Fairy Tale and Film

Epilogue: The Importance of Enchantment
1. Although Zipes has often voiced concerns about mass-produced fairy tales, 
singling out the Disney Corporation as emblematic of the most negative ten-
dencies, he has also found something positive to say about examples such as 
Mulan
and 
Return to Oz
, even as he regards such films as atypical, affirming 
the need to evaluate every film on its own merits.
2. Zipes conceives various forms of reappropriation, including ‘social satire’, ‘uto-
pian’, ‘pedagogical’, ‘feminist’, ‘comic parody’ and ‘spiritual’, yet affirms that 
many tales can ‘carry on several dialogues all at the same time’ (2002b: 245). 
The notion of ‘re-utilisation’ derives from the German term ‘umfunktion-
ierung’ and borrows from Bertold Brecht, Ernst Bloch and Walter Benjamin as 
an oppositional strategy, although Zipes admits it can be used for quite differ-
ent ends.
3. The film also references British social realist film 
Kes
(Ken Loach, 1969), as 
well as Italian neo-realist film 
Shoeshine
(Vittorio de Sica, 1946) in which two 
boys similarly turn to crime, with bleak results, counterpointing a desire to 
care for animals against a cruel world.
4. There are various female characters in film whose lives are poignantly cur-
tailed: the young girls seemingly taken by spirits in 
Picnic at Hanging Rock 
(Peter Weir, 1975), the sisters who end their own lives (due to a combina-
tion of heartbreak, grief and pious contrition) in 
The Virgin Suicides
(Sofia 
Coppola, 1999), the young girl murdered by a monstrous stepfather in 
Pan’s 
Labyrinth 
(only to be reborn in the world of her imagination), the dreamer 
who falls to her death in the place where she lived out her fantasies in 
Bridge 
to Terabithia
(Istvan Csupo, 2007), or the equally fable-like 
Innocence 
(Lucile 
Hadzihalilovic, 2004) where tragedies similarly befall girls on the brink of 
sexual maturity. In all these cases we are invited to view the protagonists 
mythically, with the intimation that they were too good for this world, and 
able to enjoy greater freedom in death than they would as grown women, 
offering a bizarre inversion of Peter Pan. Indeed, the fact that some of these 
stories were based on real tragedies makes their apparent idealisation all the 
more disconcerting.

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195
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——— 
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