Sunday, September 16, 2012

Twisted Tales with a Modern Twist (Week One)

Little Red Riding Hood, the symbol of naivety growing into maturity (even if a little prematurely), is played with often these days. Just look up “Red Riding Hood” on Netflix: you get a several horror movies, Into the Woods (a musical), and a children’s cartoon version featuring the creepy Bratz dolls. She’s even a popular Halloween costume.  Because every one is looking for their Big Bad Wolf to blow down their innocence.

But really, she isn’t the only character getting a make over. We’ve probably all seen the make over of Beauty and the Beast  in New York with sewers and a district attorney or the new popular Once Upon a Time or the other legions of remakes. However, the best remakes seem to be in comic style.

A current webcomic called Erstwhile is three young female artists who take turns revising fairy tales in their own words and pictures. They don’t necessarily take the most famous tales either, All Fur  and The Little Shroud  being two of my favorite remakes thus far. The Little Shroud is done with almost complete silence even, only Gina Biggs’s art telling the tale, until the last few pages. Part of why fairy tales done in comic style are so intriguing and genuinely heartwarming (or breaking depending on the tale), is because a soulfully rendered picture can give a thousand more words and much more nuance than a million English majors crammed into one room together.

They can also help create a much different, much more horrifying and still comical fairytale world, like in the Vertigo comic Fables . Here we find our fairy tales heroes and heroines in the throes of an epic civil world which crosses dimensional lines when the fairy tales flee into our world, specifically New York City. The Beast changes into a monster when Beauty is mad at him (which is all the time), Prince Charming is no good cheating rat, and you don’t even want to know what Geppetto is up too. This comic which raises good humor and still puts on a very emotional war, is well delving deep into, even if these aren’t the fairy tales we know and love.

Sure, we find other modern plays on the fairy tales, such as John Connelly’s The Book of Lost Things  (a good read about a little boy who must fight a world of twisted fairy tales to save his mother), but these comic renditions really give us a good view of the other world. Besides that, they help us suspend disbelief: we see the giants, the witches, and the monsters. We have some proof, showing us that what goes bump in the night really can creep up on us.

12 comments:

  1. Great links! I am especially enjoying the Erstwhile series. This combined with the recent Snow White and the Huntsman film makes me wonder if we're in the midst of a mini-fairy tale resurgence. If so, I wonder why.

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    1. Thank you. I've been a fan of Gina Biggs for a while and when she branched out to help with the Erstwhile series, I knew it would be a treat.

      Also, I've noticed the resurgence over the past few years myself. I wonder if it is spun off the Xena/Hercules/Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Angel path which all focus around legends and mythology. It seems a fairly logical path to go down after the popularity of those and others in the same vein.

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  2. I think there is a definite resurgence of the fairy tale genre in our market these days. Just look at the "Grimm" and "Once Upon a Time" shows on the networks along with what you have posted. These are some cool and interesting links. As many reasons as there are for fairy tales to be kept active in our culture, though, I'd like to see completely modern ones being written and told. Or are these tales so imbedded that it becomes nearly impossible to write a fairy tale that doesn't pull from the classics?
    - Scott

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    1. That's a good point, Scott. That question reminds me of the theory that no story is original and we're all just retelling the same ones over and over through out history. The amount of times that these stories are retold, even now, is a strong bit of evidence behind that theory.

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  3. You brought up horror-themed fairy tale films, and I think those are interesting in their own way. Not because they're good by any means (never seen one, but previews and whatnot indicate they're kind of stupid), but because they cut closer to the gruesome nature of the original fairy tales than Disney's reinterpretations ever could. This is an interesting case of the "Shrek Effect" - that is, Shrek leading to fairy tales essentially being deconstructed left and right in current media.

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    1. It's interesting that you call it the "Shrek Effect" since this is the only link I could find about it: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Shrek%20Effect

      However, I do accept your "Shrek Effect" theory IF you're talking about the book and not the movie which followed 11 years later... Though technically even if you go with the book, the TV show "Beauty and the Beast" came first.

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  4. When you brought up the modern rehashes of Little Red Riding Hood I couldn't help think of the movie Hoodwinked. I'm usually not one for a retelling or update of a story. I would rather read or see the original. But for some reason I actually enjoyed it. Maybe it was because it had a comic edge like you said many do. Also,in Hoodwinked Red Riding hood was much more empowered and witty than in the classic versions.

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    1. I've never heard of "Hoodwinked", I'll have to check it out! Especially if Little Red is more than just a silly little girl in it.

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  5. I've noticed that the modern resurgence in fairy tales is also accompanied by a backlash of fairy tales--or at least, the Disnified versions. We have a generation of daughters who worship all things Disney princess. This trend is not without a healthy dose of reality, as it has raised concerns in parents and teachers about what lessons we are teaching young girls, besides "be pretty and demure, and someday your prince will come!"

    Perhaps in an effort to diffuse this concern, Disney made a parody of the "princess culture" with the 2007 film "Enchanted" (which I admit is one of my guilty pleasure movies...) in which an incredibly simpering and naive princess-to-be is literally thrown into modern-day New York City. The moral of the story is that the princess learns to get by and be a functional human being, without her prince coming to her rescue. It's cheesy, but really fun.

    Side note: I'm totally going to do Little Red Riding Hood for Halloween this year; partly because of the big bad wolf thing, partly because my sister's roommate still has her costume from last year :)

    Erstwhile looks really cool, I'll have to check it out.


    P.S. This is Allison, my Google account is currently linked to another blog under that pseudonym!

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    1. They also have "Tangled" out as well and "Mulan" (not technically a princess, but still...) which are great alternatives to the the "demure" princesses like Cinderella, Aurora, or Ariel (Give up my voice for a guy? Hellz no.). I'll have to check out "Enchanted" since it sounds like a good alternative too! Plus, I really like cheesy movies.

      Admittedly, I'm always a bit jealous of people who pull off the Little Red Riding Hood costume! Lucky girl!

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    2. I could not help but nod along to this post. The fairy tale motif has become popular far beyond their infancy centuries prior and it makes me think if it's merely the intrigue that keeps us interested or the comments on our reality that simmer just beneath the surface. The blossoming/stunting of sexuality, gender politics,etc, and the enforcement mechanisms that are at play give these "innocent" tales a re-conceptualization and re-significance.

      Thank you for the links and I will check them out! :)

      Rasha A.

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    3. Admittedly, this whole class topic and writing the blog got me even more in these themes behind fairy tales. I wish we were spending the whole class on them!

      I hope you enjoy the links! I think you'll like Erstwhile the best. The art is beautiful and the stories well told.

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