Fairytales

A fairy tale (alternative names include fairytale, fairy story, magic tale, or wonder tale) is a short story that belongs to the folklore genre. Such stories typically feature magic, enchantments, and mythical or fanciful beings. In most cultures, there is no clear line separating myth from folk or fairy tale; all these together form the literature of preliterate societies. Fairy tales may be distinguished from other folk narratives such as legends (which generally involve belief in the veracity of the events described) and explicit moral tales, including beast fables.

In less technical contexts, the term is also used to describe something blessed with unusual happiness, as in "fairy-tale ending" (a happy ending) or "fairy-tale romance". Colloquially, the term "fairy tale" or "fairy story" can also mean any far-fetched story or tall tale; it is used especially of any story that not only is not true, but could not possibly be true. Legends are perceived as real within their culture; fairy tales may merge into legends, where the narrative is perceived both by teller and hearers as being grounded in historical truth. However, unlike legends and epics, fairy tales usually do not contain more than superficial references to religion and to actual places, people, and events; they take place "once upon a time" rather than in actual times.

Fairy tales occur both in oral and in literary form; the name "fairy tale" ("''conte de fées''" in French) was first ascribed to them by Madame d'Aulnoy in the late 17th century. Many of today's fairy tales have evolved from centuries-old stories that have appeared, with variations, in multiple cultures around the world.

The history of the fairy tale is particularly difficult to trace because only the literary forms can survive. Still, according to researchers at universities in Durham and Lisbon, such stories may date back thousands of years, some to the Bronze Age. Fairy tales, and works derived from fairy tales, are still written today.

The Jatakas are probably the oldest collection of such tales in literature, and the greater part of the rest are demonstrably more than a thousand years old. It is certain that much (perhaps one~fifth) of the popular literature of modern Europe is derived from those portions of this large bulk which came west with the Crusades through the medium of Arabs and Jews.

Folklorists have classified fairy tales in various ways. The Aarne-Thompson classification system and the morphological analysis of Vladimir Propp are among the most notable. Other folklorists have interpreted the tales' significance, but no school has been definitively established for the meaning of the tales.

Terminology

Some folklorists prefer to use the German term ''Märchen'' or "wonder tale" to refer to the genre rather than ''fairy tale'', a practice given weight by the definition of Thompson in his 1977 946edition of ''The Folktale'': "a tale of some length involving a succession of motifs or episodes. It moves in an unreal world without definite locality or definite creatures and is filled with the marvellous. In this never-never land, humble heroes kill adversaries, succeed to kingdoms and marry princesses." The characters and motifs of fairy tales are simple and archetypal: princesses and goose-girls; youngest sons and gallant princes; ogres, giants, dragons, and trolls; wicked stepmothers and false heroes; fairy godmothers and other magical helpers, often talking horses, or foxes, or birds; glass mountains; and prohibitions and breaking of prohibitions.

Definition

Although the fairy tale is a distinct genre within the larger category of folktale, the definition that marks a work as a fairy tale is a source of considerable dispute. The term itself comes from the translation of Madame D'Aulnoy's ''Conte de fées'', first used in her collection in 1697. Common parlance conflates fairy tales with beast fables and other folktales, and scholars differ on the degree to which the presence of fairies and/or similarly mythical beings (e.g., elves, goblins, trolls, giants, huge monsters, or mermaids) should be taken as a differentiator. Vladimir Propp, in his ''Morphology of the Folktale'', criticized the common distinction between "fairy tales" and "animal tales" on the grounds that many tales contained both fantastic elements and animals. Nevertheless, to select works for his analysis, Propp used all Russian folktales classified as a folklore, Aarne–Thompson–Uther Index 300–749, – in a cataloguing system that made such a distinction – to gain a clear set of tales. His own analysis identified fairy tales by their plot elements, but that in itself has been criticized, as the analysis does not lend itself easily to tales that do not involve a quest, and furthermore, the same plot elements are found in non-fairy tale works.

As Stith Thompson points out, talking animals and the presence of magic seem to be more common to the fairy tale than fairies themselves. However, the mere presence of animals that talk does not make a tale a fairy tale, especially when the animal is clearly a mask on a human face, as in fables.Tolkien, p. 15.

In his essay "On Fairy-Stories", J. R. R. Tolkien agreed with the exclusion of "fairies" from the definition, defining fairy tales as stories about the adventures of men in '' Faërie'', the land of fairies, fairytale princes and princesses, dwarves, elves, and not only other magical species but many other marvels. However, the same essay excludes tales that are often considered fairy tales, citing as an example '' The Monkey's Heart'', which Andrew Lang included in ''The Lilac Fairy Book''.

Steven Swann Jones identified the presence of magic as the feature by which fairy tales can be distinguished from other sorts of folktales. Davidson and Chaudri identify "transformation" as the key feature of the genre.''A companion to the fairy tale''. By Hilda Ellis Davidson, Anna Chaudhri. Boydell & Brewer 2006. p. 39. From a psychological point of view, Jean Chiriac argued for the necessity of the fantastic in these narratives.

In terms of aesthetic values, Italo Calvino cited the fairy tale as a prime example of "quickness" in literature, because of the economy and concision of the tales.

History of the genre

Originally, stories that would contemporarily be considered fairy tales were not marked out as a separate genre. The German term "Märchen" stems from the old German word "Mär", which means news or tale. The word "Märchen" is the diminutive of the word "Mär", therefore it means a "little story". Together with the common beginning "once upon a time", this tells us that a fairy tale or a märchen was originally a little story from a long time ago when the world was still magic. (Indeed, one less regular German opening is "In the old times when wishing was still effective".)

The English term "fairy tale" stems from the fact that the French ''contes'' often included fairies.

Roots of the genre come from different oral stories passed down in European cultures. The genre was first marked out by writers of the Renaissance, such as Giovanni Francesco Straparola and Giambattista Basile, and stabilized through the works of later collectors such as Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm. In this evolution, the name was coined when the ''précieuses'' took up writing literary stories; Madame d'Aulnoy invented the term ''Conte de fée'', or fairy tale, in the late 17th century.

Before the definition of the genre of fantasy, many works that would now be classified as fantasy were termed "fairy tales", including Tolkien's ''The Hobbit'', George Orwell's ''Animal Farm'', and L. Frank Baum's ''The Wonderful Wizard of Oz''. Indeed, Tolkien's "On Fairy-Stories" includes discussions of world-building and is considered a vital part of fantasy criticism. Although fantasy, particularly the subgenre of fairytale fantasy, draws heavily on fairy tale motifs, the genres are now regarded as distinct.

Folk and literary

The fairy tale, told orally, is a sub-class of the folktale. Many writers have written in the form of the fairy tale. These are the literary fairy tales, or ''Kunstmärchen''. The oldest forms, from ''Panchatantra'' to the ''Pentamerone'', show considerable reworking from the oral form.Swann Jones, p. 35. The Grimm brothers were among the first to try to preserve the features of oral tales. Yet the stories printed under the Grimm name have been considerably reworked to fit the written form.

Literary fairy tales and oral fairy tales freely exchanged plots, motifs, and elements with one another and with the tales of foreign lands. The literary fairy tale came into fashion during the 17th century, developed by aristocratic women as a parlour game. This, in turn, helped to maintain the oral tradition. According to Jack Zipes, "The subject matter of the conversations consisted of literature, mores, taste, and etiquette, whereby the speakers all endeavoured to portray ideal situations in the most effective oratorical style that would gradually have a major effect on literary forms." Many 18th-century folklorists attempted to recover the "pure" folktale, uncontaminated by literary versions. Yet while oral fairy tales likely existed for thousands of years before the literary forms, there is no pure folktale, and each literary fairy tale draws on folk traditions, if only in parody.Zipes, ''The Great Fairy Tale Tradition: From Straparola and Basile to the Brothers Grimm'', p. 846. This makes it impossible to trace forms of transmission of a fairy tale. Oral story-tellers have been known to read literary fairy tales to increase their own stock of stories and treatments.

History

The oral tradition of the fairy tale came long before the written page. Tales were told or enacted dramatically, rather than written down, and handed down from generation to generation. Because of this, the history of their development is necessarily obscure and blurred. Fairy tales appear, now and again, in written literature throughout literate cultures, as in ''The Golden Ass'', which includes ''Cupid and Psyche'' (Roman, 100–200 AD),Heidi Anne Heiner
"Fairy Tale Timeline"
/ref> or the ''Panchatantra'' (India 3rd century BC), but it is unknown to what extent these reflect the actual folk tales even of their own time. The stylistic evidence indicates that these, and many later collections, reworked folk tales into literary forms. What they do show is that the fairy tale has ancient roots, older than the '' Arabian Nights'' collection of magical tales (compiled ''circa'' 1500 AD), such as '' Vikram and the Vampire'', and ''Bel and the Dragon''. Besides such collections and individual tales, in China, Taoist philosophers such as Liezi and Zhuangzi recounted fairy tales in their philosophical works.Moss Roberts, "Introduction", p. xviii, ''Chinese Fairy Tales & Fantasies''. . In the broader definition of the genre, the first famous Western fairy tales are those of Aesop (6th century BC) in ancient Greece.

Scholarship points out that Medieval literature contains early versions or predecessors of later known tales and motifs, such as the grateful dead, The Bird Lover or the quest for the lost wife. Recognizable folktales have also been reworked as the plot of folk literature and oral epics.

Jack Zipes writes in ''When Dreams Came True'', "There are fairy tale elements in Chaucer's ''The Canterbury Tales'', Edmund Spenser's ''The Faerie Queene'', and in many of William Shakespeare plays." ''King Lear'' can be considered a literary variant of fairy tales such as ''Water and Salt'' and ''Cap O' Rushes''. The tale itself resurfaced in Western literature in the 16th and 17th centuries, with ''The Facetious Nights of Straparola'' by Giovanni Francesco Straparola (Italy, 1550 and 1553), which contains many fairy tales in its inset tales, and the Neapolitan tales of Giambattista Basile (Naples, 1634–36), which are all fairy tales. Carlo Gozzi made use of many fairy tale motifs among his Commedia dell'Arte scenarios, including among them one based on ''The Love For Three Oranges'' (1761). Simultaneously, Pu Songling, in China, included many fairy tales in his collection, ''Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio'' (published posthumously, 1766). The fairy tale itself became popular among the ''précieuses'' of upper-class France (1690–1710), and among the tales told in that time were the ones of La Fontaine and the ''Contes'' of Charles Perrault (1697), who fixed the forms of ''Sleeping Beauty'' and ''Cinderella''. Although Straparola's, Basile's and Perrault's collections contain the oldest known forms of various fairy tales, on the stylistic evidence, all the writers rewrote the tales for literary effect.

The Salon Era

In the mid-17th century, a vogue for magical tales emerged among the intellectuals who frequented the salons of Paris. These salons were regular gatherings hosted by prominent aristocratic women, where women and men could gather together to discuss the issues of the day.

In the 1630s, aristocratic women began to gather in their own living rooms, salons, to discuss the topics of their choice: arts and letters, politics, and social matters of immediate concern to the women of their class: marriage, love, financial and physical independence, and access to education. This was a time when women were barred from receiving a formal education. Some of the most gifted women writers of the period came out of these early salons (such as Madeleine de Scudéry and Madame de Lafayette), which encouraged women's independence and pushed against the gender barriers that defined their lives. The salonnières argued particularly for love and intellectual compatibility between the sexes, opposing the system of arranged marriages.

Sometime in the middle of the 17th century, a passion for the conversational parlour game based on the plots of old folk tales swept through the salons. Each salonnière was called upon to retell an old tale or rework an old theme, spinning clever new stories that not only showcased verbal agility and imagination but also slyly commented on the conditions of aristocratic life. Great emphasis was placed on a mode of delivery that seemed natural and spontaneous. The decorative language of the fairy tales served an important function: disguising the rebellious subtext of the stories and sliding them past the court censors. Critiques of court life (and even of the king) were embedded in extravagant tales and in dark, sharply dystopian ones. Not surprisingly, the tales by women often featured young (but clever) aristocratic girls whose lives were controlled by the arbitrary whims of fathers, kings, and elderly wicked fairies, as well as tales in which groups of wise fairies (i.e., intelligent, independent women) stepped in and put all to rights.

The salon tales as they were originally written and published have been preserved in a monumental work called '' Le Cabinet des Fées'', an enormous collection of stories from the 17th and 18th centuries.

Later works

The first collectors to attempt to preserve not only the plot and characters of the tale, but also the style in which they were told, was the Brothers Grimm, collecting German fairy tales; ironically, this meant although their first edition (1812 & 1815) remains a treasure for folklorists, they rewrote the tales in later editions to make them more acceptable, which ensured their sales and the later popularity of their work.

Such literary forms did not merely draw from the folktale, but also influenced folktales in turn. The Brothers Grimm rejected several tales for their collection, though told orally to them by Germans, because the tales derived from Perrault, and they concluded they were thereby French and not German tales; an oral version of ''Bluebeard'' was thus rejected, and the tale of ''Little Briar Rose'', clearly related to Perrault's '' The Sleeping Beauty'', was included only because Jacob Grimm convinced his brother that the figure of Brynhildr, from much earlier Norse mythology, proved that the sleeping princess was authentically Germanic folklore.

This consideration of whether to keep ''Sleeping Beauty'' reflected a belief common among folklorists of the 19th century: that the folk tradition preserved fairy tales in forms from pre-history except when "contaminated" by such literary forms, leading people to tell inauthentic tales. The rural, illiterate, and uneducated peasants, if suitably isolated, were the ''folk'' and would tell pure ''folk'' tales. Sometimes they regarded fairy tales as a form of fossil, the remnants of a once-perfect tale. However, further research has concluded that fairy tales never had a fixed form, and regardless of literary influence, the tellers constantly altered them for their own purposes.

The work of the Brothers Grimm influenced other collectors, both inspiring them to collect tales and leading them to similarly believe, in a spirit of romantic nationalism, that the fairy tales of a country were particularly representative of it, to the neglect of cross-cultural influence. Among those influenced were the Russian Alexander Afanasyev (first published in 1866), the Norwegians Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe (first published in 1845), the Romanian Petre Ispirescu (first published in 1874), the English Joseph Jacobs (first published in 1890), and Jeremiah Curtin, an American who collected Irish tales (first published in 1890). Ethnographers collected fairy tales throughout the world, finding similar tales in Africa, the Americas, and Australia; Andrew Lang was able to draw on not only the written tales of Europe and Asia, but those collected by ethnographers, to fill his "coloured" fairy books series. They also encouraged other collectors of fairy tales, as when Yei Theodora Ozaki created a collection, ''Japanese Fairy Tales'' (1908), after encouragement from Lang. Simultaneously, writers such as Hans Christian Andersen and George MacDonald continued the tradition of literary fairy tales. Andersen's work sometimes drew on old folktales, but more often deployed fairytale motifs and plots in new tales. MacDonald incorporated fairytale motifs both in new literary fairy tales, such as ''The Light Princess'', and in works of the genre that would become fantasy, as in ''The Princess and the Goblin'' or ''Lilith''.

Cross-cultural transmission

Two theories of origins have attempted to explain the common elements in fairy tales found spread over continents. One is that a single point of origin generated any given tale, which then spread over the centuries; the other is that such fairy tales stem from common human experience and therefore can appear separately in many different origins.

Fairy tales with very similar plots, characters, and motifs are found spread across many different cultures. Many researchers hold this to be caused by the spread of such tales, as people repeat tales they have heard in foreign lands, although the oral nature makes it impossible to trace the route except by inference. Folklorists have attempted to determine the origin by internal evidence, which can not always be clear; Joseph Jacobs, comparing the Scottish tale ''The Ridere of Riddles'' with the version collected by the Brothers Grimm, '' The Riddle'', noted that in ''The Ridere of Riddles'' one hero ends up polygamously married, which might point to an ancient custom, but in ''The Riddle'', the simpler riddle might argue greater antiquity.

Folklorists of the "Finnish" (or historical-geographical) school attempted to place fairy tales to their origin, with inconclusive results. Sometimes influence, especially within a limited area and time, is clearer, as when considering the influence of Perrault's tales on those collected by the Brothers Grimm. ''Little Briar-Rose'' appears to stem from Perrault's ''The Sleeping Beauty'', as the Grimms' tale appears to be the only independent German variant. Similarly, the close agreement between the opening of the Grimms' version of ''Little Red Riding Hood'' and Perrault's tale points to an influence, although the Grimms' version adds a different ending (perhaps derived from ''The Wolf and the Seven Young Kids'').

Fairy tales tend to take on the color of their location, through the choice of motifs, the style in which they are told, and the depiction of character and local color.

The Brothers Grimm believed that European fairy tales derived from the cultural history shared by all Indo-European peoples and were therefore ancient, far older than written records. This view is supported by research by the anthropologist Jamie Tehrani and the folklorist Sara Graca Da Silva using phylogenetic analysis, a technique developed by evolutionary biologists to trace the relatedness of living and fossil species. Among the tales analysed were ''Jack and the Beanstalk'', traced to the time of splitting of Eastern and Western Indo-European, over 5000 years ago. Both ''Beauty and the Beast'' and ''Rumpelstiltskin'' appear to have been created some 4000 years ago. The story of ''The Smith and the Devil'' (Deal with the Devil) appears to date from the Bronze Age, some 6000 years ago. Various other studies converge to suggest that some fairy tales, for example the swan maiden, could go back to the Upper Palaeolithic.

Association with children

Originally, adults were the audience of a fairy tale just as often as children. Literary fairy tales appeared in works intended for adults, but in the 19th and 20th centuries the fairy tale became associated with children's literature.

The ''précieuses'', including Madame d'Aulnoy, intended their works for adults, but regarded their source as the tales that servants, or other women of lower class, would tell to children. Indeed, a novel of that time, depicting a countess's suitor offering to tell such a tale, has the countess exclaim that she loves fairy tales as if she were still a child. Among the late ''précieuses'', Jeanne-Marie Le Prince de Beaumont redacted a version of ''Beauty and the Beast'' for children, and it is her tale that is best known today. The Brothers Grimm titled their collection ''Children's and Household Tales'' and rewrote their tales after complaints that they were not suitable for children.

In the modern era, fairy tales were altered so that they could be read to children. The Brothers Grimm concentrated mostly on sexual references; Rapunzel, in the first edition, revealed the prince's visits by asking why her clothing had grown tight, thus letting the witch deduce that she was pregnant, but in subsequent editions carelessly revealed that it was easier to pull up the prince than the witch. On the other hand, in many respects, violenceparticularly when punishing villainswas increased. Other, later, revisions cut out violence; J.R.R.Tolkien noted that '' The Juniper Tree'' often had its cannibalistic stew cut out in a version intended for children. The moralizing strain in the Victorian era altered the classical tales to teach lessons, as when George Cruikshank rewrote ''Cinderella'' in 1854 to contain temperance themes. His acquaintance Charles Dickens protested, "In an utilitarian age, of all other times, it is a matter of grave importance that fairy tales should be respected."

Psychoanalysts such as Bruno Bettelheim, who regarded the cruelty of older fairy tales as indicative of psychological conflicts, strongly criticized this expurgation, because it weakened their usefulness to both children and adults as ways of symbolically resolving issues. Fairy tales do teach children how to deal with difficult times. To quote Rebecca Walters (2017, p. 56) "Fairytales and folktales are part of the cultural conserve that can be used to address children’s fears …. and give them some role training in an approach that honors the children’s window of tolerance". These fairy tales teach children how to deal with certain social situations and helps them to find their place in society. Fairy tales teach children other important lessons too. For example, Tsitsani et al. carried out a study on children to determine the benefits of fairy tales. Parents of the children who took part in the study found that fairy tales, especially the color in them, triggered their child's imagination as they read them.Jungian Analyst and fairy tale scholar, Marie Louise Von Franz interprets fairy tales based on Jung's view of fairy tales as a spontaneous and naive product of soul, which can only express what soul is. That means, she looks at fairy tales as images of different phases of experiencing the reality of the soul. They are the "purest and simplest expression of collective unconscious psychic processes" and "they represent the archetypes in their simplest, barest and most concise form" because they are less overlaid with conscious material than myths and legends. "In this pure form, the archetypal images afford us the best clues to the understanding of the processes going on in the collective psyche". "The fairy tale itself is its own best explanation; that is, its meaning is contained in the totality of its motifs connected by the thread of the story. ..Every fairy tale is a relatively closed system compounding one essential psychological meaning which is expressed in a series of symbolical pictures and events and is discoverable in these". "I have come to the conclusion that all fairy tales endeavour to describe one and the same psychic fact, but a fact so complex and far-reaching and so difficult for us to realize in all its different aspects that hundreds of tales and thousands of repetitions with a musician's variation are needed until this unknown fact is delivered into consciousness; and even then the theme is not exhausted. This unknown fact is what Jung calls the Self, which is the psychic reality of the collective unconscious. ..Every archetype is in its essence only one aspect of the collective unconscious as well as always representing also the whole collective unconscious.

Other famous people commented on the importance of fairy tales, especially for children. For example, Albert Einstein once showed how important he believed fairy tales were for children's intelligence in the quote "If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairytales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairytales."

The adaptation of fairy tales for children continues. Walt Disney's influential ''Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs'' was largely (although certainly not solely) intended for the children's market.Grant and Clute, "Cinema", p. 196. The anime ''Magical Princess Minky Momo'' draws on the fairy tale ''Momotarō''. Jack Zipes has spent many years working to make the older traditional stories accessible to modern readers and their children.

Motherhood

Many fairy tales feature an absentee mother, as an example Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid, Little Red Riding Hood and Donkeyskin, where the mother is deceased or absent and unable to help the heroines. Mothers are depicted as absent or wicked in the most popular contemporary versions of tales like Rapunzel, Snow White, Cinderella and Hansel and Gretel, however,
some lesser known tales or variants such as those found in volumes edited by Angela Carter and Jane Yolen depict mothers in a more positive light.

Carter's protagonist in ''The Bloody Chamber'' is an impoverished piano student married to a Marquis who was much older than herself to "banish the spectre of poverty". The story is a variant on Bluebeard, a tale about a wealthy man who murders numerous young women. Carter's protagonist, who is unnamed, describes her mother as "eagle-featured" and "indomitable". Her mother is depicted as a woman who is prepared for violence, instead of hiding from it or sacrificing herself to it. The protagonist recalls how her mother kept an "antique service revolver" and once "shot a man-eating tiger with her own hand."

Contemporary tales

Literary

In contemporary literature, many authors have used the form of fairy tales for various reasons, such as examining the human condition from the simple framework a fairytale provides. Some authors seek to recreate a sense of the fantastic in a contemporary discourse. Some writers use fairy tale forms for modern issues; this can include using the psychological dramas implicit in the story, as when Robin McKinley retold ''Donkeyskin'' as the novel ''Deerskin'', with emphasis on the abusive treatment the father of the tale dealt to his daughter. Sometimes, especially in children's literature, fairy tales are retold with a twist simply for comic effect, such as ''The Stinky Cheese Man'' by Jon Scieszka and ''The ASBO Fairy Tales'' by Chris Pilbeam. A common comic motif is a world where all the fairy tales take place, and the characters are aware of their role in the story, such as in the film series Shrek.

Other authors may have specific motives, such as multicultural or feminist reevaluations of predominantly Eurocentric masculine-dominated fairy tales, implying critique of older narratives. The figure of the damsel in distress has been particularly attacked by many feminist critics. Examples of narrative reversal rejecting this figure include ''The Paperbag Princess'' by Robert Munsch, a picture book aimed at children in which a princess rescues a prince, Angela Carter's ''The Bloody Chamber'', which retells a number of fairy tales from a female point of view and Simon Hood's contemporary interpretation of various popular classics.

There are also many contemporary erotic retellings of fairy tales, which explicitly draw upon the original spirit of the tales, and are specifically for adults. Modern retellings focus on exploring the tale through use of the erotic, explicit sexuality, dark and/or comic themes, female empowerment, fetish and BDSM, multicultural, and heterosexual characters. Cleis Press has released several fairy tale-themed erotic anthologies, including ''Fairy Tale Lust'', ''Lustfully Ever After'', and ''A Princess Bound''.

It may be hard to lay down the rule between fairy tales and fantasies that use fairy tale motifs, or even whole plots, but the distinction is commonly made, even within the works of a single author: George MacDonald's ''Lilith'' and ''Phantastes'' are regarded as fantasies, while his "The Light Princess", " The Golden Key", and "The Wise Woman" are commonly called fairy tales. The most notable distinction is that fairytale fantasies, like other fantasies, make use of novelistic writing conventions of prose, characterization, or setting.

Film

Fairy tales have been enacted dramatically; records exist of this in commedia dell'arte, and later in pantomime. Unlike oral and literacy form, fairy tales in film is considered one of the most effective way to convey the story to the audience. The advent of cinema has meant that such stories could be presented in a more plausible manner, with the use of special effects and animation. The Walt Disney Company has had a significant impact on the evolution of the fairy tale film. Some of the earliest short silent films from the Disney studio were based on fairy tales, and some fairy tales were adapted into shorts in the musical comedy series "Silly Symphony", such as ''Three Little Pigs''. Walt Disney's first feature-length film ''Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs'', released in 1937, was a ground-breaking film for fairy tales and, indeed, fantasy in general. With the cost of over 400 percent of the budget and more than 300 artists, assistants and animators, ''Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs'' was arguably one of the highest work force demanded film at that time. The studio even hired Don Graham to open animation training programs for more than 700 staffs. As for the motion capture and personality expression, the studio used a dancer, Marjorie Celeste, from the beginning to the end for the best results. Disney and his creative successors have returned to traditional and literary fairy tales numerous times with films such as ''Cinderella'' (1950), ''Sleeping Beauty'' (1959), ''The Little Mermaid'' (1989) and ''Beauty and the Beast'' (1991). Disney's influence helped establish the fairy tale genre as a genre for children, and has been accused by some of bowdlerizing the gritty naturalism – and sometimes unhappy endings – of many folk fairy tales. However, others note that the softening of fairy tales occurred long before Disney, some of which was even done by the Grimm brothers themselves.

Many filmed fairy tales have been made primarily for children, from Disney's later works to Aleksandr Rou's retelling of ''Vasilissa the Beautiful'', the first Soviet film to use Russian folk tales in a big-budget feature. Others have used the conventions of fairy tales to create new stories with sentiments more relevant to contemporary life, as in ''Labyrinth'', ''My Neighbor Totoro'', ''Happily N'Ever After'', and the films of Michel Ocelot.

Other works have retold familiar fairy tales in a darker, more horrific or psychological variant aimed primarily at adults. Notable examples are Jean Cocteau's ''Beauty and the Beast'' and ''The Company of Wolves'', based on Angela Carter's retelling of ''Little Red Riding Hood''. Likewise, ''Princess Mononoke'', ''Pan's Labyrinth'', ''Suspiria'', and ''Spike'' create new stories in this genre from fairy tale and folklore motifs.

In comics and animated TV series, ''The Sandman'', ''Revolutionary Girl Utena'', ''Princess Tutu'', ''Fables'' and ''MÄR'' all make use of standard fairy tale elements to various extents but are more accurately categorised as fairytale fantasy due to the definite locations and characters which a longer narrative requires.

A more modern cinematic fairy tale would be Luchino Visconti's ''Le Notti Bianche'', starring Marcello Mastroianni before he became a superstar. It involves many of the romantic conventions of fairy tales, yet it takes place in post-World War II Italy, and it ends realistically.

In recent years, Disney has been dominating the fairy tale film industry by remaking their animated fairy tale films into live action. Examples include ''Maleficent'' (2014), ''Cinderella'' (2015), ''Beauty and the Beast'' (2017) and so on.

Motifs

Any comparison of fairy tales quickly discovers that many fairy tales have features in common with each other. Two of the most influential classifications are those of Antti Aarne, as revised by Stith Thompson into the Aarne-Thompson classification system, and Vladimir Propp's ''Morphology of the Folk Tale''.

Aarne-Thompson

This system groups fairy and folk tales according to their overall plot. Common, identifying features are picked out to decide which tales are grouped together. Much therefore depends on what features are regarded as decisive.

For instance, tales like ''Cinderella'' – in which a persecuted heroine, with the help of the fairy godmother or similar magical helper, attends an event (or three) in which she wins the love of a prince and is identified as his true brideare classified as type 510, the persecuted heroine. Some such tales are ''The Wonderful Birch''; '' Aschenputtel''; ''Katie Woodencloak''; ''The Story of Tam and Cam''; ''Ye Xian''; ''Cap O' Rushes''; ''Catskin''; ''Fair, Brown and Trembling''; ''Finette Cendron''; ''Allerleirauh''.

Further analysis of the tales shows that in ''Cinderella'', ''The Wonderful Birch'', ''The Story of Tam and Cam'', ''Ye Xian'', and ''Aschenputtel'', the heroine is persecuted by her stepmother and refused permission to go to the ball or other event, and in ''Fair, Brown and Trembling'' and ''Finette Cendron'' by her sisters and other female figures, and these are grouped as 510A; while in ''Cap O' Rushes'', ''Catskin'', and ''Allerleirauh'', the heroine is driven from home by her father's persecutions, and must take work in a kitchen elsewhere, and these are grouped as 510B. But in ''Katie Woodencloak'', she is driven from home by her stepmother's persecutions and must take service in a kitchen elsewhere, and in ''Tattercoats'', she is refused permission to go to the ball by her grandfather. Given these features common with both types of 510, ''Katie Woodencloak'' is classified as 510A because the villain is the stepmother, and ''Tattercoats'' as 510B because the grandfather fills the father's role.

This system has its weaknesses in the difficulty of having no way to classify subportions of a tale as motifs. ''Rapunzel'' is type 310 (The Maiden in the Tower), but it opens with a child being demanded in return for stolen food, as does ''Puddocky''; but ''Puddocky'' is not a Maiden in the Tower tale, while ''The Canary Prince'', which opens with a jealous stepmother, is.

It also lends itself to emphasis on the common elements, to the extent that the folklorist describes '' The Black Bull of Norroway'' as the same story as ''Beauty and the Beast''. This can be useful as a shorthand but can also erase the coloring and details of a story.

Morphology

Vladimir Propp specifically studied a collection of Russian fairy tale

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