The Fairy Tale and Anime: Traditional Themes, Images and Symbols at Play on Screenby Dani Cavallaro

The Fairy Tale and Anime: Traditional Themes, Images and Symbols at Play on Screenby Dani Cavallaro was released earlier this year and is one of the books that was sent to me for a review by McFarland. I've been saving it for fairy tale and film discussions. Alas, I have to admit that anime is one of the areas of fairy tales that I have the weakest knowledge--it's hovering above zero most of the time. So I can offer the book description and table of contents as well as share the main titles discussed in the book. Cavallaro knows her anime (I've included her bibliography below) and I am intrigued by her works as well as the source materials. If only there were time enough to do it all... So are there any anime fans out there who can share their love/hate of fairy tale inspired anime? I am still looking for submissions--only one has arrived!--for this month's giveaway.

Book description from the publisher:

Over the last few decades, anime has consistently come into fruitful contact with themes, images and symbols associated with the fairy tale tradition. This critical text focuses on the ways in which fundamental principles of the fairy tale tradition are deployed, and hence come to manifest themselves narratively and cinematographically, in anime. Topics covered include modes of storytelling, aesthetics, as well as dramatic, ethical, psychological and social considerations. Of particular interest is the way in which allegorical commentaries on cultural and historical issues are illustrated in anime.

About the Author

Dani Cavallaro has written widely about literature, cultural theory, and anime. She lives in London.

Other Books by Dani Cavallaro Available from McFarland:

The Anime Art of Hayao Miyazaki

The Cinema of Mamoru Oshii

Anime Intersections

The Art of Studio Gainax

Anime and Memory

Anime and the Visual Novel

Magic as Metaphor in Anime

The Mind of Italo Calvino

Anime and the Art of Adaptation

The World of Angela Carter

Table of Contents

Preface 1

Chapter 1. Theoretical Foundations 5

Chapter 2. Alterity 23

Chapter 3. Voyages 68

Chapter 4. Creativity 106

Chapter 5. Dystopias 153

Filmography 193

Bibliography 199

Index 205

Some of the titles from the filmography include:

   

   

   

   

  

Upcoming Book: Belle's Song by K. M. Grant

Belle's Song by K. M. Grant. Okay, I admit this one caught my eye with the cover. And then I read the description and now I am fascinated. A YA book that draws inspiration from Canterbury Tales? Has this been done before? Probably, but not that I know of. This one isn't due to be released until November, but I had to share and perhaps start the conversation now.

Book description from the publisher:

Fifteen-year-old Belle is a dreamer with a sharp tongue and an aching burden: her carelessness has crippled her father. A chance meeting with bespectacled Luke has her decide to join the pilgrimage to Canterbury made famous by Geoffrey Chaucer's beloved tales. There she befriends the famous writer and Walter, a handsome squire with a secret of his own. Growing to love her fellow travelers dearly, Belle is thrilled by the attention from both Luke and Walter. But casting its shadow over the pilgrims is the threat to England posed by an unreliable king anxious to keep his throne at any cost. When Belle discovers that Master Chaucer is embroiled in dangerous politics, she is forced to make a choice that will turn her pilgrimage into a gamble with a deadly price.

I'm not even sure how many high schoolers are assigned The Canterbury Tales anymore. I had to read them all at my magnet high school, yes even the bawdy ones. It was a magnet school and not a hint of scandal from this classic among the students although I seem to remember my teacher giggling at a few bits himself. I admit that I enjoyed Chaucer but that is because my teacher didn't assign a specific edition. I asked my mom to find one and she came back from her university bookstore with a prose edition that sold me on it while everyone else struggled with the language in their other editions--no one else had the one I had. What a blessing that my local mall bookstores didn't have any editions and Mom resorted to a campus bookstore. I still have it somewhere and used it side by side with the assigned text when I was working for my English degree and reading it yet again. I'm grateful to it for illuminating Chaucer when I was too young to struggle with the language. The edition was by translated by David Wright if you are interested. (And the reviewers seem to agree--the low rated reviews are for the Kindle edition formatting or about the third party booksellers, not the book itself.)  I highly recommend giving both this new novel and a readable Chaucer to a precocious teen in your life although I haven't read the novel I would have devoured it as a teen as a tie-in.

And, yes, this all counts as pertinent to SurLaLune since Chaucer drew from folklore and influenced it, too.

Another New Show? Beauty and the Beast on ABC, Perhaps

From 'Jericho' writer sells 'Beauty and the Beast' remake to ABC by James Hibberd:

Beauty and the Beast could be returning to TV. ABC is developing a new version of the classic fairy tale romance from Human Target and Jericho writer-producer Jonathan E. Steinberg. The one-hour fantasy drama is described as an “epic re-imagining” of the tale.

Beauty and the Beast joins a host of name-brand projects in the running for broadcast’s next pilot season, including a Frankenstein, Romancing the Stone and Munsters project at NBC and a Bewitched remake at CBS. Of course, Beast would follow not one but two fairy tale inspired dramas hitting the air this fall — NBC’s Grimm and ABC’s Once Upon a Time.

May I just say that I am ready for some Beauty and the Beast after all of this inundation with Snow White and Cinderella and the rest? I HOPE this one makes it to the small screen. And no, it doesn't appear to be a relaunch of the CBS 80s series with Linda Hamilton and Ron Perlman.

And Bewitched? Really? Please don't.... Next we'll be seeing I Dream of Jeannie, too. No wonder I mostly watch USA Network...

Words Alone: Yeats and His Inheritances by R. F. Foster

The following is a short video of R. F. Foster discussion of Yeats and the faerie fascination of years past. Foster's new book, Words Alone: Yeats and His Inheritances, was released this past July.

Book description from the publisher:

Roy Foster's two-volume biography of Yeats was hailed in the New York Review of Books as "a triumph of scholarship, thought, and empathy such as one would hardly have thought possible in this age of disillusion." Now, Foster turns his focus to the largely unacknowledged influences that shaped the young W.B. Yeats.

So dramatic and revolutionary was Yeats' impact on Irish literature that the writers and traditions that preceded him are often overlooked, just as his successors are often overshadowed by his achievement. In Words Alone, Roy Foster explores the Irish literary traditions that preceded Yeats, including romantic "national tales" in post-Union Ireland and Scotland, the nationalist poetry and polemic of the Young Ireland movement, the occult and supernatural fictions of Sheridan LeFanu, the "peasant fictions" of William Carleton, and the fairy-lore and folktale collections Yeats absorbed. As well as placing these nineteenth-century literary movements in a rich contemporary context of politics, polemic, and social tension, Foster discusses recent critical and interpretive approaches to these phenomena. But the unifying theme throughout the book is the self-conscious use Yeats made of his literary predecessors during his own apprenticeship, particularly in the construction of his path-breaking early work. Show More T.S. Eliot famously observed that Yeats was "part of the consciousness of an age which cannot be understood without him," and Foster shows the many ways that Yeats both shaped and was shaped by the age in which he lived, despite his attempts to construct his own literary pedigree and present himself as entirely original.

Returning to the rich seed-bed of nineteenth-century Irish writing, Words Alone draws out themes which had particular resonance for Yeats, offering a new interpretation of the influences surrounding the young poet as he began to "hammer his thoughts into a unity."

Table of Contents:

Acknowledgements
Introduction
1: National Tales and National Futures in Ireland and Scotland after the Union
2: The First Romantics: Young Irelands between Catholic Emancipation and the Famine
3: Lost in the Big House: Anglo-Irishry and the Uses of the Supernatural
4: Oisin Comes Home: Yeats as Inheritor

For a review of the book, check out a review by Adam O'Riordan for The Independent.

And the video:

Freud in Oz: At the Intersections of Psychoanalysis and Children's Literature by Kenneth B. Kidd

Freud in Oz: At the Intersections of Psychoanalysis and Children's Literatureby Kenneth B. Kidd isn't due to be released until November or December of this year. (Academic books don't have hard release dates like bestsellers and I've seen sometime in November and December 1 listed for this one.) But since it's not primarily about fairy tales--but does contain a chapter devoted to them--I thought I would share it now. The good news is that this one will be affordable for the average reader here on SurLaLune, too, with a $25.00 list price for the paperback.

Book description from the publisher:

Children’s literature has spent decades on the psychiatrist’s couch, submitting to psychoanalysis by scores of scholars and popular writers alike. Freud in Oz turns the tables, suggesting that psychoanalysts owe a significant and largely unacknowledged debt to books ostensibly written for children. In fact, Kenneth B. Kidd argues, children’s literature and psychoanalysis have influenced and interacted with each other since Freud published his first case studies.

In Freud in Oz, Kidd shows how psychoanalysis developed in part through its engagement with children’s literature, which it used to articulate and dramatize its themes and methods, turning first to folklore and fairy tales, then to materials from psychoanalysis of children, and thence to children’s literary texts, especially such classic fantasies as Peter Pan and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. He traces how children’s literature, and critical response to it, aided the popularization of psychoanalytic theory. With increasing acceptance of psychoanalysis came two new genres of children’s literature—known today as picture books and young adult novels—that were frequently fashioned as psychological in their forms and functions.

Freud in Oz offers a history of reigning theories in the study of children’s literature and psychoanalysis, providing fresh insights on a diversity of topics, including the view that Maurice Sendak and Bruno Bettelheim can be thought of as rivals, that Sendak’s makeover of monstrosity helped lead to the likes of the Muppets, and that “Poohology” is its own kind of literary criticism—serving up Winnie the Pooh as the poster bear for theorists of widely varying stripes.

Table of Contents:

Introduction: Reopening the Case of Peter Pan

1. Kids, Fairy Tales, and the Uses of Enchantment
2. Child Analysis, Play, and the Golden Age of Pooh
3. Three Case Histories: Alice, Peter Pan, and Oz
4. Maurice Sendak and Picturebook Psychology
5. “A Case History of Us All”: The Adolescent Novel before and after Salinger
6. T Is for Trauma: The Children’s Literature of Atrocity

Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index

University of Minnesota Press is publishing this one. They don't have a large fairy tale library, but what they have is worth a look. When it comes to folklore they have been republishing classic titles such as the fairy tale illustration work of Wanda Gag. I've written about these before so I'm not planning on individual posts, but wanted to herald their existence again anyway.

   

They've also reprinted Tales from a Finnish Tupa, whose co-editor was Margery Bianco Williams of The Velveteen Rabbit fame as well as Legends of Paul Bunyan.

And Then There Were Two Cinderella Movies....

From U taps scribe for Cinderella rethink: Peacock lining up for rewrite work by Justin Kroll:

Is Cinderella the next Snow White?

With a handful of new takes on the Snow White story actively in the works around Hollywood, Universal is looking to conjure a fresh take on the classic Cinderella story as well, with Ann Peacock in final negotiations to rewrite an untitled reimagining of the fairy tale.

Plot details are being kept under wraps. Michael Dougherty wrote the previous draft.

Bruno Aveillan is aboard to helm the pic, with Scott Stuber and Pam Abby producing through the Stuber Pictures shingle.

Project has been in development for some time, but given the rise in fairy-tale rethinks over the past year, U sees this as a perfect time to get the wheels in motion.

Though the iconic character isn't getting quite the attention Snow White has received, she is generating some heat on a couple of fronts. Disney brought on Mark Romanek to helm that studio's untitled Cinderella story.

And this is from last month: Mark Romanek to Direct Re-Imagining of CINDERELLA for Disney by Adam Chitwood:

Snow White isn’t the only Disney princess getting her big live-action update. In addition to the multiple Snow White projects currently in development, Disney is fashioning a live-action re-imagining of Cinderella. Deadline reports that the studio is courting Mark Romanek (Never Let Me Go) to direct the film, which has a script by Aline Brosh McKenna (The Devil Wears Prada). The Mouse House put the project into development last May, after Alice in Wonderland made a ridiculous amount of money.

The script is described as an update of the classic tale, as it finds the prince set up for a politically arranged marriage that is threatened when he meets Cinderella. I’m a big fan of Romanek. The director has been courted for a number of high-profile projects as of late (including The Wolverine), and if the deal goes through it’ll be exciting to see a director of his dramatic talents take on this fairy tale update.

New Book: Anti-Tales: The Uses of Disenchantment

Anti-Tales: The Uses of Disenchantment was released earlier this year. I haven't seen it. I hadn't heard of it until I read the title in the Call for Papers that is also being posted today on this blog. So I had to learn more and being generous with that knowledge, share with you.

From the introduction:

Anti-Tales: The Uses of Disenchantment is the result of a two day symposium which took place at the University of Glasgow, 12-13 August 2010. Scholars and practitioners participated from a variety of disciplines,geographic locations and stages of career. One aim of the symposium was to secure the term “anti-tale” more thoroughly in an international and interdisciplinary scholarship. It followed attempts to define this term, historically by Robert Walser (1910) and André Jolles (1929), later by Wolfgang Mieder (1987, 2008) and John Pizer (1990), and most recently in David Calvin’s forthcoming doctoral thesis “No More Happily Ever After: The Anti-Fairy Tale in Postmodern Literature and Popular Culture”(University of Ulster, 2011).

Book description from the publisher:

The anti-(fairy) tale has long existed in the shadow of the traditional fairy tale as its flipside or evil twin. According to André Jolles in Einfache Formen (1930), such Antimärchen are contemporaneous with some of the earliest known oral variants of familiar tales. While fairy tales are generally characterised by a “spirit of optimism” (Tolkien) the anti-tale offers us no such assurances; for every “happily ever after,” there is a dissenting “they all died horribly.” The anti-tale is, however, rarely an outright opposition to the traditional form itself. Inasmuch as the anti-hero is not a villain, but may possess attributes of the hero, the anti-tale appropriates aspects of the fairy tale form, (and its equivalent genres) and re-imagines, subverts, inverts, deconstructs or satirises elements of these to present an alternate narrative interpretation, outcome or morality. In this collection, Little Red Riding Hood retaliates against the wolf, Cinderella’s stepmother provides her own account of events, and “Snow White” evolves into a postmodern vampire tale. The familiar becomes unfamiliar, revealing the underlying structures, dynamics, fractures and contradictions within the borrowed tales.

Over the last half century, this dissident tradition has become increasingly popular, inspiring numerous writers, artists, musicians and filmmakers. Although anti-tales abound in contemporary art and popular culture, the term has been used sporadically in scholarship without being developed or defined. While it is clear that the aesthetics of postmodernism have provided fertile creative grounds for this tradition, the anti-tale is not just a postmodern phenomenon; rather, the “postmodern fairy tale” is only part of the picture. Broadly interdisciplinary in scope, this collection of twenty-two essays and artwork explores various manifestations of the anti-tale, from the ancient to the modern including romanticism, realism and surrealism along the way.

About the editors:

Catriona McAra is an AHRC doctoral candidate in History of Art at the University of Glasgow researching the work of Dorothea Tanning. She is particularly interested in intertextual theory, narratology, and the intersection between Surrealism and the fairy tale. Catriona organised the Anti-Tales symposium and is co-editor of this volume.

David Calvin is a doctoral candidate in the Languages and Literature department at the University of Ulster, Belfast. His PhD thesis is entitled “No More Happily Ever After: The Anti-Fairy Tale in Postmodern Literature and Popular Culture,” and has been instrumental in the reintroduction of the term “anti-tales” to current scholarship. He is co-editor of this volume.

Some blurbs:

“Books like Anti-Tales are important, taking a cold look at the complex, often dark affect at fairy tales and broadening the contemporary lens onto theories about their appearances in art, literature, film. The idea of anti-tale has been so important to me, and I’m delighted to see this volume enter the conversation and whisper its fragments of spells. The fairy tale is real; long live the anti-fairy-tale.”

—Kate Bernheimer, author of The Complete Tales of Lucy Gold and editor of My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales

“This valuable collection of essays, oriented around the idea of the ‘anti-tale,’ offers a much needed formal as well as analytic focus on the dark side of the fairy-tale genre.”

—Professor Aidan Day, University of Dundee


“The essays in this collection discuss an abundance of anti-tales from literature, film and art. Retellings, reimaginings and new tales from across centuries and around the world are all explored in relation to the critical term ‘anti-tale,’ uncovering new paths through the forest. Where the fairy tale leaves us with answers the anti-tale leaves us with questions and Anti-Tales: The Uses of Disenchantment is a valuable text for scholars, readers and writers who wish to engage with this wonderfully subversive form.”

—Claire Massey, Editor of New Fairy Tales

And a table of contents:

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction by Catriona McAra and David Calvin [1]

Part One: History and Definitions

The German Enlightenment and Romantic Märchen as Antimärchen by Laura Martin [18]

Reader Beware: Apuleius, Metafiction and the Literary Fairy Tale by Stijn Praet [37]

Some Notes on Intertextual Frames in Anti-Fairy Tales by Larisa Prokhorova [51]

Part Two: Twisted Film and Animation

Wonderland Lost and Found? Nonsensical Enchantment and Imaginative Reluctance in Revisionings of Lewis Carroll’s Alice Tales by Anna Kérchy [62]

The Forceful Imagination of Czech Surrealism: The Folkloric as Critical Culture by Suzanne Keller [75]

Bruno Schulz’s “Generatio Aequivoca”: Sites of (Dis)Enchantment in the Quay Brothers’ Street of Crocodiles by Suzanne Buchan [84]

Part Three: Surrealist Anti-Tales

“Blind Date”: Tanning’s Surrealist Anti-Tale by Catriona McAra [100]

The Luminary Forest: Robert Desnos and Unica Zürn’s Tales of (Dis)Enchantment and Transformation by Esra Plumer [115]

Paula Rego, Jane Eyre and the Re-Enchantment of Bluebeard by Helen Stoddart [130]

Part Four: Sensorial Anti-Tales

Visual Anti-Tales: The Phantasmagoric Prints of Francisco Goya and William Blake by Isabelle van den Broeke [142]

In the Realm of the Senses: Tomoko Konoike’s Visual Recasting of “Little Red Riding Hood” by Mayako Murai [152]

Part Five: Black Humour

The Phoney and the Real: Roald Dahl’s Revolting Rhymes as Anti-Tales by Christina Murdoch [164]

“You Know How Happy Kings Are”: The Anti-Fairy Tales of James Thurber by John Patrick Pazdziora [173]

Landscapes of Anti-Tale Uncertainty: The Dark Knight by Deborah Knight [185]

Metamorphoric Enchantment in Rikki Ducornet’s Anti-Tales by Michelle Ryan-Sautour [203]

Part Six: Inverted (Anti-)Fairy Tales

Blood on the Snow: Inverting “Snow White” in the Vampire Tales of Neil Gaiman and Tanith Lee by Jessica Tiffin [220]

In Her Red-Hot Shoes: Re-Telling “Snow White” from the Queen’s Point of View by David Calvin [231]

In the Shadow of the Villain: Fairy Tale Villains Tell their Side of the Story by Mary Crocker Cook [246]

Exploding the Glass Bottles: Constructing the Postcolonial “Bluebeard” Tale in Nalo Hopkinson’s “The Glass Bottle Trick” by Natalie Robinson [253]

Part Seven: (Post) Modern Anti-Tales

A.S. Byatt and “The Djinn”: The Politics and Epistemology of the Anti-Tale by Defne Çizakça [264]

Margaret Atwood’s Anti-Fairy Tales: “There Was Once” and Surfacing by Sharon R. Wilson [275]

Modernism and the Disenchantment of Modernity in Katherine Mansfield and D.H. Lawrence by María Casado Villanueva [285]

Contributors [295]