Grimm-Franks Talk

After hearing Kate Berheimer talk about fairy tales, how similar and lurid they are, and the future of fairy tales, the one thing that stayed with me was when she asked us to think about how fairy tales are done today and how they’re different.

My immediate reaction went to Tim Burton and Guillermo Del Toro. I think both filmmakers’ imaginations fuel the fairy tale genre today, keeping the “language of fairy tales” alive. When it comes to movie genres, fantasy is one of the big names, but “fairy tale” is arguably a genre of its own. This is because fairy tales over time have received a large faithful cult audience. Almost every film by Burton and Del Toro can be called a fantasy cult film. Films like Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands come to mind for the former while titles like Pan’s Labyrinth and Hellboy come to mind for the latter. This year, Del Toro directed another film that I would count as a lurid fairy tale, Crimson Peak.

I wrote in my P1 and P2 about the evolution of Alice in Wonderland and the evolution of the fantasy genre; one of my conclusions was “fairy tales still sell.” Even when Kate brings up how Disney “sanitized” the original novels by making the colors brighter and more appealing for children, history has shown that filmmakers would still go back to the fascinating dark places of the genre. Just look at Tim Burton’s rendition of Alice in Wonderland. Or the upcoming Alice Through The Looking Glass.

Fairy tales are not going away, because there is always an audience for it.