Fairy Tale and Film

particularly the idea that they are aimed primarily at children and have 
no relation to reality. Curiously, although Vladimir Propp’s 
Morphology 
of the Folktale
(1928) has successfully made the crossover from folklore 
to film studies – with his idea of archetypes and their associated action 
often used to explore narrative structure – this has proved to be one of 
the few intersections in a discipline that tends to negate fairy tales as 
unworthy of serious study, leading to an area of critical neglect which 
has required the intervention of folklorists to redress.
One of the first scholarly works to assess cinema’s relationship to 
fairy tales was 
Cinema and the Realms of Enchantment 
(Petrie, 1993), a 

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4 
Fairy Tale and Film
collection of essays, published by the BFI, including films ranging from 
early silent cinema, European cineastes such as Renoir and Vigo, the 
1940s 
Cat People
films produced by Val Lewton, to Tim Burton’s 
Edward 
Scissorhands
(1990) and 
Batman Returns 
(1992). Although slim, the vol-
ume marks an important attempt to consider the breadth of examples 
we might view as fairy tale-inspired films. This is partly attributable 
to the significant contribution made by historian and mythographer 
Marina Warner, whose approach to identifying fairy tale motifs is 
refreshingly inclusive. Although she admits to the potential hazard of 
being too keen to find connections, ‘stretching fairy tale as a genre to fit 
anything ... finding Cinderellas and Bluebeards here, there and every-
where’ (1993a: 27), she also argues that our usual associations need to 
alter, pointing out that ‘the never-never land, bright as sweet wrappers 
and crowned with towers or castles, long ago and far away’ is by no 
means the only way to define ‘the territory of the fairy tale’ (1993a: 27). 
They do not have to have a medieval storybook setting, in other words, 
much less conform to cheery family entertainment – an admission that 
requires us to despatch with any prior assumptions and focus instead 
on discerning conspicuous plot features. 
This necessitates a widening of our critical faculties and an engage-
ment with films on the basis of the stories they are telling, enabling us 
to identify points of reference with older tales in order to understand 
mutual concerns and desires – as well as equally significant points of 
departure and difference. In this sense, the fairy tale becomes ‘a tool 
for thought’, as Warner puts it, and also a way to rethink reality, rather 
than escape from it (1993a: 17). The inclusion of fantastic elements is 
not necessarily a given. Fairy tales may routinely involve supernatural 
features and extraordinary figures (such as the fairy godmother or genie 
able to conjure miracles, or an apparently dead princess brought back 
to life) yet this is not the case with many modern updates. Hence, 
Pretty 
Woman
(Garry Marshall, 1990) is clearly a ‘Cinderella’ tale, although 
‘the Fairy Godmother’s magic wand is replaced by a businessman’s 
credit card’ (Butler, 2009: 49), just as many variations of this perennially 
popular tale ditch the supernatural features, knowing that audiences will 
get the reference without seeing a pumpkin coach. By contrast, magi-
cal transformations in films like 
Shallow Hal
(Peter and Bobby Farrelly, 
2001), 
17 Again
(Burr Steers, 2009) or 
Groundhog Day
(Harold Ramis, 
1993) may not immediately bring ‘Beauty and the Beast’ to mind, yet in 
featuring a flawed male character who is tested via an enchantment and 
redeemed by love they all rework a common fairy tale trope. These com-
edies mine their humour from a central moment of whimsy (magically 

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