In The Oxford History of World Cinema (1996), edited by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith and advertised as “the definitive history of cinema worldwide,” there is not one word about fairy tale films. Even in the chapter on animation, the term “fairy tale” does not appear. All this is very strange, if not bizarre, given the fact that two fairy tale films—Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and The Wizard of Oz (1939)—are among the most popular films in the world and have had a significant impact on cinema up through the present. The exclusion of fairy tale film as...

Fairy tales are fictional narratives that combine human and nonhuman protagonists with elements of wonder and the supernatural. They come in traditional (usually collected from oral tellers) or literary (formally composed and written) forms. Each traditional fairy tale telling forms a copy for which there is no original. Every version offers a snapshot—a view of that story in time and space that refers to its sources and predecessors—but fidelity to an original is profoundly beside the point. Though readers, hearers, viewers, and tellers may perceive the first version they encounter as the genuine, authentic text, as Donald Haase...

While folklorists often define the fairy tale or tale of magic as a narrative where the supernatural is never questioned—thus requiring the audience’s absolute suspension of disbelief—recent fairy tale films seem to thrive precisely on raising questions about the realism, if not the reality, of fairy tales and their heroines. For instance, in the popular 1998 film Ever After (directed by Andy Tennant), the heroine’s self-proclaimed great-great-granddaughter states, “While Cinderella and her prince did live happily ever after, the point, gentlemen, is that she lived.” Bringing closure to the tale she has just told the two men identified...

In the twenty-first century, when genetic manipulation, robotics, organ transplants, and neuropharmaceutical drugs are familiar to most people’s worldviews, the story of a little boy who is literally built by a paternal figure continues to engage audiences. The wooden puppet, Pinocchio, written into the cultural imagination by Carlo Collodi in 1883, provides a significantly different representation of childhood than contemporary ones but nonetheless continues to inform current questions about what childhood is, or should be. Collodi’s original written text and its screen version, produced by the Disney Corporation in 1940, still speak to cultural analyses of childhood because they reflect...

Fairy tales have undergone multiple changes and evolved over the centuries as a result of the prejudices and preferences of authors, folklorists, and film directors, producers, and screenwriters. For example, Cinderella’s tale (ATU 510A), replicated in Disney’s Cinderella (directed by Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson, and Hamilton Luske, 1950) and Ever After (directed by Andy Tennant, 1998), also provided the inspiration for works like Pretty Woman (directed by Garry Marshall, 1990) and Maid in Manhattan (directed by Wayne Wang, 2002). All share elements commonly associated with fairy tales, such as the phrase “once upon a time,” angelic princesses (with or without...

The fairy tale princess has become familiar to Euro-North Americans through bedtime stories, children’s literature, and Disney films. The prolific fairy tale theorist Jack Zipes has gone so far as to claim—possibly exaggerating for effect—that “it is not by chance that the fairy tale film has become the most popular cultural commodity in America, if not the world” (1997, 1). Equally famous—if not more so for children today—is J. K. Rowling’s series of Harry Potter novels and the films based on the books. Their phenomenal success has prompted both positive and negative readings of their characters...

The 1998 film Ever After: A Cinderella Story, directed by Andy Tennant and starring Drew Barrymore, is a delightful retelling of “Cinderella” (ATU 510A) for a contemporary audience that has grown up with second-wave feminism and its arguments about the problematically sexist representation of women. Unlike other popular literary and cinematic Cinderellas, who need the help of birds (Grimms and Disney), mice (Disney), or fairies (Perrault and Disney) to accomplish chores and prove themselves worthy of respect and love, Danielle (Drew Barrymore) wins the affection and esteem of her prince (Dougray Scott) by being -smart, caring, strong, and assertive. She...

Folklorists contend that some stories can be traced through time and space yet retain their fundamental form even in the face of different tellers’ cultural and symbolic inflections. Indeed, a few fairy tales, like “The Juniper Tree” (ATU 720), have been extensively told and retold in genres other than their primary oral and written forms. They contain multiple messages, explicit or tacit, for tellers and audiences, which can refer to individual psychology, performance context, and/or underlying cultural patterns, among many possibilities. Given the extreme variability within the genre, what light can a filmed interpretation shed on this story and its...

Walt Disney Studios promoted their movie Enchanted (directed by Kevin Lima, 2007) as a celebratory self-parody of their classic fairy tale films, including Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (directed by David Hand, 1937), Cinderella (directed by Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson, and Hamilton Luske, 1950), and Sleeping Beauty (directed by Clyde Geronimi, 1959). Extensive advertising touted Enchanted as a musical comedy that pokes fun at the conventional damsels in distress, the villains seeking to destroy them, and their manly rescuers, all presented in the context of a contemporary story line.¹ We contend that the film reinforces previous Disney fairy tale...

According to Jack Zipes, readers intuitively know that a narrative is a fairy tale, and the same can be said of fairy tale film (1997, 61).¹ But even though the genre is recognizable regardless of form or medium, audience approaches can be unpredictable. In this chapter, I want to explore a particular audience’s reactions and understanding when a specific familiar text is adapted to film. I currently teach a course on the representation of female archetypes in fairy tales. My students and I work with a number of traditional motifs in film and literature, focusing on versions and references in...

This chapter demonstrates the intertexual relationship between Stanley Kubrick’s final film, Eyes Wide Shut (1999), and the international fairy tale known as “The Twelve Dancing Princesses” (ATU 306)—also variously called “The Worn-Out Dancing Shoes” and “The Secret Ball.”² I argue that approaching Eyes Wide Shut through the analytic lens of its borrowings from ATU 306 illuminates the film’s central themes of desire, duplicity, and power as classic tropes with a decidedly modern twist. As the case of Eyes Wide Shut attests, the age-old story of the disobedient, undomesticated female has considerable cultural elasticity, remaining relevant today as a cautionary...

American filmmaker Tim Burton has, for nearly two decades, performed potent countermagic to Hollywood’s syrupy adaptations of fairy tales and fables. While films like Sleepy Hollow (1999) and Alice in Wonderland (2010) illustrate the extent to which he has engaged the genre, Burton’s links to towering figures like Washington Irving, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Marie-Catherine D’Aulnoy, Walt Disney, and others run deeper than many realize. The visionary and “slightly twisted” (Tiffin 2008, 148)¹ auteur began using fairy tales quite early, when he was still slaving during the 1980s as an underappreciated cartoonist in the dungeons of Disney Studios. Since those...