| Summary: | "In this, the first collection of essays to address the development of fairy tale film as a genre, Pauline Greenhill and Sidney Eve Matrix stress, "the mirror of fairy-tale film reflects not so much what its audience members actually are but how they see themselves and their potential to develop (or, likewise, to regress)." As Jack Zipes says further in the foreword, "Folk and fairy tales pervade our lives constantly through television soap operas and commercials, in comic books and cartoons, in school plays and storytelling performances, in our superstitions and prayers for miracles, and in our dreams and daydreams. The artistic re-creations of fairy-tale plots and characters in film--the parodies, the aesthetic experimentation, and the mixing of genres to engender new insights into art and life-- mirror possibilities of estranging ourselves from designated roles, along with the conventional patterns of the classical tales." Here, scholars from film, folklore, and cultural studies move discussion beyond the well-known Disney movies to the many other filmic adaptations of fairy tales and to the widespread use of fairy tale tropes, themes, and motifs in cinema."--Publisher's description.
To set the field: fairy tales are traditional or literary fictional narratives that combine human and non-human protagonists with elements of wonder and the supernatural. Scholars of literature and film explore how such narratives manifest in film, either native to it or changelings from written literature or oral tradition. Among the topics are the commodification of childhood in contemporary fairy tale film, Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth/El Laberinto del fauno and neomagical realism, feminism and place in The Juniper Tree, patriarchal backlash and nostalgia in Disney's Enchanted, feminist cultural pedagogy in Angela Carter and Neil Jordan's The Company of Wolves, and a secret midnight ball and a magic cloak in Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut.
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