Fairy Tale and Film

Cinema and the Realms of 
Enchantment
, a more recent collection of essays, 
Fairy Tale Films: Visions 
of Ambiguity
(Greenhill and Matrix, 2010), reveals equivalent diversity 
among its contributions and further highlights the complexity of categori -
sation. Reasserting a need to extend our usual parameters in recognis-
ing a fairy tale film, Jack Zipes, in the opening foreword, contends 
that while some of the examples discussed – including the cinematic 
adaptation of the Harry Potter novels, Tim Burton films and Stanley 
Kubrick’s 
Eyes Wide Shut
– are not ‘strictly speaking’ fairy tale films, 
‘the motifs, characters and plots of these films have clearly been bor-
rowed from fairy tales, and they exemplify how complicated the defini-
tion of a literary or film genre can be’ (Zipes, 2010: x). In his view, these 
recognisable references affirm a common point of affiliation, despite their 
‘tantalisingly diverse forms’ (xii). The book’s editors, Pauline Greenhill 
and Sidney Eve Matrix, also acknowledge the wide range of films dis-
cussed and the differing genres they would conventionally be assigned 
to, but claim that we can evaluate them as one specific genre – ‘the fairy 
tale film’. As they affirm, ‘a genre comprises a series of narrative con-
ventions, including characterisation, plot and style, common to each 
iteration of a story’ and ‘their patterns fall into recognisable and specific 
forms’, yet, instead of the usual cinematic generic templates, they cite 
the ATU index of folk tale types to make a case for reclassifying films in 
similar fashion (2010: 2). Although this system has met with some criti-
cism, as they note, it remains useful in categorising key elements of a 
tale and thus enabling researchers to compare different variations.
3
The 
merits of adopting this method in helping to identify specific fairy tale 
markers in film are thus evident, utilising a familiar system to discern 
how a theme is articulated on screen, although some drawbacks need 
to be admitted. The system is not comprehensive enough to cover every 
theme (not including examples initiated by books, rather than tales, 
such as 
Peter Pan
, or motifs derived from stories beyond the Western 
European tradition, although recent expansions seek to address this). 
It is also scant in terms of the level of detail provided – Warner has 

---

Introduction 
7
likened it to ‘a list of ingredients and recipes with no evocation of their 
taste or the pleasure of the final dish, or a sense of how or why it was 
eaten’ (1995: xviii)
4
– yet it remains a useful summative tool, despite 
these shortcomings – and I accordingly use ATU citations in this present 
work, as a means of identifying key themes linking films with tales of 
the past, providing additional references where relevant. Nonetheless, 
it is important to consider films within a cinematic context, as much 
as a thematic one. Tale types, by themselves, are an inadequate means 
of understanding the particular generic features involved in the way a 
narrative is delivered, potentially negating some important cinematic 
considerations. Labelling a vast array of films under the category ‘fairy 
tale film’ may draw attention to the specific way they are being evaluated 
(focusing on the story told and its relationship to similar versions) yet 
there are other dynamics involved in how a story is shaped on screen. A 
film’s meaning will be informed and affected by a number of factors: its 
cast and production staff (and the expectations we, as an audience, have 
of them), the culture and country in which it was produced, its intended 
market and its relationship to other films (this last point being particu-
larly apposite given the degree of referencing that occurs in film today, 
especially films utilising fairy tale motifs). Citing an ATU number to alert 
us to its folkloric connections may be a useful starting point in suggest-
ing a particular way to read a film, but this will not tell us everything 
about it. In Zipes’ foreword to