Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale

by Marina Warner

  Because fairy tales can be meddled with, mixed up, and turned around in ways that an authored text resists, they have emerged as the favoured reservoir of contemporary mass entertainment, and their yields are in a perpetual state of metamorphosis. In 1890, when Adelheid Wette, the sister of the composer Engelbert Humperdinck, adapted the Grimms’ Hansel and Gretel as a song cycle for her own family to perform at home at Christmas, she could not bear the cruelty of the Grimms’ story, even in its watered-down version. She was alarmed, too, at how her children might react, and so she softened it—Gretel becomes motherly, Hansel protective and manly, and both say their prayers. The Sandman appears to lull the children to sleep and he’s nothing like the terrifying figure of the Uncanny whom Freud discusses, but a benign angelic visitor who subdues the horrors of the scary dark forest.

  This family Christmas concert eventually became her brother’s much loved, magnificent opera, Hansel and Gretel. At the end, the children’s parents come rushing onto the stage looking for them—they never meant to lose them, let alone expose them to die. All the witch’s victims—who have been turned into gingerbread biscuits—come back to life. Joy and reassurance all round follows. Even the witch is revived out of the oven—in the form of a cake.

  The young Humperdincks then, and children now at a panto or a play, might not already know the story—there is a first time in the dark forest, and they need to be held gently by the hand to meet the cruel mother and the greedy and punitive witch—often played as her double. For the first-time audience, fairy tales still have happy endings—and lots of comic business to lighten the threats.

  Techno-Magic: Cinema and Fairy Tale

  From the earliest experiments by George Meliès in Paris in the l890s to the present day dominion of Disney Productions and Pixar, fairy tales have been told in the cinema. The concept of illusion carries two distinct, profound, and contradictory meanings in the medium of film: first, the film itself is an illusion, and, bar a few initiates screaming at the appearance of a moving train in the medium’s earliest viewings, everyone in the cinema knows they are being stunned by wonders wrought by science. All appearances in the cinema are conjured by shadow play and artifice, and technologies ever more skilled at illusion: CGI produces living breathing simulacra—of velociraptors (Jurassic Park), elvish castles (Lord of the Rings), soaring bionic monsters (Avatar), grotesque and terrifying monsters (the Alien series), while the modern Rapunzel wields her mane like a lasso and a whip, or deploys it to make a footbridge. Such visualizations are designed to stun us, and they succeed: so much is being done for us by animators and filmmakers, there is no room for personal imaginings. The wicked queen in Snow White (1937) has become imprinted, and she keeps those exact features when we return to the story; Ariel, Disney’s flame-haired Little Mermaid, has eclipsed her wispy and poignant predecessors, conjured chiefly by the words of Andersen’s story.

  A counterpoised form of illusion, however, now flourishes rampantly at the core of fairytale films, and has become central to the realization on screen of the stories, especially in entertainment which aims at a crossover or child audience. Contemporary commercial cinema has continued the Victorian shift from irresponsible amusement to responsible instruction, and kept faith with fairy tales’ protest against existing injustices. Many current family films posit spirited, hopeful alternatives (in Shrek Princess Fiona is podgy, liverish, ugly, and delightful; in Tangled, Rapunzel is a super heroine, brainy and brawny; in the hugely successful Disney film Frozen (2013), inspired by The Snow Queen, the younger sister Anna overcomes ice storms, avalanches, and eternal winter to save Elsa, her elder). Screenwriters display iconoclastic verve, but they are working from the premise that screen illusions have power to become fact. ‘Wishing on a star’ is the ideology of the dream factory, and has given rise to indignant critique, that fairy tales peddle empty consumerism and wishful thinking. The writer Terri Windling, who specializes in the genre of teen fantasy, deplores the once prevailing tendency towards positive thinking and sunny success:

  The fairy tale journey may look like an outward trek across plains and mountains, through castles and forests, but the actual movement is inward, into the lands of the soul. The dark path of the fairytale forest lies in the shadows of our imagination, the depths of our unconscious. To travel to the wood, to face its dangers, is to emerge transformed by this experience. Particularly for children whose world does not resemble the simplified world of television sit-coms … this ability to travel inward, to face fear and transform it, is a skill they will use all their lives. We do children—and ourselves—a grave disservice by censoring the old tales, glossing over the darker passages and ambiguities …

  Fairy tale and film enjoy a profound affinity because the cinema animates phenomena, no matter how inert; made of light and motion, its illusions match the enchanted animism of fairy tale: animals speak, carpets fly, objects move and act of their own accord. One of the darker forerunners of Mozart’s flute is an uncanny instrument that plays in several ballads and stories: a bone that bears witness to a murder. In the Grimms’ tale, ‘The Singing Bone’, the shepherd who finds it doesn’t react in terror and run, but thinks to himself, ‘What a strange little horn, singing of its own accord like that. I must take it to the king.’ The bone sings out the truth of what happened, and the whole skeleton of the victim is dug up, and his murderer—his elder brother and rival in love—is unmasked, sewn into a sack, and drowned.

  This version is less than two pages long: a tiny, supersaturated solution of the Grimms: grotesque and macabre detail, uncanny dynamics of life-in-death, moral piety, and rough justice. But the story also presents a vivid metaphor for film itself: singing bones. (It’s therefore apt, if a little eerie, that the celluloid from which film stock was first made was itself composed of rendered-down bones.)

  Early animators’ choice of themes reveals how they responded to a deeply laid sympathy between their medium of film and the uncanny vitality of inert things. Lotte Reiniger, the writer-director of the first full-length animated feature (The Adventures of Prince Achmed) (Figure 15), made dazzling ‘shadow puppet’ cartoons inspired by the fairy tales of Grimm, Andersen, and Wilhelm Hauff; she continued making films for over a thirty-year period, first in her native Berlin and later in London, for children’s television. Her Cinderella (1922) is a comic—and grisly—masterpiece.

  Figure 15 Oriental shadowplay: early animation takes its cue from the Arabian Nights. Aladdin and Dinarzade, from Lotte Reiniger, The Adventures of Prince Achmed, 1926.

  Early Disney films, made by the man himself, reflect traditional fables’ personification of animals—mice and ducks and cats and foxes; in this century, by contrast, things come to life, no matter how inert they are: computerization observes no boundaries to generating lifelike, kinetic, cybernetic, and virtual reality.

  Box 6 Living Toys

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  L’Enfant et les Sortilèges (The Child and the Spells, 1925), was composed by Maurice Ravel to a libretto by the novelist Colette. In the opera, a cross and contrary child protagonist has a tantrum when his mother asks him if he has done his homework. He hasn’t and he won’t, so when she leaves him to it, he batters his toys, teases and torments his pet squirrel, smashes the teapot and teacup, slashes the curtains, swings on the pendulum of the grandfather clock, and pulls his cat’s tail. When he tears up the pages of his book of fairy tales, the princess in the story appears to take her leave of him and he cries to keep her. All the while, the havoc he creates is mimicked vividly and wittily by the orchestra: the Wedgwood teapot and teacup jiggle to a ragtime tune; the Chinese cup steps to a foxtrot.

  Colette and Ravel had a prophetic insight into an aspect of modern life, which Walt Disney would exploit to the full: the child’s toys and his nursery furniture are not things, any more than his pets and other animals, but are living, conscious beings, independent of the child’s make-believe. At th
e end, the naughty boy calls out for his mother, and his cry, ‘Maman’, is the Magic Word. With this summons, the opera ends in reconciliation and hope and love—like a classic fairy tale. The great puppeteer filmmaker Lotte Reiniger, who animated every kind of object through her art, tried valiantly to buy the rights to the opera, but failed. What a classic of fairytale film she would have made.

  Utopian Dreams/Wishful Thinking

  By far the most striking development in the alliance of fairy tale and cinema as vehicles in family entertainment has been the rise of political sensitivity, and resulting tinkering with stories to show awareness of gender, power relations, and ethnic representation. Both the cultural-historical and psychoanalytical approaches to fairy tale have sharpened producers’ awareness of social engineering. Whereas Reiniger could show a jolly frolic in a harem, and Prince Achmed carousing with lascivious Josephine Baker-style houris, the writer and director of Snow White and the Huntsman (2012) could not even end the story with a marriage—to the prince or to the pauper. This Snow White (Kristen Stewart of the Twilight series) has to remain a lone heroine, a role model for the independent woman—at times in full armour. The rules of genre, which require some resolution to the story, were flouted in the interests of exemplary gender moulding.

  Interestingly, the first experiments in character building through cinematic enchantments took place under socialist or communist regimes. The masters of Soviet Russia and the communist bloc demanded that artists and writers celebrate heroic workers, agricultural quotas, and the brotherhood of man; stray into dream and fantasy and you were dangerously flirting with a degenerate bourgeois aesthetic—veering close to the decadence of surrealism or the moral vacuity of subjective feeling. Many went to the Gulag for such personal flights of fancy.

  But retelling fairy tales for a child audience could offer cover for alternative messages, and turn the official political programme for the arts topsy-turvy: tractors disappeared and flying carpets took over; golden fish swam into view and blue unicorns with long gold eyelashes pranced on the screen. Miracles happened that were not the result of five-year plans. From the Soviet Union, to Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia (as they were then called), the Grimms’ founding principle—that fairy tale expressed the people and the nation—provided a rationale for dusting off traditional stories from all over the empire. Polishing them up for family viewing created a picture of joyous unity in diversity.

  In the days when Stalin wanted everyone to be happy in the vast empire, fairy tales were collected, published (often in beautiful illustrated editions), and performed to forge community spirit. From Belgrade to Vladivostok, the Black Sea to the Arctic Ocean, ethnic stories were told, sung, acted—often in local national dress—to deepen the sense of belonging. Plots were fixed to give uplift: the brave little tailor rejects the princess in favour of the gardener’s daughter; the greedybags treasure-hoarder is destroyed.

  One of the most successful early fairytale films in colour, The Singing Ringing Tree, was made in 1957 in East Germany by the state-controlled studios, the DEFA. The story mashes many elements from favourite tales—several animal helpers, a wicked dwarf, a stuck-up princess, and a plucky, lowborn hero. Their struggles are epic, involving dark perils and terrifying trials. The tree itself reverberates with powerful magic, as in ‘The Juniper Tree’. But these elements are slanted through the lens of East German politics: the proud, spoiled princess learns to love the people, makes common cause with the forces of righteousness, and leads a revolution against the dwarf.

  Arguments did however flare up in East Germany around the use of fantasy and The Singing Ringing Tree in particular, and they sound very familiar. Why was the story about a princess at all? Why did it show her realizing the error of her arrogant ways? Surely this colluded reprehensibly with outdated notions of reform and noblesse oblige? What about the happy ending when the princess and the pauper marry? Cries of ‘bourgeois’ and ‘revanchist!’ echoed round the bureaux of the censors.

  The series was pulled, mothballed and forgotten—its makers were embarrassed to recall it when later asked by enthusiastic fans. But in l962, the BBC bought the film—and sparked unforgettable thrills in a generation of British children, and continued enthusiasm among film buffs.

  The East German case is highly illuminating of present tensions around the telling of fairy tales. On the one hand, the general consensus now agrees with Dickens, Tolkien, Bettelheim, and Windling, who, for different reasons, have declared that sweetening the tales is tantamount to vandalism. But at the same time, changes to the corpus are constantly being made in the light of current opinion—muting and muffling this bit or that—without any official censors needing to be brought in.

  The kind of political wishful thinking that emanated from the old Soviet bloc resembles what is called PC or political correctness, which is often scorned, and perhaps applied to extremes. Yet it depends on recognizing that what we discover in books or other media when we are young imprints us—stories communicate values, like myths, and shape our understanding of the world.

  One of the consequences has been the rise of self-censorship—by publishers, producers, scriptwriters, and editors, most especially when children are in view. Behind every book for young people and every global product of family entertainment, the hum of boardroom discussion about the politics of the work can be heard. Every scriptwriter and director takes up a passive Cinderella and turns her into a champion freedom fighter, or transforms Jack the Giant Killer into Robin Hood, in order to put across an approved code of conduct—the values that will win approval and ratings. The big film industry (‘Hollywood’) keeps straining to produce a fairytale heroine for the age of the female CEO, but its efforts fall foul of audiences and are still arousing fierce attacks from children’s experts in every field.

  One consequence of twenty-first-century social and political sensitivities has been a clear split in some cases between material for children and adults, similar to the division between top‐shelf and eye-level magazines on a news stand or the two sides of the 9 p.m. watershed in television broadcasting. Many fairytale re-visionings now require Parental Guidance; several are classified Adults Only.

  Current fairy tales on stage and screen reveal an acute malaise about sexual, rather than social, programming of the female, and the genre continues ever more intensively to wrestle with the notorious question Freud put long ago, ‘What do women want?’ The singer Tori Amos, for example, adapted a Victorian fairy tale, The Light Princess (2013), about a girl who has lost her gravity—she has to be tethered to prevent her floating up and away and she can’t do anything but laugh. George MacDonald wrote the original tale in 1867; he was a Christian allegorist, a friend of Lewis Carroll’s, and encouraged and influenced the Alice books. Tori Amos’s vision, by contrast, is sparked by the dominant, psychological concern today with young girls’ troubles and unfocused desires, the search for numbness and nullity that leads to binge drinking, passing out, self-harm, even death.

  The popularity of different fairy tales beats with an irregular pulse: recurrent favourites are ‘Snow White’ and ‘Sleeping Beauty’, with ‘Bluebeard’ coming close behind. The idea that women must stop sleepwalking through life has its origins in feminist anger against the Sleeping Beauty ideal (think of The Stepford Wives), but the concern is spiking (Disney’s Maleficent (2014) stars Angelina Jolie in the title role as the thirteenth fairy; the brilliantly inventive choreographer Matthew Bourne has turned Sleeping Beauty’s prince into a vampire, who wakes her with a bite … the fairy tale seen through Twilight). Blancanieves (2012), made in Spain, is an exhilarating, inspired reinvention of ‘Snow White’, set among the flamenco dancers, bullfighters, and travelling circus folk of Andalusia. Directed and written by the Catalan director Pablo Berger, it is shot in expressionist chiaroscuro, and gorgeously controlled, with a play of shimmer and glare on mirrors, crystal, eyes, and lips in the stark sunlight of the bullring and the deep shadows of interiors, castles, caravans.
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br />   No compunction about depicting evil restrains the storyteller here: the wicked stepmother is a nurse who sees her chance when the gored hero of the bullring is admitted to her hospital, his wife dies in childbirth, and he is left paralysed; nothing is spared to show us her cruelty, vanity, greed—no plot lines are added to excuse her, in contrast to the Hollywood vehicles, for which scriptwriters are made to come up with back stories of trauma to soften her evil. Maribel Verdú, the actress playing the wicked queen (Figure 16), has an uncanny face that changes, with a twitch of her lips, from glorious serene diva to predatory fury, and she gives Berger’s dominatrix a marvellous, witty energy, on the verge of parody, but always remaining too threatening to allow the release of laughter.