into the heart of a fantasy world. It is an intimate and immersive experience of animation, book art and performance.
Davy always had the dream of creating a theatre performance that opened up like a pop-up book. A show that would mix video projections with live actors to create a totally immersive experience. We wanted to create a full scale, life-size theatre production.
The idea for the Icebook was to create a miniature maquette for this dream – a demonstration model to show to producers and other funders in the hope that they would give us some money to make the full scale show. (And we still hope that this will come true one day!) The Icebook has since however, grown its own legs and turned into a miniature show all by itself. An intimate performance for small audiences.
We love the old pre-cinematic optical illusions, such as zeotropes and magic lanterns, and the magical way in which they can mesmerise audiences through basic mechanics. Rather than simply projecting images onto a screen, we wanted to create an object with a life of its own – a tangible and magical “thing” for an audience to experience.
...Aesthetically, we were also inspired by early 20th century Russian fairytales as well as the work of Jan Svankmajer, Flatworld, the Judder Man from the Metz advert, Georges Méliès and the genre of German expressionism.
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| This concept art was for a Snow Queen attraction in Disney Land, which was sadly never made. |
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| Pre 2003 visual development for Disney's Snow Queen by Carol Kieffer Police |
She is also set to provide the speaking and singing voice as the lead in Disney’s upcoming animated feature Frozen. Directed by Chris Buck (Surf’s Up), the film is being produced by John Lasseter and Peter Del Vecho.
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| Pre 2003 visual development for Disney's Snow Queen by Carol Kieffer Police |
Our guess is that "Frozen" will be a computer generated feature (released in 3D, naturally), and that the next traditionally animated Disney feature will be "The Name Game," a quirky take on the Rumpelstiltskin tale being readied (in secret) by Ron Clements and John Musker. Supposedly the reason why that project is gaining momentum is because of the runaway success (and synergistic opportunities) of ABC's Sunday night series "Once Upon a Time," which features Rumpelstiltskin as the show's main villain.
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| Pre 2003 visual development for Disney's Snow Queen by Carol Kieffer Police |
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| Brave textural poster by Peter Moxom |
(On the folk tales:) Despite the makers of Brave claiming a passion for Scottish legends, insiders say the Caledonian influence is a bit hit and miss. One studio source said the only Scottish idea is the will o' the wisp who leads Merida to a meeting with a witch, below. But will o' the wisps, jack o' lanterns or hinkypunks are not uniquely Scottish, appearing in fairytales all over the world.
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| Header from Jeana Jorgenson's site. Photo by Chris Chambers |
For the non-folklorists out there, we use the term “tale type” to refer to a folktale or fairy tale plot that has shown stability throughout time and space. “Cinderella” and “Little Red Riding Hood” are great examples of tale plots that are transmitted in different languages, countries, and time periods. But here you run into the problem of tale title; “Cinderella” doesn’t bear that name in every telling, so how are we scholars supposed to keep track of them all?
The tale type system, pioneered by Finn Antti Aarne in the early 1900s and revised by American Stith Thompson in the mid-20th century and updated by German Hans-Jorg Uther in 2004, assigns numbers to tale plots. So “Cinderella” is Aarne-Thompson-Uther (ATU) 510A, “Little Red Riding Hood” is ATU 333, and so on.
However, there are problems with the system. As fairy-tale scholar Donald Haase writes on his Facebook:
I am happy to announce a new project for folk-narrative and fairy-tale scholars. For decades we have relied on the Aarne-Thompson tale-type index to understand the essence of a tale, but its skeletal description of each type’s essential plot prevents us from seeing other possibilities. The recent revision of the AaTh index was an important first step in rethinking and revising those descriptions. The Internet, however, now makes possible a new way of thinking. Devoted to breaking the magic spell of Aarne-Thompson, I propose a communal catalog of #TwitterTypes. What are #TwitterTypes? Posted on Twitter, #TwitterTypes are new summaries of traditional tales in 140 characters or less (including some version of the tale’s title). Why Twitter? Because the discipline of 140 characters composed on a computer or smartphone forces creative choices about a tale’s “essence,” and those choices reveal, to the Tweeter, the alternatives — the “Tweets-not-taken.”
by Alan Lee (corrected, thanks to Anonymous)
The cool thing is that Haase basically wants to crowd-source this, a technique noted by digital humanities scholars and which I’m really curious about for fairy-tale studies:
Why a communal catalog? Imagine not a SINGLE effort to capture the SINGLE essence a tale but MANY efforts to express its MANY possibilities. Besides, I don’t want to do this all myself. So this is a CFT — a Call for #TwitterTypes. A call for contributions to the omnipresent, cloud-based #TwitterType Catalog, an endless project that exists everywhere and nowhere, a catalog that grows every time a fairy-tale scholar tweets. The first two #TwitterTypes–for “Little Red Riding Hood” and “The Frog King or Iron Henry”–follow soon on Twitter, with simultaneous postings on my Facebook page. (Thanks, Gary, for having inspired this project.)Examples of Haase’s include Blue Beard: (he-said-she-said) I do.–DON’T!–I won’t.–YOU DID!–I didn’t.–YOU’RE DONE FOR!–DON’T THINK SO!! (He didn’t; done in.)
I’m going to start posting some of my own, and I encourage fairy-tale enthusiasts to do the same, and please share this link! In an update, Haase announced that we’ll go with the hashtag #TwTy since it’s shorter, allowing for more creativity within Twitter’s character limits (though I think starting with the #TwitterTypes hashtag to let searchers know that you’re participating might be helpful). Looking for inspiration? Folklorist D. L. Ashliman runs a great site of electronic folklore & mythology texts, many of which include tale type numbers. His Grimms’ tale listing is here. Another great fairy-tale site online is Sur La Lune. If you can’t find the tale type numbers, that’s fine, I think using the title will work too.
So, have at, and pass it on!
Frog King Iron Henry: Little ball lost. Froggie goes a courtin’. Deal’s a deal. Gets to first. Rounding third. Off the wall! OMG! Oh Henry! (Donald Haase)
Snow Child (ATU1362): Child conceived by eating snow should not be left in the sun. Cuckolds make the worst babysitters. #TwTy (Adam Zolkover)
Sleeping Beauty (ATU410): Fairies are poor sports. Spindles cause 100 year dreams. Wake up to big surprises. #TwTy (Brittany Waram)
Rapunzel: Little girls named for food can't be preserved and stored forever. Princes also have cravings. #TwTy (Donald Haase)
#TwTy Bluebeard: Curiosity killed the wives. Her key to survival? Angry brothers killed the cad. (Gypsy Thornton)
C&P (ATU425B): Beauty given to monster who beds her as a man. She peeks; he flees. His mom’s a real witch who demands the impossible. #TwTy (Linda Lee)
