Utah State University DigitalCommons@USU All USU Press Publications USU Press 2010 Fairy Tale Films Pauline Greenhill Sidney Eve Matrix Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/usupress_pubs Part of the Folklore Commons Recommended Citation Greenhill, P., & Matrix, S. E. (2010). Fairy tale films: Visions of ambiguity. Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press. This Book is brought to you for free and open access by the USU Press at DigitalCommons@USU. It has been accepted for inclusion in All USU Press Publications by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@USU. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Fairy Tale Films Visions of Ambiguity Fairy Tale Films Visions of Ambiguity Pauline Greenhill and Sidney Eve Matrix Editors Utah State University Press Logan, Utah 2010 Copyright © 2010 Utah State University Press All rights reserved Utah State University Press Logan, Utah 84322-7800 Cover photo adapted from The Juniper Tree, courtesy of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, Nietzchka Keene papers, 1979-2003, M2005-051. Courtesy of Patrick Moyroud and Versatile Media. ISBN: 978-0-87421-781-0 (paper) ISBN: 978-0-87421-782-7 (e-book) Manufactured in the United States of America Printed on acid-free, recycled paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fairy tale films : visions of ambiguity / Pauline Greenhill and Sidney Eve Matrix, editors. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-87421-781-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-0-87421-782-7 (e-book) 1. Fairy tales in motion pictures. 2. Fairy tales--Film adaptations. I. Greenhill, Pauline. II. Matrix, Sidney Eve. PN1995.9.F34F35 2010 791.43’6559--dc22 2010021567 Contents Acknowledgments vii Foreword: Grounding the Spell: The Fairy Tale Film and Transformation Jack Zipes ix Introduction: Envisioning Ambiguity: Fairy Tale Films Pauline Greenhill and Sidney Eve Matrix 1 1 Mixing It Up: Generic Complexity and Gender Ideology in Early Twenty-first Century Fairy Tale Films Cristina Bacchilega and John Rieder 23 2 Building the Perfect Product: The Commodification of Childhood in Contemporary Fairy Tale Film Naarah Sawers 42 3 The Parallelism of the Fantastic and the Real: Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth/El Laberinto del fauno and Neomagical Realism Tracie D. Lukasiewicz 60 4 Fitting the Glass Slipper: A Comparative Study of the Princess’s Role in the Harry Potter Novels and Films Ming-Hsun Lin 79 5 The Shoe Still Fits: Ever After and the Pursuit of a Feminist Cinderella Christy Williams 99 6 Mourning Mothers and Seeing Siblings: Feminism and Place in The Juniper Tree Pauline Greenhill and Anne Brydon 116 7 Disney’s Enchanted: Patriarchal Backlash and Nostalgia in a Fairy Tale Film Linda Pershing with Lisa Gablehouse 137 8 Fairy Tale Film in the Classroom: Feminist Cultural Pedagogy, Angela Carter, and Neil Jordan’s The Company of Wolves Kim Snowden 157 9 A Secret Midnight Ball and a Magic Cloak of Invisibility: The Cinematic Folklore of Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut Sidney Eve Matrix 178 10 Tim Burton and the Idea of Fairy Tales Brian Ray 198 List of Tale Types and Literary Stories 219 Bibliography 221 Filmography 239 Contributors 245 Index 249 Acknowledgments Pauline and Sidney Eve thank the contributors for their patience with the process of revision and rewriting. We thank John Alley for being a persistent, but warmly appreciative, editor. We thank Jack Zipes and an anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments and suggestions that greatly improved this book. We thank John Dobson for his attentive indexing. We thank Barbara M. Bannon for her careful and insightful copy-editing. We thank Dorinda Hartmann of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research for archival assistance. We thank Patrick Moyroud for giving us permission to use the cover image. And we thank Emilie Anderson-Grégoire and Kendra Magnusson for their invaluable research assistance at various stages of the work. Pauline thanks Sidney Eve for getting her interested in fairy tale film in the first place, for having the idea that we should do this book together, for assigning her Nietzchka Keene’s The Juniper Tree to write about, and for being an excellent friend and colleague. She thanks her wonderful colleagues in women’s and gender studies at the University of Winnipeg—Roewan Crowe, Angela Failler, and Fiona Green—for their unwavering support and fabulous company. She also thanks the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for its ongoing support of her research and its invaluable and tireless nurturing of Canadian scholars in the human sciences. Sidney Eve thanks Pauline for her generous and critically astute role in shaping this project. She has learned a great deal from Pauline about folklore and fairy tales, and she is deeply grateful for Pauline’s unwavering enthusi- asm and tireless efforts in preparing this text. Sidney Eve’s inspiration for editing this text came from the students she worked with in a course called FILM436—Fairy Tale Film—at Queen’s University. The unexpected con- nections, sharp and fresh insights, and sense of delight and wonder in fairy tales that emerged through many hours of seminar discussions were enlight- ening and energizing. Most of all she wishes to acknowledge her parents, Penny and Mike Reynolds, for the countless hours they spent reading fairy tales and children’s stories to an inquisitive girl who developed an insatiable appetite for books and a lifelong love of learning. Thank you. vii Foreword Grounding the Spell The Fairy Tale Film and Transformation Jack Zipes In THE OXFORD HISTORY OF WORLD CINEMA (1996), edited by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith and advertised as “the definitive history of cinema world- wide,” 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 a category from The Oxford History of World Cinema is even stranger when one considers that the godfather and pioneer of film narrative, Georges Méliès, produced close to thirty films that were superb féeries and numerous directors in Europe and America created well over forty silent fairy tale films at the beginning of the twentieth century. Moreover, Walt Disney and Lotte Reiniger began their great cinematic careers in the 1920s by adapting fairy tales, and nothing much has been made of their great debt to folklore and the fairy tale genre. Indeed, aside from a number of essays and a couple of books that touch on the subject, film critics, folklorists, and literary historians in America and Europe have not realized how much films owe to folklore and the fairy tale. It is for this reason, I believe, that the publication of Pauline Greenhill and Sidney Eve Matrix’s Fairy Tale Films is path breaking and will fill a gap in both film studies and folklore. Not only do the essays in Greenhill and Matrix’s critical study fill a need, but they are also original in their concept, insightful, and based on thorough research. To be sure, they cannot cover all the fairy tale lacunae in ix x Fairy Tale Films film studies; they cannot magically discuss every aspect of the fairy tale film. The focus of the book is mainly on North American, Mexican, and British films produced in the past forty years. And not all the films covered in the book, such as the adaptations of the Harry Potter novels and the fantasy films of Tim Burton and Stanley Kubrick, are, strictly speaking, fairy tale films. However, the motifs, characters, and plots of these films have clearly been borrowed from fairy tales, and they exemplify how complicated the definition of a literary or film genre can be. If we begin with a valid thesis that there is no such thing as a pure genre, but there are distinctive characteristics and plots that alert us to regularities in similar works of art, we can trace a marvelous evolution of the oral won- der tale in the western world and see how it contributed to the formation of the literary fairy tale as a genre in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and how the oral and literary traditions conspired or colluded to reach out to other forms of art to propagate their wonder and fairy tales. We can also easily recognize how the wonder tale and fairy tale were adapted and transformed over five centuries through solo storytelling, gala performances, opera, the ballet, the salon, theater, opera buffo, the magic lantern, vaude- ville, extravaganzas, shows at fairs, painting, book illustrations, and card and video games. By the time Méliès arrived on the scene in Paris with magic and vaudeville shows in the 1890s, the fairy tale was begging or perhaps even demanding to be made into a film. In short, all the conditions for adapting fairy tales for film had been satisfied. Méliès’s experiments with the fairy tale are good examples of the way he expanded the definition of the genre and demonstrated the way that film could enrich it. Not only did he re-create three literary fairy tales written by Charles Perrault and show a flair for comic invention, but he also freely adapted The Arabian Nights and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and used montage, stop-action, dissolves, folklore, and dream to create his own stories. He borrowed and played with motifs and characters from diverse fairy tales, reversing expectations and creating extravagant spectacles.