Fairy Tale and Film

Three Hazelnuts for Cinderella
, 
the nuts serving as the method used to hide three dresses for the heroine’s 
makeover.
6. Ironically, this idea of being ‘low-culture’, although often pejoratively 
intended, has also been a cause to take fairy tales, and their folkloric prede-
cessors, more seriously. Warner cites John Updike’s negative comment that, 
prior to television and pornography, fairy tales were ‘the life-lightening trash 
of preliterate peoples’ (1995: xiv) yet Carter reclaims this notion in proudly 
referring to them as ‘the perennially refreshed entertainment of the poor’, 
representing ‘the most vital connection we have with the imaginations of 
the ordinary men and women whose labour created our world’ (1990: ix), 
perceiving them to offer some insight into the difficulties of ordinary life, as 
well as common aspirations. It is their very ‘lowliness’ that has also led to 
claims of radical or subversive intentions smuggled through a medium that 
few took notice of. Warner equates this with a magic cloak of invisibility that 
enabled fairy tales to emerge as one of the few means of expressing female 
concerns (1995), while Zipes denotes politically progressive potential in sto-
ries where lowly figures triumph over the powerful, attributing certain folk 
and fairy tales with the ability to help us ‘break the magic spell’ that inhibits 
and disempowers us, enabling us to grasp our full potential (2002a). 
7. Although von Trier has alluded to another source, a Danish fairy tale called 
‘Golden Heart’ he was obsessed with as a boy, which ‘expressed the role of 
the martyr in its most extreme form’, he added features such as romantic 
sacrifice and a sea setting that are much closer to ‘The Little Mermaid’. (See 
his interview in 
Sight and Sound
, October 1996, www.industrycentral.net/
director_interviews/LVT01.htm.) For an insightful analysis of Andersen’s tale 
and its cinematic treatment see White (1993), who mentions the interesting 
departure, 
I Have Heard the Mermaids Singing
(Patricia Rozema, 1987). We 
might also add John Sayles’ 
The Secret of Roan Inish
(1994), a variation of the 
mermaid legend, Selkies, which refutes Andersen’s dismal tone, and Anna 
Melikyan’s 
Mermaid
(2007), which frustratingly reiterates a tragic finale for 
its heroine. Ch. 23 of Marina Warner’s 
From the Beast to the Blonde
provides 
an interesting discussion of mermaid mythology, in which she contrasts the 
fatal call of sirens with Andersen’s (and Disney’s) silencing of the female 
voice, perceiving 
The Piano
to reference similar themes in its heroine’s wilful 
silence, as well as her attraction to the idea of a watery demise (1995: 405–6). 
8. Like 
Princess Mononoke
(Hayao Miyazaki, 1997) – the first film to draw inter-
national attention to Studio Ghibli and particularly Miyazaki’s interesting 
depictions of female characters – the central relationship in 
Ponyo
is framed 

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Notes to Chapter 1 
173
as a conciliation between nature and humanity, just as the ‘love’ between 
Chihiro and Haku in 
Spirited Away
(Hayao Miyazaki, 2000) similarly elides 
romantic engagement, an idea approved by some critics (see Bacchilega and 
Reider, 2010), yet arguably makes these films somewhat infantile.
9. The story is found in Carter’s first volume of 
The Virago Book of Fairy Tales
(1990). While wished-for children sometimes provide great happiness, in 
more ominous treatments they simply bring misery, suggesting they should 
never have been born. In the Grimm tale ‘The Pink’, a queen’s longing for 
a child is granted, giving birth to a son who is able to make wishes come 
true, yet this gift quickly brings tragedy. The boy is stolen, his parents sepa-
rate for many years (the mother cruelly imprisoned to punish her perceived 
negligence) and they die just a few days after their son reunites the family. 
In other tales a new baby often results in the mother’s imminent death; she 
is either jealously killed (sometimes by a member of her own family) or dies 
in childbirth – her wish for a child paid for with her own life. We might 
regard such tales as a warning about the perils of reproduction at a time 
of high maternal mortality, as critics such as Warner have asserted. By the 
same token, the motif of wished-for children that turn out to be ‘monstrous’ 
may have been used to discuss unspeakable ideas. The parents in ‘Hans my 
Hedgehog’ are so ashamed of their abnormal offspring they rue their wish 
for a child and desire to be rid of him (inspiring a level of resentment and 
cruelty in his conduct towards others). These concerns about parenting and 
reproduction are discussed further in Chapter 5. 
10. Jamshid Tehrani’s research was particularly newsworthy in using a biologi-
cal system to test a folkloric hypothesis. Inspired by the historic-geographic 
approach, in which the familiarity of motifs in different parts of the world 
is attributed to travel and migration, the co-ordinates for ‘Red Riding Hood’ 
(ATU 333) and similar tales such as ‘The Wolf and the Kids’ (ATU 123) were 
plotted geographically in the areas where they were first recorded, seeking 
to map the route taken by ‘Red Riding Hood’ in Europe, Africa and Asia, and 
the cultural variants that resulted. The findings were considerably simplified 
in the news however, as Tehrani admits that assigning an accurate chronol-
ogy to oral tales is notoriously difficult, making any attempt to argue a clear-
cut ancestry tenuous at best (see Tehrani, 2013).
11. Warner (1992: 2) (cited by Petrie 1993: 3).