New Book: Fairy Tale Films: Visions of Ambiguity

Christy referenced this book in her comment on the Zipes' film post, so I had to learn more for once again, somehow I missed it when it was released in August.  Thanks, Christy!

Fairy Tale Films: Visions of Ambiguity edited by Pauline Greenhill and Sidney Eve Matrix with an introduction by Jack Zipes

Description from the publisher:

In this, the first collection of essays to address the development of fairy tale film as a genre, Pauline Greenhill and Sidney Eve Matrix stress, "the mirror of fairy-tale film reflects not so much what its audience members actually are but how they see themselves and their potential to develop (or, likewise, to regress)." As Jack Zipes says further in the foreword, “Folk and fairy tales pervade our lives constantly through television soap operas and commercials, in comic books and cartoons, in school plays and storytelling performances, in our superstitions and prayers for miracles, and in our dreams and daydreams. The artistic re-creations of fairy-tale plots and characters in film—the parodies, the aesthetic experimentation, and the mixing of genres to engender new insights into art and life— mirror possibilities of estranging ourselves from designated roles, along with the conventional patterns of the classical tales.”

Here, scholars from film, folklore, and cultural studies move discussion beyond the well-known Disney movies to the many other filmic adaptations of fairy tales and to the widespread use of fairy tale tropes, themes, and motifs in cinema.

And from Zipes' introduction:

The essays in Fairy Tale Film seek to keep our eyes open and sharpen our perspective. Folk and fairy tales pervade our lives constantly through television soap operas and commercials, in comic books and cartoons, in school plays and storytelling performances, in our superstitions and prayers for miracles, and in our dreams and daydreams. The artistic re-creations of fairy-tale plots and characters in filmýthe parodies, the aesthetic experimentation, and the mixing of genres to engender new insights into art and lifeýare significant because they mirror possibilities of estranging ourselves from designated roles and the conventional patterns of the classical tales. As Greenhill and Matrix stress in their introduction, "the mirror of fairy-tale film reflects not so much what its audience members actually are but how they see themselves and their potential to develop (or, likewise, to regress)."

You can also see the table of contents with a strange bookviewer on the press page for the book.  Overall, it appears to be discussing the usual suspects--Company of Wolves, Pan's Labyrinth, the Harry Potter movies with Ever After and Enchanted thrown in this time. And Eyes Wide Shut?  Okay then.  :)

What will be interesting is the literature that will arrive in a few years after the new slew of fairy tale movies we are being promised by the media, most of them not from Disney.  I'm so glad that SurLaLune is a perennial project...