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: