Summary
Summary
Reality, Magic, and Other Lies: Fairy-Tale Film Truths explores connections and discontinuities between lies and truths in fairy-tale films to directly address the current politics of fairy tale and reality. Since the Enlightenment, notions of magic and wonder have been relegated to the realm of the fanciful, with science and reality understood as objective and true. But the skepticism associated with postmodern thought and critiques from diverse perspectives--including but not limited to anti-racist, decolonial, disability, and feminist theorizing--renders this binary distinction questionable. Further, the precise content of magic and science has shifted through history and across location. Pauline Greenhill offers the idea that fairy tales, particularly through the medium of film, often address those distinctions by making magic real and reality magical. Reality, Magic, and Other Lies consists of an introduction, two sections, and a conclusion, with the first section, "Studio, Director, and Writer Oeuvres," addressing how fairy-tale films engage with and challenge scientific or factual approaches to truth and reality, drawing on films from the stop-motion animation company LAIKA, the independent filmmaker Tarsem, and the storyteller and writer Fred Pellerin. The second section, "Themes and Issues from Three Fairy Tales," shows fairy-tale film magic exploring real-life issues and experiences using the stories of "Hansel and Gretel," "The Juniper Tree," and "Cinderella." The concluding section, "Moving Forward?" suggests that the key to facing the reality of contemporary issues is to invest in fairy tales as a guide, rather than a means of escape, by gathering your community and never forgetting to believe. Reality, Magic, and Other Lies--which will be of interest to film and fairy-tale scholars and students--considers the ways in which fairy tales in their mediated forms deconstruct the world and offer alternative views for peaceful, appropriate, just, and intersectionally multifaceted encounters with humans, non-human animals, and the rest of the environment.
Reviews (1)
Choice Review
Beginning with the notion that fairy tales are somehow connected to reality and truth, a theme stemming from the older fantasy tradition of George MacDonald, G. K. Chesterton, J. R. R. Tolkien, and C. S. Lewis, Greenhill (women's and gender studies, Univ. of Winnipeg) investigates the uncanny and marvelous in a wonderful selection of marginal films. She opens with the fascinating, meta-cinematic work of Oregon-based LAIKA studios and its stop-motion animated films, e.g., Coraline (2009) and ParaNorman (2012). Such films expose their behind-the-curtain SFX techniques, making reality and fantasy interchangeable. A second spellbinding chapter on director Tarsem's magical reality aesthetics (and hetero-everything) explores the almost medieval relation of science and magical alchemy in texts like Mirror Mirror (2012), seemingly a nod to Athanasius Kircher's camera obscura. Greenhill makes a convincing case for finding truths in the fairy tales but slips into Procrustean beds of ideological analysis of films involving Hansel and Gretel. Unfortunately, the book, however intriguing, reads like a collection of postmodern articles strung together with sleight of hand. But Greenhill maps out several curious routes through enchanted forests, and these guide readers in deconstructing the hegemony of a modern, challenging rationality that has lost its ability to wonder and imagine. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students through faculty. --Terry Lindvall, Virginia Wesleyan University