FairyTales as Myths, Myths as Fairy Tales

I have to admit that this week's readings in regards to what Walt Disney did to the original fairy tale stories shocked me. I was unaware of how he manipulated them which saddens me.  I think this quote from the reading sums it up better that I could: "[Disney's] close adaption of fairy tales with patriarchal codes indicate that all the technical experiments would not be used to foster social change in America, but to keep power in the hands of individuals like himself, who felt empowered to design and create new worlds." Many of the characters in Disney's films were adapted to subtly tell his own story and he often injected himself into characters.  He also often changed main story concepts to emphasis the woman's role in the story was to be the home keeper, and to focus on class segregation.

For our assignment, we were to create a story board for our tale and represent two major instances in our stories into a physical model.

Below is the beginning of my story board

And here is my very bad attempt at making a popup version of two of the most important scenes:

Scene 1: Cheeto Face taking over the land of Gamehendge and announcing himself as king.  He pollutes the waters and starts to knock down the forest to build a city.

Scene 3: When Colonel Forbin decides to decent into the world of Gamehendge.  This video is supposed to be the cellar hatch that appears in the bodega

Adapted Fairy Tales

For our 2nd and 3rd class, we were asked to take a fairy tale that we know from our past and adapt it.  I decided to work with the Gamehendge story --written by the lead singer from the band Phish for his undergraduate thesis-- that which he wrote into multiple songs telling this narrative. Here is my first adaption of the story that I will be developing more to create the land of Gamehendge in the setting of New York.

For the third class, we were asked to create three of the characters in our stories to use moving forward.

Cheeto-Faced Man- the antagonist:

Mustache-clad hipster - the sidekick

Class 1 - History of Fairy Tales

Thoughts on the assigned readings: I have never read to history of fairy tales and it's so intriguing how complex their history's are.

What are fairy tales used for? I thought the New Yorker article summed it up quite nicely: "[Fairy tales]... with their exacting distribution of rewards and punishments, they also increasingly tapped into the human urge to derive morals from stories. For centuries they held a moral anecdote, and based on the time and location, absorbed the tales of the culture and land to be passed on for generations.

A quote that I found really interesting, and it really stuck with me, in Bruno Bethlehem's book, The Uses of Enchantment, "Like great art, fairy tale' deepest meaning will be different for each person, and different for the same person at different moments in life. A child will extract different meaning from the same fairy tale, depending on his interests and needs of the moment."

I feel like this is very powerful and this, in my eyes, is what makes fairy tales powerful. This is the reason why fairy tales live on throughout our lives, why we carry them with us, and pass them on.  They have such wisdom that we once didn't see.

As mentioned later in the chapter, fairy tales are often very simple, where all the unnecessary detail is left out, yet their didactic meaning is so impactful that there can be many layers to learning.

When looking at the note above, it's interesting because I feel that Tarot reading and astrological chart have the same affect on adults. I wonder if in this class we will be comparing fairy tales to astrology as this is something I'm very interested in diving deeper into.

Another note that I found interesting in the book written by Jack Zipes called Why Fairy Tales Stick, he talks about how the women's role in story telling changes over the centuries. In the Middle Ages, fairy tales, once respected and cherished, were "gradually associated with untruths or silly women's tales" and "believers began 'feminizing' the tradition of wonder and fairy tales and thereby dismissing it as not relevant to the 'real world'..." Not until the seventeenth century were there much mention of women writers, but at this time in France there women that were changing the preseption of the female role in storytelling.