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Just For Fun: Cinderella looks for missing shoe

I'm trying to decide on a name for these short posts linking to funny, amusing, quaint, etc. articles I find. This one is about a woman in the UK who lost one of her leopard-print Christian Louboutin heels and is offering a £50 reward: Cinderella looks for missing shoe.

Glass slippers have changed a bit in our modern age, haven't they? And these were apparently given to her by her prince (i.e. husband) instead of her fairy godmother...

(And no, I don't know if the image is of the exact style she lost. They are just for a visual. And although I am not a heel wearer--my funky and fun shoes run in the tennis shoe line--I have always enjoyed seeing the red soles of Louboutins. They rather remind me of Little Red Riding Hood, I admit.)

Snow White: A Twist in the Fairytale

Since this week has for some reason been about Snow White in a good percentage of the entries, I thought this was quite fitting for Friday. A twist in the fairytale is an article about a different rendition of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs performed by students in Malaysia. In the end, the article describes a very interesting mish mash of cultures. The event was for students learning English through drama, but I think we English speakers can learn a little about how tales can be perceived and interpreted by another culture.

The play, based on the children's fairytale, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, showed the length Snowy, the disaffected princess and child of King Edward of Attinsmoor, goes to overcome her feelings of inadequacy after the death of her mother, the queen.

Bitter at her father, the king and his new wife, Snowy, unleashes a series of evil acts, some of which result in the death of the new queen and her baby.

The largely sombre mood of the play was punctuated by comical displays involving the guards of Attinsmoor and Reim over the hand of the kingdom's handmaid.

The play also showed how the embittered Snowy easily fell into the trap of evil witches, whose deception causes the princess to kill her lover, the prince from another kingdom, and eventually her father.

The hair-raising shrieks, screams and antics of the witches were truly something to behold.

King Edward, a round and portly figure amused and surprised the audience with varied displays of emotions.

The play ended with Snowy regretting her misdeeds.

Definitely not your mother's Snow White. More like your grandfather's darkest Shakespeare. Or a Greek tragedy a few thousand years late....

Article: Why children’s stories should have happy endings

Found this article at WalesOnline.co.uk yesterday: Why children’s stories should have happy endings. This blog is mostly newsy in nature, but sometimes the opportunity arises for more thought or even discussion. You, dear readers, will decide that with your responses to this post, if there are any at all. This is my quick release of some festering thoughts of late, not well-organized and somewhat reactionary. That's my disclaimer. :)

First blockquote:

MODERN children’s stories rarely end with lashings of ginger ale and an assurance that everyone lived happily ever after.

The blue-skied Britain of Enid Blyton may bear little resemblance to modern Wales, but Welsh authors yesterday backed a call by former children’s laureate Anne Fine to balance realism with hope.

Speaking at the Edinburgh Book Festival, Ms Fine stunned an audience by suggesting that the backlash against children’s stories of the 1950s may have gone too far.

She said: “Books for children became much more concerned with realism, or what we see as realism.

“But where is the hope? How do we offer them hope within that?”

And her questions struck a chord with authors.

And, just to show that the article is even more pertinent to this fairy tales blog, it also offers this:

[The Rev Lionel Fanthorpe] said fiction should shine a “lantern of hope” into young lives and present “a hero who will be able to fight her way out” of crises, in the tradition of essayist and author GK Chesterton (1874-1936) who powerfully argued that parents should not stop telling fairy tales for fear of frightening their children.

Chesterton wrote: “Fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already because it is in the world already. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey.

“The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St George to kill the dragon.”

(And please, the second page of the article almost ruins the tone and message of the first page which has some interesting points. The "revisions" of the famous tragic stories, well, miss the entire point of the first page and come across as condescending. Especially since some of the originals offer the exact hope the authors are mentioning. Charlotte's Web is hopeless? Not to me. Sad, yes, hopeless, I don't think so. Romeo and Juliet as children's literature? Not on my planet. On another side note: One of my early influences, Madeleine L'Engle, managed to write some of the earliest hard-hitting stories for YA long before it was the trend and still infuse the stories with the hope that is missing so often today.)

I have more of Chesterton's thoughts on Fairy Tales on SurLaLune. And for those of you who are unaware of Anne Fine, stateside she is best known for penning Mrs. Doubtfire although she has many gems that have been popular in the UK, just not here. I met her briefly at Simmons College years ago and she was one of the most grounded and perhaps even jaded children's authors I've met as her body of work also illustrates. She is not one to hide in fantasies although humor is one of her favorite tools of the trade. So when she says our children's literature needs more hope, she's not into simple wish-fulfillment.

And just to be balanced here's already a rebuttal article that disagrees with Anne Fine and company: Children can handle much more realism than Anne Fine thinks. Granted, I've not seen Fine's full speech but I interpreted her words as a call for hope even in the bleakest stories. It's all up to interpretation, really, as any author can tell you happens once her words are sent out into the world. We all bring our own experience to our interpretations. Overall, I want more hope in my reading.

Now I've said before--and most of the readers here are sitting in choir seats--that traditional fairy tales are not happy little tales served Splenda-sweet--or popular with many detractors, Disney-style--even if most offer the hope of a happy future once trials are overcome. The tales are dark, violent, gruesome, unfair and often horrendous right up to the end. Then the end is overcome and "happily ever after" is offered up. This can be just as much as a storytelling device ending as "Once upon a time..." is a beginning. But the tale also shows how the hero(ine) overcame great adversity with mixtures of cunning, kindness, virtue, perseverance, penitence, serendipity, luck and help from others. The final "happily ever after" comes from knowing that even future adversity can be overcome with variations of the same recipe. There is hope offered up with the ending. (Cardinal rule of storytelling: Leave them smiling.)

Or at least that's the way I see it.

All this and fairy tales still remain controversial for being too dark, too light, too violent, too happy, unrealistic, magical, unfeminist, etc. And then there are the ones who think fairy tales begin and end with the Disney versions and condemn those as fantastical wish-fulfillment. Yes, fairy tales can hit so many sore spots and then the next tale can soothe the same wound into healing. That's their beauty and their curse.

I prefer the happy endings, especially in times like these when economic and other woes have caused more stress and heartache of late than most years of my life have seen. This time, too, shall pass. And isn't it nice that we have several fairy tales entering the pop culture awareness again through film and other sources?

P.S. More food for thought: Romance appears to once again be recession proof for similar reasons. And I enjoyed Meg Cabot's defense of romance a few months ago on her blog which was another response to the articles about dark YA literature. Read her here: Romance, Trauma Porn, and Brazil Dates! She includes links to more articles so I'll refrain here.

Just For Fun: Snow White lives happily ever after, again

Because it made me laugh: Snow White lives happily ever after, again

Once upon a time, there was a struggling actress who tried to make ends meet by playing Snow White at Disneyland.

The Rancho Cucamonga resident ended up winning $5.2 million on "Make Me a Millionaire," the weekly television show featuring 12 scratcher winners.

Marston, who no longer works at Disneyland, said maybe her role as a fairy tale princess gave her some good karma.

"I'd like to think that," she said. "It was a rewarding job, so maybe I was rewarded for passing those smiles to the kids."

Come on, doesn't that make you smile, too? And hope that she beats the happily ever after lottery winner statistic?

And makes me wish I played the lottery if fairy tale karma works that well. By now, I should have lots of fairy tale karma stored up...

Seven Ballet

Australian Stage magazine recently posted a review for a new ballet production, Leigh Warren & Dancers’ Seven. If you guessed it is a new interpretation of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, well, you'd be right.

The overall shape of Seven can be summed up by referring to its source material: the tale of Snow White and her seven dwarfs. But to explain this complex piece through such a simple comparison seems crude. While Seven is a fairytale, it's one where the mirror on the wall is cracked, the stepmother isn’t always evil and the dwarfs live in what is basically a sharehouse, complete with rivalries and intimacies.

As always, follow the links to read more. I have to admit this one makes me wish I was a little bit more convenient to Australia. Perhaps someone will produce the ballet closer to my home someday.

Little Red Riding Hood and Horror Films

Yes, Little Red Riding Hood is one of the most popular tales for inspiring various genres. Horror is particularly popular for obvious reasons. With currently two to three LRRH film projects in the works, there is definitely a surge in popularity again, too.

Here's a link to a short article with trailer for the new Rotkappchen: The Blood of Red Riding Hood: Gory fairytale horror movie Rotkappchen: The Blood of Red Riding Hood out soon.

“The story follows Rose, a precocious German 17 year old, as her mother brings her from Germany to live with her grandmother in America. Although she is happy to see her grandmother, Rose hates her new life: she misses her friends back in Germany and she is teased and ridiculed by the other students at school. Rose can only find comfort in her tattered book of fairy tales until she meets and develops a crush on Nick, the most popular guy at school, and is befriended by Summer, a beautiful sexy coed. But things become complicated as Rose is tormented by Nick's girlfriend Bridgette, and the once quiet town finds itself rattled by a series of gruesome, mysterious murders.”

Of course, this isn't to be confused with the other film, The Girl With The Red Riding Hood, in the works by Catherine Hardwicke (who is best known for directing Twilight). Read more about that here: Twilight Director To Helm ‘Gothic’ Little Red Riding Hood and 'Twilight' Director Catherine Hardwicke To Tackle The Big Bad Wolf.

And I've already posted previously about Appian Way's possible production.

So Little Red Riding Hood will soon be alive and kicking on a theatre screen near you. Or not so alive judging from the plot descriptions and trailers...

I'm rather relieved Disney doesn't appear to have this particular tale under consideration right now.

A.S. Byatt in Publisher's Weekly

Well, A.S. Byatt, Jack Zipes, Grimms, and even a comment from Jane Yolen all on one page of the Publisher's Weekly website. Go here to read the short article promoting Byatt's new book: PW talks with A.S. Byatt.

Poetry Break: Irene Rapunzel

Found this poem unexpectedly last week and had never read it before, so thought I'd share.

IRENE RAPUNZEL

"Rapunzel, from your chamber
In the air,
Let down the flowing tresses
Of your hair;
From my dappled charger bold
I would clamber as of old
Up that mass of shining gold,
Oh, so fair."

"Dear knight, to my chamber
In the air,
No longer may you clamber
When you care;
For the fashion caught my eye
As the other maids passed by
In the morning—and so I
Bobbed my hair."

by W. A. Hanway

From The Yale Literary Magazine, Volume 82, Issue 7 (April 1917)

And the artwork is by stabstabstab aka Becky Cloonan who does work for various comic books among other things.

(Does the poem make you think of Bernice Bobs Her Hair by F. Scott Fitzgerald or is that too obscure these days? I'm not that old, really, I just had an old-fashioned education.)