Chervona Vorona Creates Fairy Tale Worlds Infused With Her Heritage

Chervona Vorona isn't new to having her work go viral. It's likely you've seen a few of her images over the years without even realizing who created them. The picture at the head of this post, and the set it's from, are currently making the rounds on the internet, and the papier-mâché beast is certainly an impressive addition to the lovely styling and work of this Ukrainian artist's photography, and well worth the attention. Rather than just focus on this trending set of photos which incorporate her design, creations of costumes, props, her photography and digital work, we thought we'd also hand-pick some other pieces of her work to showcase a little of the variety she's created that you may not have seen before, with an emphasis (for us) on those that evoke untold tales.

Though most of her work doesn't appear to have titles, she calls this first one, "We Are Sewn To Our Land", which is a great expression of her whole artistic approach:

The following are a very brief selection from her various portfolios. Some have multiple pictures in the same shoot, (see the kitsune example below) while others are stand-alones. Either way, we think each of these shows her preference and propensity for creating stories in a frame.

(You can see some of Chervona Vorona's digital process in creating one of the kitsune portraits, in a brief video HERE.)

Here's an excerpt from an interview with Paradox Magazine:

Tell us a few things about your studies and your decision to become a photographer. 

Chervona Vorona: I studied to be an illustrator. But my job is only remotely related to my education. First I worked as a stylist and a decorator, but photography was what I needed to complete my aspirations. 

What is the role of imagination in your work? Your work is full of fairy tale images. 

Chervona Vorona: Fairy tales, this is the most important thing, my main inspiration, therefore, my images are of different ages, but they are all united by magic or a hint of it.
Maybe it’s because of the books read in childhood. Although I now read mostly fairy tales! Imagination is very important in my work! But of no less importance are things like observation and resourcefulness.

Darina (Dary), or Chervona Vorona, as the internet knows her, makes her own props and costumes and apparently often starts with headpieces, building the look from there. Her talents include altering old dresses, like the one for Beauty and the Beast, for which she used an old wedding dress, and the traditional folk-design wings she constructed for her "Wings of Hope" spread), as well as doing the styling of the shoots and digital work afterward.
A nice personal touch is that Dary also uses dresses designed and created by her grandmother, Zoya, who, at 66 was finally able to fulfill a life-long dream, after working most of her years to date in a factory to raise her granddaughter and two other children. The Rapunzel dress below is one of Zoya's creations.

And here are a couple more shots from the striking Beauty and the Beast shoot:

As a bonus here's a very quick video of Dary creating the Beast puppet:

We love how Darina makes creative use of her heritage, often in subtle ways in the intricacies of the designs or placement of things and people, and isn't afraid to try different styles (like this HERE - yes, that Julia Margaret Cameron-looking photo is hers!) as well as 'traditional' ideas of fairy tales, in creating photographic tales and designs. It gives her work a unique and memorable flavor.

You can find much more of Dary's photography on her Facebook page HERE and her Instagram HERE.

Sources: HERE, HERE and HERE

Article: "How video games like 'The Witcher' are saving Slavic folklore" & Introducing a New Eastern European Fairy Tale Based Family Game 'Forest of Sleep'

Folktales from the Slavic countries (primarily Central and Eastern Europe) form one of the richest and most diverse mythologies in the world. Traditional Western European fairy tales may have become watered down and sanitised over countless retellings and interpretations, but Slavic mythology still retains its bite. (alphr.com)

This topic has been much in discussion in the fairy tale newsroom these past few weeks, so when this article popped onto our radar we had to share it.

THE WITCHER, RISE OF THE TOMB RAIDER & THEA: THE AWAKENING
The Witcher is officially based on Polish folklore as it's main source, but it clearly' borrows' from other Slavic (and Northern European) neighbors as well.

Here are some excerpts, complete with a historian/anthropologist with a special interest in folklore chiming in:

Slavic stories are different to tales from other cultures. Unlike typical Western European stories, commonly based on wars of competing ideologies, Slavic folklore – and other Eastern European stories – are more often about individual human traits, rather than good versus evil. 

..Slavic mythology features prominently in Andrzej Sapkowski’s The Witcher novels, as well as the associated video games and the soon-to-be-filmed series for Netflix. These are new stories that were populated with creatures and monsters from Slavic folklore, and told with a distinctly Slavic flavour. For example, it could be argued that the immortal crones of Crookback Bog in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt are representative of the Baba Yaga myth... 

...The Witcher games are also full of spirits that are bound to specific locations in the game, with tragic backstories that can be unravelled as part of protagonist Geralt’s investigations into the monsters he hunts. “The most fascinating aspect of Slavic lore are the ‘unclean spirits’ attached to specific locations, such as the home or the barn,” says Nicole Schmidt of the Mythos Podcast. “There is the Bannik, the spirit of the bathhouse, and the Poludnica, a malevolent female spirit of the harvest field.” 

...Dr David Waldron is a lecturer in history and anthropology at Federation University, with a special interest in folklore. He explains: “[Slavic tales] have a distinct ideological difference to Western science fiction and fantasy. Battles between good and evil, and opposing ideologies in general, are seen as inherently destructive. You find the ultimate values being placed on the immediate kindness, integrity and compassion to those around you. Ideologies tend to suppress that for the ‘greater good’. I find something quite laudable in the Slavic approach to ethics,” he adds, “and think it could be argued Eastern European stories led to the ambiguity we now see in modern fiction like Game of Thrones or even 
in Star Wars: The Last Jedi, where toxic masculinity is the villain.” 

The ambiguous morality of Slavic folklore, and the focus on the individual rather than the greater good, translates well into the player-focused decision-making of video games. Video games are also greatly focused on spaces, which gives a lot of scope for stories of “unclean spirits” to be woven into the detailed environments of worlds like The Witcher 3’s – often as enemies to be fought.

You can read the whole of the article HERE.

There is an older article, titled The Myth Behind The Monsters of The Witcher 3, citing the specific folkloric inspiration (and differences) for the game too. You can find that HERE, and we've included some excerpts below as well. The monsters listed are:

• Alps  - vampiric-like elves, that seek out female dreamers and twist their dreams into nightmares
• Leshen (Leshy) - "gnarled, root-like monstrosities can be found in dense, ancient forests and are fiercely territorial. Their attacks manipulate nature itself, using roots and branches to assail their opponents", though The Witcher has added an element of Wendigo to them, making them more malicious than mischievous as per Slavic folklore
• Noonwraiths - again The Witcher has amped the horrific aspects, but in folklore, they are the personification of heatstroke, with Summer field workers being vulnerable to their attacks
• Botchlins or Mylings - basically tragic infant zombies that cannot rest due to "being discarded or aborted without burial or a given name". They hunt for expectant mothers to drain the life source of them and their fetuses... eesh.
• Succubi - The Witcher versions share aspects with the scarier versions of sirens/harpies.

• Plague Maidens - we'll just quote their explanation: "Plague Maidens are derived from “Pesta” of Scandinavian folklore. An elderly woman, robed in black, is the embodiment of the pestilence and disease that ravaged Europe when the Black Death rolled into town. From 1346 to 1353, the bubonic plague devastated entire populations and communities. Denmark lost a third of its population, with Norway losing almost half. The legend of Pesta states that she would travel from farm to farm, bringing with her the ill omen of the plague. If she was seen carrying a rake, people believed that only a few of the populace would die, but if she was seen carrying a broom, the settlement would not survive the disease."
• The Wild Hunt - "...are a spectral horde of elves from another dimension. Atop their ghastly steeds, this throng of hunters rides across the night sky, harbingers of war and death. They are heavily armored soldiers that pursue their foes by teleporting between dimensions, striking without warning, and wherever they go a crippling frost precedes them."

Oh and Jacob Grimm gets a nice credit here in this article too, particularly for his volume “Deutsche Mythologie”.

                                     

Please note: In case it's not clear by this point, The Witcher video game is very adult. There is a TON of violence, horror monsters, as well as alcohol and explicit sex. Nevertheless, the game has amazing artwork, innovative use of story and a huge and popular following. (See some amazing, folkloric, and quite horrific cosplay of The Crones - a specifically strongly folkloric aspect at one point of the adventure - HERE.) Even their trailers are intriguing for non-violent RPG video gamers (this one embedded here is PG, possibly PG-13, which might actually be considered misleading, regarding its usual content):

FOREST OF SLEEP
There's also another article on a family-friendly, Slavic folktale-based video game we never got to blog about (the beginnings of a post are still sitting in our drafts folder!), called Forest of Sleep, that should interest folks as well. It is "an experimental, generative storytelling adventure based on Eastern European fairy tales" and the art style and aspects we've seen are delightful. The article/interview is titled: “Weird stuff can happen in folk tales”: Ed Key talks meaning, morals and evil bears in Forest of Sleep", and, just like the interviewer, you can't help but be drawn in by the image of a bear holding a balalaika...

 Here's an excerpt from the interview:

TM: So how are you going about structuring these generative folk tales? Are you looking at folklore through a structuralist lens – taking the approach that they’re built up of common movements and characters?EK: Yes, but there's also the link to modern storytelling here, like episodic cartoons, which all follow this fairly limited set of dramatic structures. Because of the incidents within them, they feel different and surprising, and they have a measure of anticipation.I should really say that thinking in terms of these structures is quite new to me. Nicolai and Hannah [Nicolai Troshinsky and Hannah Nicklin, who are also working on Forest of Sleep] both come from much more of a story-making background. Between us we're getting into this structural idea of narratives. Vladimir Propp is the big figure when you talk about folk tales and structuralism....Where Forest came from originally was, halfway through making Proteus I took a break and started making a game about an expedition – going up a mountain and coming back down again, and how you plan your food and so on. That morphed into a more fixed folk tale story about being in the forest when your parent falls ill, and your group needs to go into the next valley and find medicine. Then I started talking to Nicholai about generative narratives, and he suggested making a game about folk tales. His reason for this was based on the sense that weird stuff can happen in folk tales, and you don't question it so much.Also, there's a thing fairly specific to Russian folk tales, in that you have characters that recur across several stories, like Prince Ivan or Baba Yaga, who are kind of archetypes. The way these characters recur felt like it lent itself to a generative system.

You can find that article HERE.

Forest of Sleep is still in development, with the projected release sometime during 2018. (Possibly, or a little later.)

The Theme For This #FolkloreThursday is Favorite Folk and Fairy Tales!

                               

Do you know this Icelandic fairy tale? (Answer below)

If you're not a Twitter regular, may we suggest popping in on Thursday this week for a topic close to our hearts: Favorite Fairy Tales!

All you need to do is look up the hashtag:

#FolkloreThursday

(ie. put this hashtag into the search bar

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 Tales edited by Mrs. Angus W. Hall. Here is a storytelling video of the tale:

Disney's "The Nutcracker and the Four Realms" Update

Although we announced the trailer release on Twitter the day it came out, we realize there may not be a handy summary of details, the trailer and screenshots etc regarding this highly anticipated Winter release from Disney, and thought it might be nice to gather them here to bring folks up to date, especially as the film will be released a little earlier than "Christmas week" as originally planned.

We posted at length during the development and pre-production of the film HERE and HERE, explaining the sources being used and the approach (along with the cast list) so we'll just get straight to the synopsis to remind you of where the plot is being hinted at going, and the limited looks so far. (They still have a lot of work to do with special effects etc, which will likely take most of the year.)

Here's the latest on how the production is going:

(In late December), the (Disney) studio announced it was planning a massive 32 days of additional photography on the ballet-inspired fantasy movie, bringing in “Captain America: The First Avenger” director Joe Johnston instead of original filmmaker Lasse Hallstrom. The studio said Hallstrom was unavailable due to scheduling issues — though he has no other projected publicly lined up — but he will be involved with postproduction. (TheWrap)

Here's the official synopsis, released with the trailer in December:

All Clara (Mackenzie Foy) wants is a key – a one-of-a-kind key that will unlock a box that holds a priceless gift from her late mother. A golden thread, presented to her at godfather Drosselmeyer’s (Morgan Freeman) annual holiday party, leads her to the coveted key—which promptly disappears into a strange and mysterious parallel world. It’s there that Clara encounters a soldier named Phillip (Jayden Fowora-Knight), a gang of mice and the regents who preside over three Realms: Land of Snowflakes, Land of Flowers and Land of Sweets. Clara and Phillip must brave the ominous Fourth Realm, home to the tyrant Mother Ginger (Helen Mirren), to retrieve Clara’s key and hopefully return harmony to the unstable world. Starring Keira Knightley as the Sugar Plum Fairy and featuring a special performance by Misty Copeland, Disney’s new holiday feature film “The Nutcracker and the Four Realms” is directed by Lasse Hallström and inspired by E.T.A. Hoffmann’s classic tale. In theaters on Nov. 2, 2018.

Here's the trailer:

No summary would be complete without a boat-load of stills. the fantasy aspect is very apparent, though the responses to the visuals seem to be quite mixed. Some people love them, others are calling it an "Alice in Wonderland reboot". It's early days yet, considering how much still needs to be done, but what do our readers think about it so far? (Note: Pictures shown in no particular order.)

We barely get to see Helen Mirren as Mother Ginger but she's intriguing, even in just a glimpse. And she has a wooden sword...

We get glimpses of Misty Copeland dancing "all the parts" as The Ballerina. 

For your reference, from our post on Twitter in December: 

Misty Copeland on diversity & her 'Nutcracker' princess: "(my scenes are)...kind of a production within..the movie...a performance characters are experiencing...I’m portraying all the scenes in Nutcracker, the snow scene, battle scene, land of the sweets." https://t.co/4doQCz8CkX

— Gypsy Thornton (@inkgypsy) December 5, 2017

While we have no doubt Copeland's dancing will be phenomenal, we're yet to be wowed by this sequence and hope the end result will have more innovation than what's been shown to date. The use of Tchaikovsky's score means we'll definitely be treated to another variation on this beloved suite; definitely a plus.

This sequence where Clara sees a tag on a string, rope or ribbon, then follows it in some sort of Victorian parlour Christmas game, is intriguing. We've seen a couple of games like this in films and TV episodes before (Reign anyone?) and even vaguely remember playing something like this as children but finding information on this game is proving difficult to dig up. We're quite curious about the significance and symbolism it may have with regard to the story and the four realms. Feel free to chime in and share links in the comments, if you find some online resources on this topic.

This tree opening and framing looks really familiar! (Pan's Labyrinth, Once Upon A Time, Maleficent, among others...)

And finally a little bit of odd trivia that folklorists should enjoy, from The Times:

Margaret Thatcher’s influence has been widely felt but few would have put money on the Iron Lady being the inspiration for a Disney heroine. According to Keira Knightley, the puffed-up pink hairdo flaunted by her character, the Sugar Plum Fairy, in Disney’s forthcoming film The Nutcracker and the Four Realms, was based on Thatcher’s bouffant, in volume if not colour. “There were a couple of Tory female politicians I thought of,” Knightley tells Variety. “She’s Margaret Thatcher meets Marilyn Monroe.”

Cast

• Mackenzie Foy as Clara
• Jayden Fowora-Knight as Philip
• Keira Knightley as Sugar Plum Fairy, the Sweets Realm Queen
• Helen Mirren as Mother Ginger
• Morgan Freeman as Drosselmeyer
• Misty Copeland as The Ballerina
• Eugenio Derbez as Flower Realm King
• Miranda Hart as Dew Drop Fairy
• Jack Whitehall as Harlequin
• Ellie Bamber as Louise
• Richard E. Grant as Snow Realm King

This shot of Clara in the toy soldier's uniform is possibly the most intriguing to us; it indicates she's not a passive child-heroine, but an active protagonist. While the other visuals are fine, this is the one that makes us curious. Bring on November!