Download the full version of the ebook at

https://ebookultra.com

The Enchanted Screen The Unknown History of

Fairy tale Films 1st Edition Jack Zipes

https://ebookultra.com/download/the-enchanted-
screen-the-unknown-history-of-fairy-tale-
films-1st-edition-jack-zipes/

Explore and download more ebook at https://ebookultra.com

 Recommended digital products (PDF, EPUB, MOBI) that
you can download immediately if you are interested.

Green Banks The fairy tale of sustainability 1st Edition

Hedwig Heerdt

https://ebookultra.com/download/green-banks-the-fairy-tale-of-
sustainability-1st-edition-hedwig-heerdt/

ebookultra.com

Fairy Tale Science Monstrous Generation in the Takes of

Straparola and Basile 1st Edition Suzanne Magnanini

https://ebookultra.com/download/fairy-tale-science-monstrous-
generation-in-the-takes-of-straparola-and-basile-1st-edition-suzanne-
magnanini/
ebookultra.com

Fairy Tale Knits 20 Enchanting Characters to Make Goble

https://ebookultra.com/download/fairy-tale-knits-20-enchanting-
characters-to-make-goble/

ebookultra.com

Happy Ever After Financial Freedom Isn t a Fairy Tale 1st

Edition Millionaire

https://ebookultra.com/download/happy-ever-after-financial-freedom-
isn-t-a-fairy-tale-1st-edition-millionaire/

ebookultra.com
The Lord of the Films The Unofficial Guide to Tolkien s
Middle Earth on the Big Screen First Edition J. W. Braun

https://ebookultra.com/download/the-lord-of-the-films-the-unofficial-
guide-to-tolkien-s-middle-earth-on-the-big-screen-first-edition-j-w-
braun/
ebookultra.com

Genetics in the Madhouse The Unknown History of Human

Heredity 1st Edition Theodore Porter

https://ebookultra.com/download/genetics-in-the-madhouse-the-unknown-
history-of-human-heredity-1st-edition-theodore-porter/

ebookultra.com

Fairy Tales A New History Ruth B. Bottigheimer

https://ebookultra.com/download/fairy-tales-a-new-history-ruth-b-
bottigheimer/

ebookultra.com

Balboa Films A History and Filmography of the Silent Film

Studio 1st Edition Jean-Jacques Jura

https://ebookultra.com/download/balboa-films-a-history-and-
filmography-of-the-silent-film-studio-1st-edition-jean-jacques-jura/

ebookultra.com

The Elements of Teaching Second Edition Unknown

https://ebookultra.com/download/the-elements-of-teaching-second-
edition-unknown/

ebookultra.com
The Enchanted Screen The Unknown History of Fairy
tale Films 1st Edition Jack Zipes Digital Instant
Download
Author(s): Jack Zipes
ISBN(s): 9780415990622, 0415990629
Edition: 1
File Details: PDF, 47.20 MB
Year: 2010
Language: english
The Enchanted Screen

“Jack Zipes takes us beyond Disney and DreamWorks to the many films that draw on fairy-tale
sorcery for their cinematic power. With fierce analytic energy, encyclopedic inclusiveness, and
imaginative verve, he enlivens an expansive history that reaches back to Georges Méliès’s enchant-
ments and ends with the complex grotesqueries of Pan’s Labyrinth and Little Otik.”
—Maria Tatar, Harvard University

“The Enchanted Screen is a labor of love and a major work of scholarship, encyclopedic in reach and
rich in sustained and detailed thinking. The ‘unknown history’ of fairy-tale film is lucky to have found
such a skilled and dedicated narrator.”
—Stephen Benson, University of East Anglia Norwich

The Enchanted Screen: The Unknown History of Fairy-Tale Films offers readers a long overdue,
comprehensive look at the rich history of fairy tales and their influence on film, complete with the
inclusion of an extensive filmography compiled by the author. With this book, Jack Zipes not only
looks at the extensive, illustrious life of fairy tales and cinema, but he also reminds us that, decades
before Walt Disney made his mark on the genre, fairy tales were central to the birth of cinema as a
medium, as they offered cheap, copyright-free material that could easily engage audiences not only
through their familiarity but also through their dazzling special effects.

Since the story of fairy tales on film stretches far beyond Disney, this book discusses a broad range
of films silent, English and non-English, animated, live-action, puppetry, woodcut, montage (Jim
Henson), cartoon, and digital. Zipes thus gives his readers an in-depth look into the special
relationship between fairy tales and cinema, and guides us through this vast array of films by tracing
the adaptations of major fairy tales like “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Cinderella,” “Snow White,”
“Peter Pan,” and many more, from their earliest cinematic appearances to today.

Full of insight into some of our most beloved films and stories, and boldly illustrated with numerous
film stills, The Enchanted Screen is essential reading for film buffs and fans of the fairy tale alike.

Jack Zipes is Professor Emeritus of German and Comparative Literature at the University of
Minnesota. An acclaimed translator and scholar of children’s literature and culture, his most recent
books include Relentless Progress: The Reconfiguration of Children’s Literature, Fairy Tales, and
Storytelling; The Collected Sicilian Folk and Fairy Tales of Giuseppe Pitrè; Why Fairy Tales Stick; Hans
Christian Andersen: The Misunderstood Storyteller; Beautiful Angiola; and The Robber with the Witch’s
Head, all published by Routledge.
The Enchanted Screen
The Unknown History of
Fairy-Tale Films

Jack Zipes
First published 2011
by Routledge
270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016
Simultaneously published in the UK
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2011.

To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s
collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.

© 2011 Taylor & Francis

The right of Jack Zipes to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in
accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form
or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks,
and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Zipes, Jack, 1937–
The enchanted screen : the unknown history of fairy-tale films / Jack Zipes.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
Includes filmography.
1. Fairy tales in motion pictures. 2. Fairy tales—Film adaptations. I. Title.
PN1995.9.F34Z57 2011
791.43'6559—dc22
2010042961

ISBN 0-203-92749-4 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN13: 978–0–415–99062–2 (hbk)

ISBN13: 978–0–415–99061–5 (pbk)
ISBN13: 978–0–203–92749–6 (ebk)
It is rare to have great scholars who are also great friends, and so I want to
dedicate this book to Cristina Bacchilega, Don Haase, and Marina Warner,
who have supported my efforts over the years and kept the critical fairy-tale
spirit alive in extraordinary ways.
 Table of Contents

List of Figures ix
Preface xi
Acknowledgements xiii

Prologue 1

Part I 5
1 Filmic Adaptation and Appropriation of the Fairy Tale 7
2 De-Disneyfying Disney: Notes on the Development of the Fairy-Tale Film 16
3 Georges Méliès: Pioneer of the Fairy-Tale Film and the Art of the Ridiculous 31
4 Animated Fairy-Tale Cartoons: Celebrating the Carnival Art of the Ridiculous 49
5 Animated Feature Fairy-Tale Films 82

Part II 113
6 Cracking the Magic Mirror: Representations of Snow White 115
7 The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood Revisited and Reviewed 134
8 Bluebeard’s Original Sin and the Rise of Serial Killing, Mass Murder, and
Fascism 158
9 The Triumph of the Underdog: Cinderella’s Legacy 172
10 Abusing and Abandoning Children: “Hansel and Gretel,” “Tom Thumb,”
“The Pied Piper,” “Donkey-Skin,” and “The Juniper Tree” 193
11 Choosing the Right Mate: Why Beasts and Frogs Make for Ideal Husbands 224
12 Andersen’s Cinematic Legacy: Trivialization and Innovation 252
viii • Contents

Part III 281

13 Adapting Fairy-Tale Novels 283
14 Between Slave Language and Utopian Optimism: Neglected Fairy-Tale
Films of Central and Eastern Europe 321
15 Fairy-Tale Films in Dark Times: Breaking Molds, Seeing the World Anew 349

Endnotes 367
Bibliography 376
Filmography 388
Index 426
 List of Figures

1 Burt Gillett, The Big Bad Wolf 28

2 Tex Avery, Swing Shift Cinderella 29
3 Georges Méliès, Cinderella 39
4 Georges Méliès, The Enchanted Well 44
5 Georges Méliès, The Kingdom of the Fairies 45
6 Walt Disney, Puss in Boots 57
7 Max and Dave Fleischer, Little Dutch Mill 61
8 Friz Freleng, The Trial of Mr. Wolf 63
9 Peter Burness, The Fifty-First Dragon 65
10 Brad Case, Prince Charming 66
11 Ub Iwerks, The Brave Tin Soldier 72
12 Lotte Reiniger, The Golden Goose 74
13 Jirí Trnka, The Emperor’s Nightingale 76
14 George Pal, When Tulips Shall Grow 78
15 Lotte Reiniger, The Adventures of Prince Achmed 85
16 Clyde Geronimi, Sleeping Beauty 89
17 Ivan Ivanov-Vano/Boris Butakov, The Humpbacked Horse 92
18 Ivan Ivanov-Vano, The Adventures of Buratino 94
19 Karel Zeman, King Làvra 97
20 Karel Zeman, Krabat 99
21 Paul Grimault, The King and Mr. Bird 100
22 John Korty/Charles Swenson, Twice Upon a Time 104
23 Taiji Yabushita, The White Serpent 105
24 Hayao Miyazaki, Spirited Away 107
25 Michel Ocelot, Kirikou and the Sorceress 110
26 Max and Dave Fleischer, Snow White 120
27 Walt Disney, Snow White 122
28 Caroline Thompson, Snow White: The Fairest of Them All 126
29 Picha, Snow White: The Sequel 130
30 Walt Disney, Little Red Riding Hood 138
31 Burt Gillett, The Big Bad Wolf 139
32 Friz Freleng, The Trial of Mr. Wolf 141
33 Tex Avery, Little Red Walking Hood 142
34 Tex Avery, Red Hot Riding Hood 143
x • Figures

35 Tex Avery, Little Rural Riding Hood 144

36 Neil Jordan, The Company of Wolves 148
37 David Kaplan, Little Red Riding Hood 151
38 Matthew Bright, Freeway 152
39 Georges Méliès, Bluebeard 160
40 Edgar Ulmer, Bluebeard 164
41 Charlie Chaplin, Monsieur Verdoux 169
42 Claude Chabrol, Landrou 171
43 Bud Fisher, A Kick For Cinderella 177
44 Dave Fleischer, Poor Cinderella 179
45 Bryan Forbes, The Slipper and the Rose 181
46 Václav Vorlícek, Three Wishes for Cinderella 184
47 Ericka Beckman, Cinderella 190
48 Alex van Warmerdam, Grimm 200
49 Christoph Hochhäusler, This Very Moment 202
50 Yim Pil-Sung, Hansel and Gretel 204
51 Dave Borthwick, The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb 209
52 Jirí Barta, Krysar 214
53 Jacques Demy, The Pied Piper 216
54 Atom Egoyan, The Sweet Hereafter 217
55 Nietzchka Keene, The Juniper Tree 223
56 Jean Cocteau, Beauty and the Beast 231
57 Gary Trousdale/Kirk Wise, Beauty and the Beast 233
58 Lev Atamanov, The Little Scarlet Flower 236
59 Hal Hartley, No Such Thing 244
60 Allan Arkush, Prince Charming 249
61 Vladimir Bychkov, The Little Mermaid 259
62 Boris Rytsarev, The Princess on the Pea 262
63 Peter Medak, The Emperor’s New Clothes 268
64 Päivi Hartzell, The Snow Queen 272
65 Julian Gibbs, The Snow Queen 273
66 Jannik Hastrup, H. C. Andersen’s The Long Shadow 277
67 Nick Willing, Tin Man 292
68 Dallas Bower, Alice in Wonderland 295
69 Jonathan Miller, Alice in Wonderland 298
70 Luigi Cominicin, The Adventures of Pinocchio 310
71 P. J. Hogan, Peter Pan 319
72 Mikhail and Vera Tsekhanovsky, The Frog Princess 326
73 Yuri Norstein, Tale of Tales 329
74 Vojtech Jasný, Cassandra Cat 333
75 Carl Reiner, The Princess Bride 352
76 Jan Svankmajer, Little Otik 354
77 Guillermo del Toro, Pan’s Labyrinth 358
78 Tarsem Singh, The Fall 360
79 Anna Melikyan, Mermaid 363
 Preface

Narrative informs all films. The question is, what kind of narrative and how? One of the best-kept
secrets in the study of the cinema concerns the neglect of the influential role that the fairy-tale
narrative has played in informing most of the films ever made—and it continues to do so. Yet, very
few scholars in cinema studies have acknowledged this role.
For some strange reason, film critics and theorists have paid very little attention to the fairy tale
and, more specifically, to the fairy-tale film. In fact, the leading encyclopedias and companions
of film do not even cite it as a genre or grant it an entry. In America, there are only two major studies
of the fairy-tale film, Folklore/Cinema: Popular Film as Vernacular Culture (2007), edited by Sharon
Sherman and Mikel Koven, and Fairy Tale Film and Cinematic Folklore (2010), edited by Pauline
Greenhill and Sidney Eve Matrix; one in the UK, Cinema and the Realms of Enchantment (1993)
by Marina Warner; one in France, Contes et légendes à l’écran (2005), edited by Carole Aurouet;
and two in Germany, 77 Märchenfilme (1990), edited by Eberhard Berger and Joachim Giera, and
WunderWelten: Märchen im Film (2004) by Fabienne Liptay.1 The American books were produced
by folklorists and literary critics, not by experts in film studies. Of course, there are numerous essays
and reviews about fairy-tale films, and many, if not too many, books and articles about the Disney
fairy-tale films. It is as if the fairy-tale film as genre had been invented by Walt Disney and as if the
Disney films were the most significant in the field up through the twenty-first century. Nothing could
be further from the truth.
My book is intended not simply to question notions of the Disney predominance in the field of
fairy-tale films, but more important, I shall pay attention, long overdue, to the vast international
production of fairy-tale films since the 1890s and provide a guide to a fantastic world of unknown
films and their connection to one another. To be sure, this book is a critical introduction to fairy-tale
films with a distinct ideological bias. It is the way I have always written—to argue critically for
alternative views in culture and, in this case, to uncover cinematic gems in the enormous genre of
the fairy tale. Without our realizing it, most fairy-tale films have deep roots in oral and literary tales
and re-create them with great imaginative and artistic power. They have enriched the genre of the
fairy tale and illuminated alternative ways of storytelling and living.
I have divided my book into three sections. The first comprises five chapters concerned with
the historical origins of the fairy-tale film, questions of adaptation and appropriation, the rise of the
Disney fairy-tale, and the significance of cartoons and feature-length animated films. The second
section has seven chapters that explore the vast number of films based on classical fairy tales such
as “Snow White,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Bluebeard,” “Cinderella,” “Hansel and Gretel,” “Tom
Thumb,” “The Pied Piper,” “Donkey Skin,” “The Juniper Tree,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “The Frog
Prince,” and a number of Hans Christian Andersen stories. Filmmakers have themselves become
xii • Preface

storytellers and have changed and employed all sorts of fairy tales to establish specific and general
discourses of films that are in dialogue with one another and with their source texts. It is fascinating
to view how various filmmakers from all over the world have appropriated and re-created popular
tales to address private and public concerns. These “unreal” films frequently touch us in real pro-
found ways, often much more than so-called “realistic” films. At the same time many also challenge
conventional narrative forms of fairy tales. At least, the very best do. To be precise, within the
field of filmic fairy-tale discourse there are major conflicts concerning how a fairy tale should be
narrated and filmed and what the purpose of a fairy tale should be. In the third section there are
three chapters: one that deals with such classical fairy-tale novels as The Adventures of Alice in
Wonderland, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The Adventures of Pinocchio, and Peter Pan and Wendy; a
second that introduces some unusual fairy-tale films from Russia, Czechoslovakia, and the former
East Germany that have rarely been shown in the West; and a third that explores the role of the child
as moral arbiter in some of the most innovative fairy-tale films of the past twenty years.
Originally, when I began this project about four years ago, I intended to include every significant
fairy-tale film in the world. Little did I realize how prolific filmmakers have been in the cultural field
of fairy-tale films, and I soon decided that I had to limit myself and focus mainly on the works
produced by European and North American filmmakers. Otherwise, I might never have finished a
project that was daunting in the first place. Wherever possible, however, I have included discussions
of notable fairy-tale films from Japan, South Korea, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong,
and Singapore. I reluctantly abandoned my intention to write about the enormous amount of films
based on tales from The Thousand and One Nights. They deserve a book-length study. Here and there
I allude to some adaptations of stories from the Nights as when I discuss Lotte Reiniger’s superb
animated film, The Adventures of Prince Achmed. Unfortunately, I have not examined some works
by several highly creative directors such as Ernst Lubitsch, Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger,
Terry Gilliam, Tim Burton, and some others. To make up for my “failure” to cover all the directors
and films that deserve to be treated in my study, I have created a very large filmography that still has
gaps but should be a helpful guide to those readers who want to explore the vast field of fairy-tale
films.
Since any study of fairy-tale films necessitates references to the oral and literary traditions, I have
stolen and included passages from some of my other books to provide historical background for
the films. I have also fully revised and inserted a chapter on films derived from Hans Christian
Andersen’s tales that appeared in my book Hans Christian Andersen: The Misunderstood Storyteller.
It is now much longer and contains discussions of many new films, one by the Danish filmmaker
Jannik Hastrup, which I consider to be one of the greatest neglected animated films of the twentieth
century. It was a surprise discovery for me.
Indeed, I hope there will be many surprises for readers of this book, and I wish I could spend a
year or three as curator of a gigantic fairy-tale film festival that would include all the superb neglected
films that I have discovered. They are truly inspiring and are informed by thousands of years of
comforting and disturbing wisdom. If only I had three wishes . . .
 Acknowledgements

The research for this book was made possible in part by a Professional Grant for Retirees from the
Graduate School of the University of Minnesota for which I am most thankful. I am also grateful for
the generous assistance of Kathleen Dickson and Steve Tollervey at the British Film Institute in
London. Cristina Bacchilega, Marina Balina, Elliott Colla, Don Haase, Norman Klein and Rembert
Heuser all took time from their own important work, read chapters of the book, or provided me with
invaluable criticism and advice. Rob Craig, founder of Kindermatinee, an extraordinary website, was
most helpful from the beginning until the end of my project. Erika Beckerman and David Kaplan,
two wonderful experimental filmmakers, kindly shared their films and ideas with me. Charlotte
Melin spurred me to apply for an important grant. The work on this book seemed at times almost
like an eternal fairy-tale adventure and led to serendipitous encounters with numerous well-informed
people who enabled me to discover important films and books. In particular, I want to thank Marina
Warner, Pauline Greenhill, Jacqui Weeks, Christine Goelz, Brigitte Beumers, Deb Girdwood, and
Isabelle Harder. Due to its size and complexity, the production of The Enchanted Screen demanded
a great deal of care and attention to detail. I was very fortunate to have the great collaboration
of Matt Byrnie, Stan Spring, and Carolann Madden at Routledge in New York, and Siân Findlay
and Alice Stoakley in England. Matt helped me develop the project, encouraged me throughout
the process, and was most understanding despite delays and changes in plans. Stan and Carolann
prepared the manuscript, sorted the photographs, and contributed to the cover design for the book.
Their assistance was indispensable. Siân dealt with all aspects of the final production of the book in
a sovereign manner and magnanimously solved numerous problems. Alice is the most impeccable
copy-editor with whom I have ever worked—perceptive, considerate, and scrupulous. Not only did
she catch my errors, but she also grasped the full gist of the book.
As usual, my wife, Carol Dines, showed extraordinary patience when I went into other worlds
during the last four years, and my amanuensis Vincenzo kept me grounded when I needed him most.
 Prologue

At their best, fairy tales constitute the most profound articulation of the human struggle to form
and maintain a civilizing process. They depict metaphorically the opportunities for human
adaptation to our environment and reflect the conflicts that arise when we fail to establish civilizing
codes commensurate with the self-interests of large groups within the human population. The more
we give in to base instincts—base in the sense of basic and depraved—the more criminal and
destructive we become. The more we learn to relate to other groups of people and realize that their
survival and the fulfillment of their interests is related to ours, the more we might construct social
codes that guarantee humane relationships. Fairy tales are uncanny because they tell us what we
need, and they unsettle us by showing what we lack and how we might compensate for lack.
Fairy tales hint of happiness. This hint, what the German philosopher of hope, Ernst Bloch, has
called the anticipatory illumination, has constituted their utopian appeal that has a strong moral
component to it. We do not know happiness, but we instinctively know and feel that it can be
created and perhaps even defined. Fairy tales map out possible ways to attain happiness, to expose
and resolve moral conflicts that have deep roots in our species. The effectiveness of fairy tales and
other forms of fantastic literature depends on the innovative manner in which we make the
information of the tales relevant for the listeners and receivers of the tales. As our environment
changes and evolves, so we change the media or modes of the tales to enable us to adapt to new
conditions and shape instincts that were not necessarily generated for the world that we have created
out of nature. This is perhaps one of the lessons that the best of fairy tales teach us: we are all misfit
for the world, and yet somehow we must all fit together.
Fairy tales have an extraordinary, uncanny power over us, and the French critic Georges Jean
locates this power on the conscious level in the way all good fairy tales aesthetically structure
and use fantastic and miraculous elements to prepare us for our everyday life. 2 Magic is used
paradoxically not to deceive us but to enlighten us. On an unconscious level, Jean believes that the
most startling fairy tales bring together subjective and assimilatory impulses with objective
intimations of a social setting that intrigue readers and allow for different interpretations according
to one’s ideology and belief.3 Ultimately, Jean argues that the fantastic power of fairy tales consists
in the uncanny way they provide a conduit into social reality. Yet, given the proscription of fairy-
tale discourse within a historically prescribed civilizing process, a more careful distinction must be
2 • Prologue

made between regressive and progressive aspects of the power of fairy tales in general to understand
the liberating potential of contemporary tales for all human beings. Sigmund Freud’s concept of the
“uncanny” and Ernst Bloch’s concept of “home” can enable us to grasp the constitutive elements
of the liberating impulse behind the fantastic and uncanny projections in fairy tales, whether they
be classical or experimental.
In his essay on the uncanny, Freud remarks that the word heimlich means that which is familiar
and agreeable and also that which is concealed and kept out of sight, and he concludes that heimlich
is a word the meaning of which develops in the direction of ambivalence, until it finally coincides
with its opposite, unheimlich or uncanny, literally “unlike home,” something unfamiliar.4 Through
a close study of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s fairy tale “The Sandman,” Freud argues that the uncanny or
unfamiliar (unheimlich) brings us in closer touch with the familiar (heimlich) because it touches
on emotional disturbances and returns us to repressed phases in our evolution:
If psychoanalytic theory is correct in maintaining that every effect belonging to an emotional
impulse, whatever its kind, is transformed, if it is repressed, into anxiety, then among
instances of frightening things there must be one class in which the frightening element can
be shown to be something repressed which recurs. This class of frightening things would then
constitute the uncanny; and it must be a matter of indifference whether what is uncanny was
itself originally frightening or whether it carried some other affect. In the second place, if
this is indeed the secret nature of the uncanny, we can understand why linguistic usage has
extended das Heimliche (“homely”) into its opposite, das Unheimliche; for this uncanny is in
reality nothing new or alien but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind
and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression. This reference
to the factor of repression enables us, furthermore, to understand Schelling’s definition of the
uncanny as something which ought to have remained hidden but has come to light.5
Freud insists that one must be extremely careful in using the category of the uncanny since not
everything that recalls repressed desires and surmounted modes of thinking belongs to the
prehistory of the individual and humanity and can be considered uncanny. In particular, Freud
mentions fairy tales as excluding the uncanny:
In fairy tales, for instance, the world of reality is left behind from the very start, and the
animistic system of beliefs is frankly accepted and adopted. Wish-fulfillments, secret powers,
omnipotence of thoughts, animation of inanimate objects, all the elements so common in
fairy stories, can exert no uncanny influence here; for, as we have learnt, that feeling can-
not arise unless there is a conflict of judgment as to whether things which have been
“surmounted” and are regarded as incredible may not, after all, be possible; and this problem
is eliminated from the outset by the postulates of the world of fairy tales.6
Although it is true that the uncanny becomes the familiar and the norm in the fairy tale because
the narrative perspective accepts it so totally, there is still room for another kind of uncanny
experience within the postulates and constructs of the fairy tale. That is, Freud’s argument must be
qualified regarding the narrative machinations of the fairy tale. However, I do not want to concern
myself with this point at the moment but would simply like to suggest that the uncanny plays
a significant role in the act of reading, hearing, or viewing a fairy tale. Using and modifying Freud’s
category of the uncanny, I want to argue that the very act of reading, hearing, and viewing a fairy
tale is an uncanny experience in that it separates the reader from the restrictions of reality from the
onset and makes the repressed unfamiliar familiar once again. Bruno Bettelheim has noted that
the fairy tale estranges the child from the real world and allows him or her to deal with deep-rooted
psychological problems and anxiety-provoking incidents to achieve autonomy.7 Whether this is true
 Prologue • 3

or not, that is, whether a fairy tale can actually provide the means for coping with ego disturbance,
as Bettelheim argues,8 remains to be seen. It is true, however, that once we begin reading, hearing,
or viewing a fairy tale, there is estrangement or separation from a familiar world inducing an
uncanny feeling which can be both frightening and comforting.
Actually the complete reversal of the real world has already taken place before we begin experi-
encing a fairy tale on the part of the storyteller, be it a writer or filmmaker. The storyteller invites
the listener/reader/viewer to repeat this uncanny experience. The active process of reading, hearing,
and viewing involves dislocating the reader/listener/viewer from his/her familiar setting and
then identifying with the dislocated protagonist so that a quest for the Heimische or real home can
begin. The fairy tale ignites a double quest for home: one occurs in the recipient’s mind and is
psychological and difficult to interpret, since the reception of an individual tale varies according
to the background and experience of the recipient. The second occurs within the tale itself and
indicates a socialization process and acquisition of values for participation in a society where the
protagonist has more power of determination. This second quest for home can be regressive or
progressive depending on the narrator’s stance vis-à-vis society. In both quests the notion of home
or Heimat, which is closely related etymologically to heimlich and unheimlich, retains a powerful
progressive attraction for readers of fairy tales. While the uncanny setting and motifs of the fairy
tale already open us up to the recurrence of primal experiences, we can move forward at the same
time because it opens us up to what Freud calls “unfulfilled but possible futures to which we still
like to cling in fantasy, all the strivings of the ego which adverse external circumstances have
crushed, and all our suppressed acts of volition which nourish in us the illusion of Free Will.”9
Obviously, Freud would not condone clinging to our fantasies in reality. Yet Bloch would argue
that some are important to cultivate and defend since they represent our radical or revolutionary urge
to restructure society so that we can finally achieve home. Dreaming which stands still bodes no good:
But if it becomes a dreaming ahead, then its cause appears quite differently and excitingly
alive. The dim and weakening features, which may be characteristic of mere yearning,
disappear; and then yearning can show what it really is able to accomplish. It is the way of the
world to counsel men to adjust to the world’s pressures, and they have learned this lesson;
only their wishes and dreams will not hearken to it. In this respect virtually all human beings
are futuristic; they transcend their past life, and to the degree that they are satisfied, they think
they deserve a better life (even though this may be pictured in a banal and egotistic way), and
regard the inadequacy of their lot as a barrier, and not just as the way of the world.
To this extent, the most private and ignorant wishful thinking is to be preferred to any
mindless goose-stepping; for wishful thinking is capable of revolutionary awareness, and can
enter the chariot of history without necessarily abandoning in the process the good content
of dreams.10
What Bloch means by the good content of dreams is often the projected fantasy and action
of fairy tales with a forward and liberating look: human beings in an upright posture who strive
for an autonomous existence and non-alienating setting which allow for democratic cooperation
and humane consideration. Real history which involves independent human self-determination
cannot begin as long as there is exploitation and enslavement of humans by other humans. The
active struggle against unjust and barbaric conditions in the world leads to home, or utopia, a place
nobody has known but which represents humankind coming into its own:
The true genesis is not at the beginning, but at the end, and it starts to begin only when society
and existence become radical: that is, comprehend their own roots. But the root of history is
the working, creating man, who rebuilds and transforms the given circumstances of the
4 • Prologue

world. Once man has comprehended himself and has established his own domain in real
democracy, without depersonalization and alienation, something arises in the world which
all men have glimpsed in childhood: a place and a state in which no one has yet been. And the
name of this something is home or homeland.11
Philosophically speaking, then, the real return home or recurrence of the uncanny is a move forward
to what has been repressed and never fulfilled. The narrative pattern in most fairy tales involves the
reconstitution of home on a new plane, and this accounts for the power of its appeal to both children
and adults.
In Bloch’s two major essays on fairy tales, “Das Märchen geht selber in Zeit” (“The Fairy Tale
Moves on its Own in Time”) and “Bessere Luftschlösser in Jahrmarkt und Zirkus, in Märchen und
Kolportage” (“Better Castles in the Air in Fair and Circus, in the Fairy Tale and Popular Books”),12
Bloch is concerned with the manner in which the hero and the aesthetic constructs of the tale
illuminate the way to overcome oppression. He focuses on the way the underdog, the small person,
uses his or her wits not only to survive but to live a better life. Bloch insists that there is good reason
for the timelessness of traditional fairy tales,
Not only does the fairy tale remain as fresh as longing and love, but the demonically evil,
which is abundant in the fairy tale, is still seen at work here in the present, and the happiness
of “once upon a time,” which is even more abundant, still affects our visions of the future.13
It is not only the timeless aspect of traditional fairy tales that interests Bloch, but also the way
they are modernized, mediated by film, and appeal to all classes and age groups in society. Instead
of demeaning popular culture and common appeal, Bloch endeavors to explore the adventure
novels, modern romances, comics, circuses, country fairs, and the like. He refuses to make simplistic
qualitative judgments of high and low art forms, rather he seeks to grasp the driving utopian impulse
in the production and reception of artworks for mass audiences. Time and again he focuses on fairy
tales as indications of paths to be taken in reality.
What is significant about such kinds of “modern fairy tales” is that it is reason itself which
leads to the wish projections of the old fairy tale and serves them. Again what proves itself is
a harmony with courage and cunning, as that earliest kind of enlightenment which already
characterizes “Hansel and Gretel”: consider yourself as born free and entitled to be totally
happy, dare to make use of your power of reasoning, look upon the outcome of things as
friendly. These are the genuine maxims of fairy tales, and fortunately for us they not only
appear in the past but in the now.14
Bloch and Freud set the general parameters for helping us understand how our longing for home,
which is discomforting and comforting, draws us to folk and fairy tales, whether they be told,
printed, or filmed. As we shall see, fairy-tale films continue to provide clues and reveal why we are
attracted to the uncanny. As part of the culture industry, fairy-tale films can both obfuscate and
illuminate the paths we must take to learn from one another and to learn what Bloch calls our
ultimate goal—to walk with an upright posture.
I
 1
Filmic Adaptation and Appropriation
of the Fairy Tale

So we need to find a way of discussing adaptation and appropriation that will

register influence but not assume it is a stranglehold, that will see possibility not
prescription authored by what comes before, authored by our inheritance, both
literary and genetic. The art of adaptation and appropriation has a potent
influence and shaping effect in its own right. . . . No appropriation can be
achieved without impacting upon and altering in some way the text which
inspired the adaptation. So influential, indeed, have some appropriations
become that in many instances they now define our first experiences or
encounters with their precursor work of art.
Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation15

I don’t like adaptations. I think it’s very bad to make an adaptation. Perhaps,
what I make is very bad, but I don’t make adaptations. . . . On the other hand
I have my own stories to tell. I am inspired by those roughly told anonymous
tales, which are often poorly composed. I vamp the tales of folklore, and I
make out of them what I want. I utilize them like ore from a mine, and I try to
make jewels out of them. But I don’t at all respect the ore of the miners. I think
those people told tales in their time. Today, it’s me who’s the storyteller, and
I do what I want with the heritage. I cite whatever has inspired me, but they are
my tales. They are my guts, my heart, and all the rest.
Michel Ocelot, Interview with Christine Gudin16

Although numerous books have been written about the filmic adaptation of literary works, mainly
novels and plays, the term adaptation in its strict sense does not fully capture how filmmakers have
used and re-created fairy tales and folk tales for the cinema. As Robert Stam, one of the foremost
scholars of film studies, remarks,
In the case of filmic adaptations of novels, to sum up what has been argued thus far, source-
novel hypotexts are transformed by a complex series of operations: selection, amplification,
8 • Part I

concretization, actualization, critique, extrapolation, popularization, reaccentuation, trans-

culturalization. The source novel, in this sense, can be seen as a situated utterance, produced
in one medium and in one historical and social context, and later transformed into another,
equally situated utterance produced in a different context and relayed through a different
medium. The source text forms a dense informational network, a series of verbal cues which
the adapting film text can then selectively take up, amplify, ignore, subvert or transform.17
Despite numerous adaptations of source fairy-tale texts, the majority of filmmakers have not
relied upon a single text as hypotext to adapt a fairy tale. The hypotext is generally considered the
pre-existing text upon which a film or hypertext is based. But it is difficult to find conclusive
evidence that filmmakers studiously labor over a particular fairy-tale text, interpret it, and create a
storyboard or a screenplay on which they base their films. On the other hand, it is clear that the
filmmakers know some variant or variants of a fairy tale either after having re-read it, heard it, seen
it in a book, viewed it as a film, or having recalled it from their childhood memories. Sometimes
filmmakers do reflect upon a single text, but when a storyboard or screenplay for the film is con-
ceived and created, other artists who work on the film will contribute their interpretations, perhaps
based on their other readings, hearings, viewings, or memories, and thus, the story keeps changing
because the hypotext is more a notion than anything else, somewhat like a meme carried about in
our brains. Thus, as hypotext, the fairy tale is also a flexible or fluid text, or it consists of several
variants of a tale type.
Whatever the case may be, there is no authoritative hypotext or Urtext upon which a filmmaker
does or can rely, and this is because literary fairy tales stem from oral folk tales and have a long
history of variation and dissemination in an oral tradition up through the present. Many literary
fairy tales are already adaptations because they are translations that comprise some kind of adap-
tation in language and references to different cultural contexts. We need only think of Perrault’s
“French” tales, the Grimms’ “German” tales, and Andersen’s “Danish” tales from different
centuries, not to mention the “Italian” tales of Straparola and Basile. They stem largely from tales
told in dialect, are not purely French, German, Danish, or Italian, and have been adapted for small
educated audiences. Numerous classic fairy tales and popular folk tales from the oral tradition
have been translated, illustrated, and spread in diverse ways, but when published, they become
so-called fixed texts—but only seemingly. This is also true of the American and British printed texts
of fairy tales. The roots of most classical fairy tales in English begin with the European oral tradition
of storytelling that led to the formation of the literary genre in the West.
The fairy tale as genre encompasses not only literary texts, but also operas, songs, poems,
advertisements, cartoons, comic strips, graphic novels, comic books, ballets, dramas, radio plays,
and hypertexts on television and the Internet and continues to be influenced by diverse forms of the
oral tradition. In the case of classical fairy tales such as “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Sleeping Beauty,”
or “Cinderella,” the filmmaker may base his or her adaptation on a text by Charles Perrault, or the
Brothers Grimm, or on a fusion of their texts. The screenplay may also simply derive from the
memory of a tale. The filmic adaptation of a fairy tale follows no clear-cut rules except those long
established by storytellers who appropriated what they heard and told stories to suit themselves and
their listeners. And their styles and narrative representations were diverse and particular.
What then is a fairy-tale film if it isn’t strictly speaking an adaptation of a particular literary text?
To begin with, we must recognize that there are various types of fairy-tale films that can be
categorized according to the cinematic techniques used: a silent black-and-white film shot with a
fixed camera; the drawings, cells, puppets of animated films; the acting of live-action films; the
mixed media of live-action/animated films; clay and wooden puppet films; paper-cut animated
films; faux-historical films; documentary films of fairy-tale authors; and all kinds of digital films.
 Filmic Adaptation and Appropriation • 9

The technologies determine the extent to which a filmmaker can elaborate and expand upon a
particular fairy tale or fairy-tale motifs and themes. The films are often based on an oral version, a
literary text of a well-known tale, and another fairy-tale film and adapted to accentuate the ideas of
the filmmaker and his or her collaborators. The fairy-tale source can also be an original screenplay
or text conceived by writers in collaboration with the filmmaker and other artists. The fairy-tale film
can be a remake of another fairy-tale film or contain intertextual references to other films. Some
other distinctions can be made with regard to adaptation if there is a definite or explicit source of
some kind: the fairy tale can be transformed into a musical as is the case with most Disney fairy-tale
films beginning with Snow White in 1937, or it can be adapted from a Broadway musical such as
James Lapine’s and Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods (1991), a collage of fairy tales, formed to
produce a singular tragic–comic tale.There are also filmic adaptations of performances of ballets
such as Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty or The Nutcracker or of fairy-tale operas such as Rossini’s
Cenerentola or Dvořák’s Russalka. Sometimes Humperdinck’s music for his opera Hansel and Gretel,
based on a religious libretto of the Grimms’ text written by Humperdinck’s sister, is used as
background music for a modern adaptation of the text as in the case of the Canon production,
Hansel and Gretel, and sometimes the opera is performed and filmed. One fairy tale may serve as
the frame for others, as is the case with the Russian Boris Rytsarev’s adaptation of Hans Christian
Andersen’s The Princess on the Pea (1976), which frames three other Andersen tales. There are also
numerous adaptations of fairy-tale novels such as A. S. Byatt’s Possession or Gregory Maguire’s The
Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister. TV cinematic productions have abounded such as the popular
series Beauty and the Beast, which takes place in New York City during the 1980s, or Jim Henson’s
remarkable montage/collage films in the series titled The Storyteller; animated cartoons for television
such as The Muppets fairy tales or the fractured fairy tales of Rocky and Bullwinkle maintain the
early cinematic cartoon tradition of the 1930s, while other animated series such as The Simpsons
and Family Guy often contain references to fairy tales or create pastiches and parodies. Some fairy-
tale films such as Shelley Duvall’s Faerie Tale Theatre productions or Tom Davenport’s Appalachian
adaptations of the Grimms’ tales have been made as videocassettes and DVDs for schools and
private showings in homes; short films, animation and live-action, have been produced for YouTube
on the Internet or for Atom films.
A fairy-tale film is any kind of cinematic representation recorded on film, on videotape, or in
digital form that employs motifs, characters, and plots generally found in the oral and literary genre
of the fairy tale, to re-create a known tale or to create and realize cinematically an original screen-
play with recognizable features of a fairy tale. Like any artistic genre that began in the oral tradition,
the fairy tale has evolved from a print genre in constant commerce with oral tales and other art and
commercial forms of fairy tales to be embraced by the technology of film. The fairy tale as genre is
not “pure” and does not adhere to set rules and conventions. There is nothing essential about it.
However, there are distinctive qualities, motifs, traits, aspects, topoi, plots, characters, and features
that constitute its generic type either as oral narrative, literary text, or film. As Jessica Tiffin notes
in her significant book, Marvelous Geometry: Narrative and Metafiction in Modern Fairy Tale,
By identifying fairy tale by texture, I am thus invoking a range of characteristics which rely
heavily on clean lines, deliberate patterning and a geometry of structure and motif, but also
include style, voice, and some aspects of content and mimetic approach. This attribute of
texture, rather than language or motif, renders a fairy tale intrinsically familiar and
identifiable even through literary manipulation, and it is precisely this quality of identifiability
which allows the form to provide such a rich ground for metafictional play.18
While maintaining these distinct characteristics, the fairy tale also borrows from other genres
and incorporates motifs and techniques from other art forms to adapt to cultural expectations and
10 • Part I

changing conditions in the film industry. The fairy-tale film is only one example of how the genre
of the fairy tale has adapted to technological changes of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
As human beings have sought to adapt to changing environments over the centuries, they have
adapted their tales. To understand what adaptation means in a broader sense, we must think of
other creative transformative processes that we employ such as appropriation, expropriation,
translation, concretization, amplification, extrapolation, and reaccentuation.19 Once again Stam is
helpful in clarifying the many techniques of transformation and adaptation when he discusses the
filmic adaptation of a novel:
The filmic adaptation of a novel performs these transformations according to the protocols
of a distinct medium, absorbing and altering the available genres and the intertexts through
the grids of ambient discourses and ideologies, and as mediated by a series of filters: studio
style, ideological fashion, political and economic constraints, auteurist predilections, charis-
matic stars, cultural values, and so forth. An adaptation consists in an interesting reading
of a novel and the circumstantially shaped “writing” of a film. The filmic hypertext, in
this sense, is transformational almost in the Chomskian sense of a “generative grammar” of
adaptation, with the difference that these cross-media operations are infinitely more
unpredictable and multifarious than they would be were it a matter of “natural language.”
Adaptations redistribute energies and intensities, provoke flows and displacements; the
linguistic energy of literary writing turns into the audio-visual-kinetic-performative energy
of the adaptation in an amorous exchange of textual fluids.20
A filmic adaptation in Stam’s sense is the artistic and technical mode employed by the filmmaker to
change and re-create a known or popular text. Whatever mode used, the adaptation always involves
an expropriation and an appropriation, whether we are discussing novels or fairy tales. Both words,
expropriation and appropriation, stem from the medieval Latin adjectives propre or proper indicat-
ing something that is peculiar, particular, belonging to, and appropriate. The nouns “property”
and “propriety” are closely connected to notions of expropriation (to take something away) and
appropriation (to make something foreign one’s own). An oral folk tale, specifically a wonder tale,
filled with magical and miraculous transformation, was at one time the “property” of a teller who
told a proper tale to suit an appropriate occasion. It was also “proper” to his/her circumstances—
cultural, social, pedagogical and belonged with the storyteller. This is still the case today, but it is more
than likely that the oral tale, if it becomes popular, will be expropriated and appropriated by others
to become a literary fairy tale. Writing and print culture have altered the effervescent “pristine”
orality in a major way, and new media technologies have also transformed print culture in radical
ways so that it is almost impossible today to hear or read a tale without already having viewed and
heard it through the media of television, cinema, and the Internet. As Walter Ong has pointed out in
his now “classical” study, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word,
Writing . . . is a particularly pre-emptive and imperialist activity that tends to assimilate other
things to itself even without the aid of etymologies. Though words are grounded in oral
speech, writing tyrannically locks them into a visual field forever. . . . This is to say that a
literate person cannot fully recover a sense of what the word is to purely oral people. In view
of this pre-emptiveness of literacy, it appears quite impossible to use the term “literature” to
include oral tradition and performance without subtly but irremediably reducing these
somehow to variants of writing.21
In view of the “pre-emptive and imperialist activity” of writing, it is necessary to emphasize the
oral roots of fairy tales and their memetic power that continues to leave traces on our minds. The
process of adapting a fairy tale for the screen has a long, profound, and complicated history that
 Filmic Adaptation and Appropriation • 11

involves taking a tale out of its original socio-cultural context, literally to dispossess the owners of
the tale and then to put one’s own mark on it: expropriate to appropriate. For instance, an oral tale
that originally had no title, as was the case with “Little Red Riding Hood,” was probably a tale told
in a French or Italian dialect in the seventeenth century by women about a girl who must demon-
strate her prowess when confronted by a werewolf or wolf so that she can become initiated into a
sewing society. In 1697, Charles Perrault, who may have heard some version of this oral tale from
a wet nurse or governess, wrote this tale down in cultivated French, gave it a title, “Le Petit Chaperon
Rouge,” and placed an emphasis on the naiveté or stupidity of a girl who is violated by a wolf
and blamed for her own violation. This tale circulated in print and was constantly reprinted and
translated into numerous different languages. It also continued to be disseminated in some form
in the oral tradition or re-entered the oral tradition in a variant of Perrault’s text, but always in
different forms. Once expropriated it was freed to become appropriated in innumerable
unimaginable ways up through the present. In his ironic play, The Romance of Little Red Riding Hood
(1862), Alphonse Daudet has poor Red Riding Hood sum up her treatment, that is, sum up the
process of expropriation/appropriation of the tale, in a most amusing and appropriate manner
when she addresses the pompous teacher Polonius:
I want you to know, monsieur, that I’ve been devoured an infinite number of times, and each
time it is my fault. There you have it! Four thousand years that I’ve had the same accident,
four thousand years that I am revived, four thousand years, by an incredible fatality, I’m going
to put myself inevitably in the paws of the wolf. What do you want? I always die very young,
and when I return to the world, I only have a vague memory of my previous existences, very
vague. . . . Oh, how interesting it would be to write and peruse that Story of Red Riding Hood
in all the centuries! Monsieur Perrault has sketched but only one chapter. How fortunate is he
who will write the others.22
Indeed, as I shall demonstrate in the chapter on “Little Red Riding Hood,” many writers and
artists have depicted Red Riding Hood’s destiny since 1697 to form a fairy-tale discourse about
this singular story up through the present and throughout the world. While violence may be done
to the oral or literary source of a fairy tale when it is expropriated and written down or filmed in
a different manner—folklorists have often talked about the contamination of a tale, film critics
about fidelity to the text—the tale is preserved in some manner and in many cases enriched. If the
hypotext or source text is oral, it has been preserved and can become part of a documented cultural
heritage, but it is done, to be sure, according to the norms of the written language in different socio-
cultural contexts. Even if it has been somewhat “violated,” it has nevertheless been preserved as
history. If the hypotext is a piece of writing by a particular author, it has often been transformed
to address concerns of a different audience in a different socio-cultural context. Of course, it can be
banalized and distorted, depending on the emphasis of the author/filmmaker who appropriates the
hypotext.
Appropriation always involves translation of some kind. The appropriator or adapter of a source
or hypotext must first interpret and translate the meaning of a story that is not of his or her own
making. Adaptation always involves remaking. Once a fairy tale has been appropriated, the appro-
priated text necessitates translation, that is, the new hypotext will be transmitted to an audience with
a new accentuation that addresses audience expectations. Fidelity to a so-called original text or
hypotext is irrelevant because, first, it is impossible to be true to any source or text and, second, the
entire purpose of adaptation is to renew, re-create, and re-present a commonly shared tale from
one’s own perspective. Every filmic adaptation of a fairy tale is a re-creation to be judged on its own
merits and, of course, within the context of a critical standards and position-taking by artists, critics,
and audiences in a given culture and period.
12 • Part I

However, translation also brings with it a certain ethical responsibility to the source, hypotext,
and audience. If a filmmaker claims or owns up to the fact that he or she is adapting a story that
does not belong to him or her, he or she is obliged, in my opinion, to treat the tale as he or she would
like to be treated, that is, interpreted and understood on some level. Even if a filmmaker is not
adapting a fairy-tale source text or any hypotext, he is always translating something other to an
implied audience, and he is translating himself at the same time.
In his insightful essay, “On Translating a Person,” Adam Phillips, the innovative British psycho-
analyst, makes the interesting comment that “the translator uses the text to reveal something about
himself; but it depends upon there being something there to be faithful to. The comfort of the text
is that it is there, and that it is as it is. The words themselves don’t change around.”23 Obviously,
there are many different questions one can ask about the translator to determine what his or her
relationship is to the text, whether the text be fictitious, historical, religious, and so on. As I have
already indicated in the case of the fairy tale, the text can actually be the spoken word, a folk tale,
or it might be a literary tale written down a few hundred years ago or a few years ago. The first
question to ask is why a filmmaker as translator chooses to translate a particular tale or collection
of tales. Why does a teller of fairy tales replicate or re-create a tale? Why does a filmmaker feel
impelled to create his or her fairy-tale film based on all sorts of tales that he or she has read or
viewed? For the love of art? For money? To make the tale more available to audiences unfamiliar
with the tale? Out of personal desire because the tale appeals to the translator and says something
relevant about him or her that the translator wants to communicate to other people? Does
the translator ever know his or her real motive? Can we? Is there an unconscious element of appeal
that needs exploring and arises through translation? For instance, in the case of the Brothers Grimm,
they began collecting the tales to help the poet Clemens Brentano, who wanted to produce a
collection of folk tales after he had published a book of folk songs with his friend Achim von Arnim.
Only after they began collecting and translating the tales into high German, for they were generally
spoken in a regional dialect, and only after Brentano lost interest in the project did they realize the
historical value of the tales that said something about themselves and their attachment to their
family, friends, and German culture.
Translation is always concerned with our conscious and unconscious ties to the past and the
present. However, the past is problematical because we both need it and need to transcend it. We
must recognize its anachronistic features that may weigh upon us, and we must work through them
and their ramifications to start anew. The present has no essential meaning without our conscious
reflection and knowledge of the past. Without dealing with the past we cannot move forward. Adam
Phillips cites both Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, who believed that the past weighs like a nightmare
on the minds of the living.
Clearly the dead are never quite dead enough, but a nightmare, of course, wakes the sleeper
up. Freud would say, it wakes the dreamer up with something from the past, the repre-
sentation of which—the language of which—the dreamer cannot bear. He needs to return to
so-called reality in order not to be overwhelmed himself; in order not to die. For Freud, in a
sense, as for Marx, the past is both a nightmare from which we must awaken, but it is also our
only resource. It is literally where we get our language from, where we learn it. To learn a
language is to learn a history, and to acquire a medium from the past in which to reconstruct
the past.24
Indeed, dreams need translation just as the past needs it. Translation can be an awakening and a
means to make use of the past for a better life. The translator is compelled to step back into the past
and step away from it. He or she appropriates a past text or tale of times past so it can be presented
anew and readers can have a new look at what has occurred. In discussing what makes for a relevant
 Filmic Adaptation and Appropriation • 13

translation, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida notes that a key to understanding the process
of translation is the Hegelian notion of sublation or Aufhebung, which he translates in French as
relève.
Without plunging us deeply into the issues, I must at least recall that the movement of
Aufhebung, the process of establishing relevance, is always in Hegel a dialectical movement
of interiorization, interiorizing memory (Erinnerung) and sublimating spiritualization. It is
also translation25 . . . What the translation with the word “relevant” also demonstrates, in an
exemplary fashion, is that every translation should be relevant by vocation. It would thus
guarantee the survival of the body of the original survival in the double sense that Benjamin
gives it in “The Task of the Translator,” fortleben and überleben: prolonged life, continuous
life, living on, but also life after death.26
Understanding a relevant translation as sublation or Aufhebung is crucial if we are to grasp how
the process of translation works and what distinguishes a translation that brings about a relative
understanding between source text and implied reader and a translation that prevents any under-
standing whatsoever and is self-serving. A relevant translation can provide a different perspective
on history and on one’s relationship to it in the present because it both negates certain anachronistic
aspects of the source text and maintains usable aspects while forming a synthetic work which
will endure as long as people in a particular culture need it. In some respects, translation is con-
nected to evolution: translating is making something fit, and we re-translate something when older
translations no longer fit.
Making a film fit a fairy tale and fit for audiences is a task that no filmmaker as translator can
fulfill. This is the conclusion that Paul Ricoeur reaches in his short book, On Translation. Ricoeur
claims that the translator can only find happiness when he “acknowledges and assumes the
irreducibility of the pair, the peculiar and the foreign.”27
Once the translator recognizes that there will always be a loss because he cannot capture the
absolute meaning of a foreign text but can only provide an equivalence without adequacy, he can
take pleasure in what Ricoeur calls “linguistic hospitality,” “where the pleasure of dwelling in the
other’s language is balanced by the pleasure of receiving the foreign word at home, in one’s own
welcoming house.”28 By providing linguistic hospitality, the translator confirms the unique identity
of the foreign text while showing signs of wanting to come to terms with the fact that every
translation is unfinished, just as every adaptation is unfinished and must be left to others to continue
to find mutual understanding. In his introduction to Ricoeur’s work, Richard Kearney writes,
it is only when we translate the wounds of strangers into our own language that healing and
reconciliation can take place. This is ultimately what Ricoeur intends when he describes the
ethics of translation as an interlinguistic hospitality. The world is made up of a plurality of
human beings, cultures, tongues. Humanity exists in the plural mode. Which means that any
legitimate form of universality must always—if the hermeneutic model of translation is
observed—find its equivalent plurality. The creative tension between the universal and
the plural ensures that the task of translation is an endless one, a work of tireless memory and
mourning, of appropriation and disappropriation, of taking up and letting go, of expressing
oneself and welcoming others.29
Earlier in the introduction Kearney maintains that “the work of translation might thus be said
to carry a double duty: to expropriate oneself as one appropriates the other.”30 This is an interesting
notion when one considers the labor of the filmmaker seeking to make something his own while
taking away or perhaps giving away something of his own, expropriating what one has appropriated
to share with others, to share in a struggle of understanding.
14 • Part I

The struggle to understand human experiences through the filmic adaptation, translation, and
appropriation of a fairy tale, whether it be oral or literary, stamps, in my opinion, the quality of the
fairy-tale film. There can be no happy end in the best of fairy-tale films even if there is a happy end.
The determination of its quality as a work of art is based on the artistic unraveling of our dilemma
when we try to translate each other or translate a story. It must always be unfinished business or an
unsuccessful struggle—a wisp of truth that can never be marked down for eternity. And yet, despite
the “failure,” there is a sweet relish, as if we can move closer not only to understanding something
other than ourselves, but also ourselves.
Fairy-tale films transcend adaptation understood in a strict sense because they are all about our
need to appropriate story to tell our own stories. In his essay, “Neo-Structuralist Narratology and
the Functions of Filmic Storytelling,” David Bordwell notes,
a formal/functionalist approach [to film narrative] can usefully start from the premise that a
film operates as a whole, in its individual parts playing determinate roles in a larger pattern.
Recognizing that pattern and its possible functions also presupposes relations to broader
historical norms. That is, a functionalist theory encourages us to explore functions and
holistic patterns across a body of films. Within these contexts individual “figures” may fulfill
conventional or unconventional purposes.31
While I shall not take a “formal/functionalist” approach to study the fairy-tale film, I am very much
concerned in tracing holistic patterns in the films as they embody discourses about very particular
fairy tales such as “Cinderella” or “Snow White” and reveal how deeply embedded these stories are
in diverse cultures throughout the world. The body of fairy-tale films is vast, and even those films
that may focus on, let us say, “Hansel and Gretel,” can also be related to other fairy-tale films such
as “Tom Thumb,” because of the thematic issue of child abuse. Or, these films may function as
horror films and enter into a discourse with other genres of fairy tales. Much will depend, as
Bordwell points out, on the effect that the filmmaker seeks to induce.
When a filmmaker chooses to adapt and re-create a fairy tale or create an “original” film using
recognizable fairy-tale characters, motifs, and topoi, he or she has several purposes, but I believe
that the most important one in regard to fairy tales is to participate in discursive patterns “across a
body of films” and to make a mark of some kind that will alter our view of the fairy tale, quite often
to address social and political issues in the filmmaker’s society and culture, or to speak to common
socio-genetic and psychological phenomena in the civilizing process. It is over and through the
body of the fairy tale that filmmakers and their crews engage with audiences, and active audiences
engage with the cinematic fairy tale and the filmmakers. Fairy tales are perhaps the most vital staple
in filmmaking, for we learn to communicate with them at a very early age. They are at the source
of human cognition. If we were to study the sources of the narratives in thousands of films through-
out the world, we would find that they are predicated on the narrative structure and patterns of
different types of fairy tales. It is part of human nature that we appropriate and expropriate them,
that we adapt and translate them, that we remake all that has been remade. We rely on cultural
patterns of different kinds to know the world. I believe that, deep down, every filmmaker who
decides to create fairy-tale films wants to be like Michel Ocelot and to make the tales his guts, heart,
and everything else. And it is also true for those filmmakers, struck by the magic of a particular fairy
tale, who feel the need to adapt and appropriate the tale that resonates within them.
But this is not the driving purpose behind all filmmakers. Many want to and have adapted and
appropriated the fairy tale to use it as vehicle to celebrate his or her virtuosity, to make money,
and to obtain power and fame. Some like Walt Disney sought to monopolize fairy-tale films so he
would be recognized as a kind of master storyteller. Fortunately, there are numerous fairy-tale
filmmakers who have contested the role of Disney and have revealed that the emperor is wearing no
 Filmic Adaptation and Appropriation • 15

clothes, or put another way, that he is wearing flimsy clothes and has banalized the fairy tale with
empty conventions. The body of films forming the frame of the fairy-tale film discourse is a body
of conflicts. At the heart of all the conflicts are debates about the nature of storytelling and narrative,
about the value and significance of human communication. As I shall indicate in the last chapter,
the debate about fairy-tale films and storytelling is also a conflict that touches children as moral
arbiters. Many fairy-tale filmmakers raise the question whether narrative has been taken away from
children or how children can use the fairy tale to gain a sense of identity in dark times. It appears
that these fairy-tale filmmakers are returning to the great oral tradition and encouraging spectators
to adjust their vision and to learn to pierce the society of the spectacle and to tell their own tales. It
is through what I call “de-Disneyfied” fairy-tale films that we learn to see reality for what it is.
In my opinion reality can best be understood paradoxically through artificiality, and in the case
of the metaphorical fairy-tale film, we learn to view ourselves in artificially arranged images anew.
The fairy tale is cinematically remade so that we can enter into particular and peculiar discourses
that touch on audience concerns. Moreover, fairy-tale films are often remakes of other fairy-tale
films built on discursive networks. There is an assumption in the fairy-tale remake that the “source”
fairy-tale film is anachronistic or failed to interpret the source fairy tale sufficiently. There appears
to be some lack or failure in the source fairy-tale film, which needs to be adapted and appropriated.
The topic of fairy-tale remakes is very complex and raises a number of questions. In his highly
significant work on film remakes, Constantine Verevis remarks,
While there sometimes seems sufficient semantic and syntactic evidence to suggest that
remakes are textual structures, film remaking depends, too (as does film genre), “on the
existence of audience activity”, not only prior knowledge of previous texts and intertextual
relationships, but an understanding of broader generic structures and categories. In addition
to this, film remaking is both enabled and limited by a series of historically specific insti-
tutional factors, such as copyright law, canon formation, and film reviewing which are
essential to the existence and maintenance—to the “discursivation”—of the film remake.
In these ways, film remaking is not simply quality of texts or viewers, but the secondary result
of broader discursive activity.32
Verevis makes clear, in agreement with Rick Altman,33 that film genres and remakes “depend on
a network of historically variable relationships.”34 The genre of the fairy-tale film is itself part of the
larger genre of the oral/literary fairy tale, and it is only by recognizing and tracing the extraordinary
relations and discourses within the larger genre that we can begin to fathom the profound cultural
meanings of fairy-tale films. We are always in the process of making and remaking ourselves, and
in many respects, the making and remaking of fairy tales charts our struggles to be at home with
ourselves and at home with the cultures that affect us. Filmmakers like the best of storytellers have
sensed that “once upon a time” is a utopian concept, and the best of their fairy-tale films are remakes
that open up alternative possibilities to form our own stories.
 2
De-Disneyfying Disney: Notes on the
Development of the Fairy-Tale Film

Indeed, there was something arrogant about the way the studio took over these
works [Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan]. Grist for a mighty mill, they were,
in the ineffable Hollywood term, “properties” to do with as the proprietor of
the machine would. You could throw jarring popular songs into the brew, you
could gag them up, you could sentimentalize them. You had, in short, no
obligation to the originals or to the cultural tradition they represented. In fact,
when it came to billing, J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan somehow became Walt
Disney’s Peter Pan, and Lewis Carroll’s Alice became Walt Disney’s Alice. It
could be argued that this was a true reflection of what happened to the works
in the process of getting to the screen, but the egotism that insists on making
another man’s work your own through wanton tampering and by advertising
claim is not an attractive form of egotism, however it is rationalized. And this
kind of annexation was to be a constant in the later life of Disney. The only
defense that one can enter for him is that of invincible ignorance: he really
didn’t see what he was doing, didn’t know how some people could be offended
by it, and certainly could not see that what was basically at fault was his
insistence that there was only one true style for the animated film—his style.
Richard Schickel, The Disney Version35

As the studio most associated with manufacturing “family entertainment,”

Disney was a master at fostering and responding to this legitimating ide-
ology of domestic amelioration. Certainly the theme pervades all of Disney’s
enterprises from Snow White on, but the insistence on the definition and
containment of the adolescent woman is nowhere stronger and nowhere more
specifically yet subtly articulated than in Peter Pan. Feminists like Chodorow
attribute this attitude to the general condition of patriarchy: ‘Men’s location
in the public sphere, then, defines society itself as masculine. It gives men
power to create and enforce institutions of social and political control, impor-
tant among these to control marriage as an institution that both expresses
 De-Disneyfying Disney • 17

men’s rights in women’s sexual and reproductive capacities and reinforces

these rights.’ Few would question that Disney intended the studio to function
as just such a controlling institution. But the more historically interesting
question is, Why did this unusually strong insistence occur when it did?
Donald Crafton, “The Last Night in the Nursery:
Walt Disney’s Peter Pan”36

Although one could (and perhaps should) consider Georges Méliès, who produced highly inno-
vative féeries at the end of the nineteenth century, as the founder and pioneer of the fairy-tale film,
it is Walt Disney who became king of the fairy-tale films in the twentieth century, and though dead,
his ghost still sits on the throne and rules the realm. Not only did Disney dominate the field of
animated fairy-tale films, but many if not most of his live-action films followed the format that he
developed for his animated films—a conventional reconciliation of conflicts and contradictions
that engenders an illusion of happiness, security, and utopianism. Naturally, Disney did not do
this by himself. He hired and organized gifted artists, technicians, and collaborators, not unlike
the industrious virtuous seven dwarfs, who adapted fairy tales for the cinema by creating extra-
ordinary cartoons and also developed the animated feature fairy-tale film in Disney’s name so that
his productions effaced the names of Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian
Andersen, and Collodi and became synonymous with the term fairy tale. There is scarcely an adult
or child born in the twentieth century who, in the western world, has not been exposed to a Disney
fairy-tale film or artifact. Our contemporary concept and image of a fairy tale have been shaped
and standardized by Disney so efficiently through the mechanisms of the culture industry that
our notions of happiness and utopia are and continue to be filtered through a Disney lens even if
it is myopic. It seems that myopia has come to dominate both reality and utopia, thanks to
Disneyfication, or that we are conditioned to view reality and fairy tales through a myopic pseudo-
utopian lens.
Despite the domination of the fairy-tale film by the Disney Corporation, however, it would be
misleading to consider the Disney productions as constituting a monopoly of fairy-tale films, or that
they have totally twisted our views of reality and utopia, for there have always been competing films
that offer a different vision of fairy tales and social conditions. As Pierre Bourdieu has made
abundantly clear in The Field of Cultural Production, culture is constituted by different fields of
production in which conflicting forces enter into a dialogue, often antagonistic, and seek to gain
proper recognition and a stronghold for their views and beliefs in the field, and though the Disney
fairy-tale films have been dominant throughout the twentieth century, they have never been without
opposition. In fact, with the rise of filmmakers like Hayao Miyazaki, Michel Ocelot, Jan Svankmajer,
Michael Sporn, David Kaplan, Matthew Bright, Guillermo del Toro, Tim Burton, Tarsem Singh,
Anna Melikyan, Yim Pil-Sung, and many others in the late twentieth and early twenty-first
centuries, it appears that the fairy-tale film may eventually become de-Disneyfied. But before I
explain what I mean by de-Disneyfication, I want to comment on the evolution of the fairy tale from
the oral to the cinematic, how this genre has expanded and morphed into the dominant form of
fairy-tale film, and why the conflict in the cultural field of cinematic production is so significant.

Theses
1) The fairy tale began hundreds if not thousands of years ago as an oral form of storytelling created
by adults, who told all kinds of tales in diverse settings in which adults determined the forms and
contents. They told tales to communicate important information, and metaphor was highly
significant in disseminating knowledge. The fairy tale was never a genre intended for children—and
18 • Part I

it is still not a genre for children. With the advent of the printing press in the fifteenth century,
writers gradually began to record and publish the oral forms of storytelling in print directed mainly
at adult reading audiences. Adults have never stopped reading, producing, re-inventing, and
experimenting with fairy tales.
2) It was not until the nineteenth century that the fairy tale was cultivated as genre and social
institution for children in the western world and mainly for children of the upper classes. Notions
of elitism and Christian meritocracy, along with the medieval notion of “might makes right,”
became staples of the stories, and a select canon of tales was established for the socialization of the
young, geared to children who knew how to read. These notions are easily recognizable in most
of the classical tales, especially those written by Hans Christian Andersen, who had become one of
the most popular writers in Europe and America during the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. The emphasis was on extraordinarily gifted individuals who owed their rise in fortunes
to God’s benevolence or miracles of destiny represented metaphorically through the intervention
of a fairy or powerful magical people and objects. Another aspect that appealed to children and
adults was the Richard Whittington/Horatio Alger attitude that encouraged taking advantage of
opportunities and pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps. Although the fairy tale was altered to
address the adult views of what a child should read, it was still read vastly by adults. Adults and
children of the lower classes could not read these tales, but they circulated them in the oral tradition
and in popular theaters.
3) Despite the rise of print materials, the fairy tale continued to be told widely throughout the
western world for all types of audiences, and by the end of the nineteenth century in America and
Great Britain, professional folklore societies were formed, and hundreds of collections of folk and
fairy tales were produced in all the major European languages. One major purpose was to preserve
the oral traditions (songs, tales, proverbs, legends, and so on) from folk cultures all over the world
by printing them. At the same time the printed fairy tale with pictures gained more legitimacy
and enduring value than the oral tale which “vanished” soon after it was told, unless recorded or
written down. On the positive side, numerous educated Europeans and Americans made a dedicated
effort to be true to the spirit or essence of the tales in their transcriptions, even though they
were handicapped by the lack of adequate technology. On the negative side, many folklorists or
transcribers regarded their informants and the people to whom the tales belonged more or less as
primitives. What was considered essential to their world views and life styles by the different ethnic
groups who used the tales to relate to one another was often viewed by the foreign transcriber as
quaint, fantastic, and supernatural. Consequently, preserved oral tales were often revised, stylized,
and censored to suit the Christian and middle-class ideology of the collectors and writers. Much
of the collecting and preserving was completed at the beginning of the twentieth century in Great
Britain and the United States during a period of western imperialism. It was only after World War
II that a shift in the ideology of collectors and translators took place with more respect shown to the
indigenous populations.
4) By the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century, the fairy tale was
often read by a parent in a nursery, library, school, or bedroom to entertain and to soothe a child’s
anxieties because the fairy tales for children were optimistic and had plots with closure, that is, with
a happy end. Fairy tales were among the first short narratives to be adapted as plays specifically for
children and to be performed by adults and children and staged in the United States, Great Britain,
and other European countries. In addition, they were read to children by librarians and teachers
and made their way into school primers. Significantly, L. Frank Baum published his famous fairy-
tale novel, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1900, and J. M. Barrie produced Peter Pan in 1904 and
had the character of Peter ask his adult audience whether they believed in fairies to save Wendy’s
life, and the audience responded with a loud vocal YES!
 De-Disneyfying Disney • 19

5) By the beginning of the twentieth century, the western classical fairy tales became established
memetically as a canon and were disseminated through all forms of the mass media including books,
postcards, newspapers, journals, radio, and film. The major tales were and still are: “Cinderella,”
“Little Red Riding Hood,” “Snow White,” “Sleeping Beauty,” “Bluebeard,” “Hansel and Gretel,”
“The Frog Prince,” “Rapunzel,” “Rumpelstiltskin,” “Donkey Skin,” “Tom Thumb,” “The Ugly
Duckling,” “The Little Mermaid,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “Aladdin,” “Ali Baba and the Forty
Thieves,” “Jack and the Beanstalk,” and some other variants of these tales.
6) Although the plots varied and the themes and characters were altered, the classical fairy-tale
narrative for children and adults reinforced the patriarchal symbolical order based on rigid notions
of sexuality and gender. The types of characters, based on real professions, family figures, social
class—often stereotypes, not archetypes—depicted in printed and staged versions of fairy tales
tended to follow schematic notions of how young men and women behaved and should behave.
Though somewhat of a simplification, most of the heroes are cunning, fortunate, adventurous,
handsome, and daring; the heroines are beautiful, passive, obedient, industrious, and self-sacrificial.
Though some are from the lower classes and though the theme of “rags to riches” plays an important
role, the peasants and lower-class figures learn a certain Habitus, what Pierre Bourdieu describes as
a set of manners, customs, normative behavior, and thinking, that enables them to fulfill a social
role, rise in social status, and distinguish themselves according to conventional social class and
gender expectations. The goal-oriented narrative of a classical fairy tale generally involves trans-
formation of the major protagonist only to reinforce the social and political status quo. Implicit in
the reconciliation of conflict is moral improvement. Evil is cleansed.
7) In printed form the fairy tale immediately became property (unlike the oral folk tale) and was
regarded as a fixed text written by an author as proprietor. It was sold and marketed, and property
rights were granted authors, collectors, and publishers. When bought, it could be taken by its “new”
owner and read by its owner at his or her leisure for escape, consolation, or inspiration. An oral tale
that once belonged to a community was gradually lifted from its context and deprived of its
“original” social meaning and relevance. It is often difficult to establish the originality of a tale, but
it is possible to study the process of expropriation and appropriation by tracing the histories of a
particular tale as discourse with numerous variants. The oral tradition often takes revenge on the
printed tradition by re-appropriating what has been stolen and expropriated from its culture.
8) There was always tension between the literary and oral traditions. The oral tales continued and
continue to threaten the more conventional and classical tales because they can question, dislodge,
and deconstruct the written tales and published texts. Moreover, within the literary tradition itself,
there were numerous writers in the late nineteenth century such as Charles Dickens, George
MacDonald, Lewis Carroll, Oscar Wilde, Laurence Housman, Edith Nesbit, and even L. Frank
Baum, who questioned the standardized model of what a fairy tale should be.
9) It was through script by the end of the nineteenth century that there was a full-scale debate
about what oral folk tales and literary fairy tales were and what their respective functions should be.
By this time the fairy tale had expanded as a high art form (opera, ballet, drama) and low art form
(folk play, vaudeville, and parody) and a form developed classically and experimentally for children
and adults. The oral tales continued to be disseminated through communal gatherings of different
kinds, but they were also broadcast by radio and gathered in books by folklorists. Most important
in the late nineteenth century, as I have already mentioned, was the rise of folklore as an organized
field of study and inquiry along with anthropology. It became a social institution and various
schools of folklore began to flourish. There was hardly any literary criticism that dealt with fairy
tales and folk tales at this time.
10) Though many fairy-tale books and collections were illustrated, and some lavishly illustrated
in the nineteenth century, the images were very much in conformity with the text. The illustrators,
20 • Part I

mainly male, were frequently anonymous and did not seem to count. Though the illustrations often
enriched and deepened a tale, they were more subservient to the text and rarely presented alternative
ways to read or look at a text. However, they clearly began influencing the way readers imagined the
characters and the scenes of the tales. The heroines were largely blonde and beautiful with perfectly
proportioned features; the heroes were gallant, handsome, and courageous, often with sword in
hand and on a white horse. These illustrations, proliferated in the nineteenth century, marked the
beginning of a major change for the fairy-tale genre.
11) The domination of the printed word in the development of the fairy tale as genre underwent
a momentous change in the 1890s and early part of the twentieth century. The next great revolution
in the institutionalization of the genre was brought about by the technological development of
film, for the images now imposed themselves on the text and formed their own text in “violation”
of print but also with the help of the print culture. This shift in adaptation of fairy tales can be
viewed to a certain extent as the “incarnation” of fairy tales. As Kamilla Elliott points out,
predicated on the Christian theology of the word made flesh, wherein the word is only a
partial representation that requires incarnation for its fulfillment, it makes adaptation
a process of incarnation from more abstract to less abstract signs. The words, which merely
hint at sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell, tantalize readers into longing for their incarnation
in signs offering more direct access to these phenomenological experiences.37
And here is where first Georges Méliès, the great magician, who used mixed media to create his films
called féeries, Percy Stow, Ferdinand Zecca, Albert Capellani, Arthur Melbourne Cooper, Anson
Dyer, J. Searle Dawley, Chester and Sidney Franklin, Herbert Brenon, Walt Disney, and other
filmmakers enter the scene. They were among the first to realize how the fairy-tale genre might be
enriched by film in unimaginable ways, and how film might be enriched by the fairy tale. In fact,
their visions of the fairy tale became realized beyond their wildest dreams.

Fairy-Tale Film Narrative

In my opinion, the classical fairy-tale narrative stamped film narrative and the canonical Hollywood
narrative long before Hollywood even existed. I would even argue that it laid the groundwork for
classical European films, especially the melodramas. David Bordwell, one of the most astute film
critics on film narrative, writes:
Of all modes, the classical one conforms most closely to the ‘canonic story’ which story-
comprehension researchers posit as normal for our culture. In fabula terms, the reliance upon
character-centered causality and the definition of the action as the attempt to achieve a goal
are both salient features of the canonic format. At the level of the syuzhet, the classical film
respects the canonic pattern of establishing an initial set of affairs which gets violated and
which must be then set right. Indeed, Hollywood screenplay writing manuals have long
insisted on a formula which has been revived in recent structural analysis: the plot consists of
an undisturbed stage, the disturbance, the struggle, and the elimination of the disturbance.
Such a syuzhet pattern is the inheritance not of some monolithic construct called the
“novelistic” but of specific historical forms; the well-made play, the popular romance, and
crucially, the late-nineteenth-century short story. The characters’ causal interactions are thus
to a great extent functions of such overarching syuzhet/fabula patterns.38
It is a shame that Bordwell does not acknowledge the significance of the fairy tale for film
narrative and the deep roots of the oral wonder tale and the literary fairy tale that generated the féerie
plays of the seventeenth century up through the nineteenth century. Nor does he cite the importance
 De-Disneyfying Disney • 21

of Georges Méliès, who was the prime “appropriator” of the féerie for the film industry in its infancy.
Though there are many different schemata and patterns of fairy tales that involve normative ways
of producing and viewing films, the conventional fairy-tale plot as outlined by Vladimir Propp in
his famous book, Morphology of the Folktale, serves as a model for the commercial Hollywood films,
Early European melodramas, and the Disneyfied fairy-tale films. Propp outlined thirty-one basic
functions that constitute the formation of a paradigm, which was and still is common in Europe
and North America. Though I have some reservations about the validity of Propp’s categories
because he does not discuss the social function of the oral wonder tale that engendered the literary
fairy tale or their diverse aspects, his structuralist approach can be helpful in understanding plot
formation and the reasons why certain tales have become so memorable. By functions, Propp meant
the fundamental and constant components of a tale that are the acts of a character and necessary
for driving the action forward. The plot generally involves a protagonist who is confronted with an
interdiction or prohibition which he or she violates in some way. Therefore, there is generally a
departure or banishment and the protagonist is either given a task or assumes a task related to the
interdiction or prohibition. The protagonist is assigned a task, and the task is a sign. That is, his or
her character will be stereotyped and marked by the task that is his or her sign. Names are rarely
used in a folk or fairy tale. Characters function according to their social class or profession, and they
often cross boundaries or transform themselves. Inevitably there will be a significant or signifying
encounter. Depending on the situation, the protagonist will meet either enemies or friends. The
antagonist often takes the form of a witch, monster, or evil fairy; the friend is a mysterious individual
or creature, who gives the protagonist gifts. Sometimes there are three different animals or creatures
who are helped by the protagonist and promise to repay him or her. Whatever the occasion, the
protagonist somehow acquires gifts that are often magical agents, which are needed in conflict and
can bring about a miraculous or marvelous change or transformation. Soon after the protagonist,
endowed with gifts, is tested and overcomes inimical forces. However, this is not the end because
there is generally a peripety or sudden fall in the protagonist’s fortunes that is only a temporary
setback. A miracle or marvelous intervention is needed to reverse the wheel of fortune. Frequently,
the protagonist makes use of endowed gifts (and this includes magical agents and cunning) to
achieve his or her goal. The success of the protagonist usually leads to marriage; the acquisition of
money; survival and wisdom; or any combination of these three. Whatever the case may be, the
protagonist is transformed in the end. The functions form a transformation.
The significance of the paradigmatic functions of the wonder tale is that they facilitate recall for
tellers, listeners, and viewers. Over hundreds of years they have enabled people to store, remember,
and reproduce the plot of a fairy tale and to change it to fit their experiences and desires due to the
easily identifiable characters who are associated with particular social classes, professions, and
assignments. The characters, settings, and motifs are combined and varied according to specific
functions to induce wonder and hope for change in the audience of listeners/readers/viewers, who
are to marvel or admire the magical changes that occur in the course of events. It is this earthy,
sensual, and secular sense of wonder and hope that distinguished the wonder tales from other oral
tales as the legend, the fable, the anecdote, the myth, and Biblical story; it is clearly the sense of
wonder that distinguishes the literary fairy tale from the moral story, novella, sentimental tale, and
other modern short literary genres. Wonder causes astonishment, and as marvelous object or
phenomenon, it is often regarded as a supernatural occurrence and can be an omen or portent. It
gives rise to admiration, fear, awe, and reverence. In the oral wonder tale, we are to marvel about
the workings of the universe where anything can happen at any time, and these fortunate
and unfortunate events are never to be explained. Nor do the characters demand an explanation—
they are opportunistic and hopeful. They are encouraged to be so, and if they do not take advantage
of the opportunity that will benefit them in their relations with others, they are either dumb or
22 • Part I

mean-spirited. The tales seek to awaken our regard for the miraculous condition of life and to evoke
profound feelings of awe and respect for life as a miraculous process, which can be altered and
changed to compensate for the lack of power, wealth, and pleasure that most people experience.
Lack, deprivation, prohibition, and interdiction motivate people to look for signs of fulfillment
and emancipation. In the wonder tales, those who are naive and simple are able to succeed because
they are untainted and can recognize the wondrous signs. They have retained their belief in
the miraculous condition of nature, revere nature in all its aspects. They have not been spoiled by
conventionalism, power, or rationalism. In contrast to the humble characters, the villains are those
who use words and power intentionally to exploit, control, transfix, incarcerate, and destroy for
their benefit. They have no respect or consideration for nature and other human beings, and they
actually seek to abuse magic by preventing change and causing everything to be transfixed according
to their interests. The marvelous protagonist wants to keep the process of natural change flowing
and indicates possibilities for overcoming the obstacles that prevent other characters or creatures
from living in a peaceful and pleasurable way.
In some ways, filmmakers are similar to fairy-tale protagonists in that they want to keep the
narrative tradition of wondrous storytelling flowing. They are the champion tellers and projectors
of fairy tales. Some do this by relying on the canonic mode of telling and showing fairy tales as
Disney came to do. Others, fully aware of the normative schemata of the canonical and/or classical
fairy tales, have sought to contest the norms and introduce alternative ways of employing and
visualizing fairy tales through film. Competing variants of fairy tales arose as soon as the tales began
circulating, and as cultural fields of storytelling were formed thousands of years ago, there have been
conflicts over the bodies of canonical tales, how to tell them, and how to achieve a certain effect. As
we shall see in the course of conflicts, the Disney fairy-tale as commodified film and book rose to
predominance in the twentieth century, but it was never the only narrative mode used by film-
makers to try to “capture” the essence of fairy tales on film. The fairy tales and fairy-tale films have
formed specific discourses about the meanings of particular tales and general discourses about
the nature of storytelling. One thing is clear, however: film had a powerful impact on the oral and
print tradition of fairy tales and has made the conflict within the genre of the fairy tale more intense
and lively.

Spectacle, Film Production, Disneyfication, and the Fairy Tale

By focusing on how the advent of film technology changed the genre of the fairy tale, I am less
concerned with the techniques of filmmaking and scholarly approaches that focus on film history
and technology than I am with the issues of the adaptation and appropriation of the fairy-tale
genre. That is, my concern is with the evolution of a specific cultural genre that has been most
widely spread and promulgated through film, the mass media, and the Internet. The manner in
which we appreciate, evaluate, and disseminate our understanding of all kinds of art, especially
simple and short forms of fiction such as the myth, the legend, the anecdote, and the fairy tale, has
undergone immense changes involving orality, literacy, and cinematography. Although all three
means of communication—oral, print, and cinematography—are often combined with sound to
convey a message and make an impression on our brains and imaginations, the image, moving and
still, particularly the cinematic, TV, and Internet image, has superseded the other means of
communication and conditions our perception of most art forms.
In the specific case of the fairy tale, I maintain that, throughout the world, in particular the world
of globalized capitalism, children and adults are more apt to be familiar with cinematic versions of
the fairy tale than they are with oral or printed ones. As Guy Debord has pointed out, we live in a
world of the spectacle that causes our lives to be mediated and determined by illusory images.
 De-Disneyfying Disney • 23

Debord explains that “the spectacle is not a collection of images; rather it is a social relationship
between people that is mediated by images.”39 In contrast to Walter Benjamin, who believed that
art in the age of mechanical reproduction would lead to greater democratization and freedom
of choice in society through the film and other forms of the mass media, Debord argued along the
lines of Theodor Adorno’s theses in his essay on the culture industry to show how the dominant
mode of capitalist production employs technology to alienate and standardize human relations.
In particular, he examined the totalitarian or totalizing tendencies of the spectacle or what he
called the spectacular, because the spectacle is constituted by signs of the dominant organization of
production and reinforces behaviors and attitudes of passivity that allow for the justification
of hierarchical rule, the monopolization of the realm of appearances, and the acceptance of the
status quo. Only by grasping how the spectacle occludes our vision of social relations will we be able
to overcome the alienation and separation that pervades our lives. Debord insisted that
by means of the spectacle the ruling order discourses endlessly upon itself in an uninterrupted
monologue of self-praise. The spectacle is the self-portrait of power in the age of power’s
totalitarian rule over the conditions of existence. . . . If the spectacle—understood in the
limited sense of those “mass media” that are its most stultifying superficial manifestation—
seems at times to be invading society in the shape of a mere apparatus, it should be
remembered that this apparatus has nothing neutral about it, and that it answers precisely
to the needs of the spectacle’s internal dynamics. If the social requirements of the age which
develops such techniques can be met only through their mediation, if the administra-
tion of society and all contact between people now depends on the intervention of such
“instant” communication, it is because this “communication” is essentially one-way; the
concentration of the media thus amounts to the monopolization by the administrators of the
existing system of the means to pursue their particular form of administration.40
Debord did not believe that the spectacle was impenetrable or that we all live in a glass bubble
constructed by illusions. He wrote, as many critics have continued to write, to expose, contest, and
negate the predominance of the spectacle and the social organization of appearances. His concept
of the spectacle is particularly important for a critical understanding of how the fairy tale as film was
“spectacularized,” that is, how its signs and images were organized to create the illusion of a just and
happy world in which conflicts and contradictions would always be reconciled in the name of a
beautiful ruling class.
Almost all of Disney’s films operate according to the “laws” of the spectacle. They impose a vision
of life, the better life, on viewers that delude audiences into believing that power can and should be
entrusted only to those members of elite groups fit to administer society. All the major, animated
feature-length Disney fairy-tale films—Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Pinocchio (1940),
Cinderella (1950), Alice in Wonderland (1951), Peter Pan (1953), Sleeping Beauty (1959), The Sword
and the Stone (1963), The Little Mermaid (1989), Beauty and the Beast (1991), Aladdin (1992), Mulan
(1998), The Emperor’s New Groove (2000), Enchanted (2007), The Princess and the Frog (2009)—
follow conventional principles of technical and aesthetic organization to celebrate stereotypical
gender and power relations and to foster a world view of harmony. The images, words, music, and
movement lead to a totalizing spectacle that basically glorifies how technology can be used to
aestheticize social and political relations according to the dominant mode of production and ruling
groups that entertain a public spectatorship through diversion and are entertained themselves by a
monologue of self-praise. There is virtually no difference in the “utopian” vision conveyed by these
films that celebrates the actual standardized mode of production in the Disney Studios, its
rationalization, hierarchy, and purpose. What is interesting is that the scheme of the Disney filmic
narrative corresponds to its mode of production for the cinema.
24 • Part I

Let us examine Disney’s earliest animated feature fairy-tale film, Snow White and the Seven
Dwarfs, and a later one, Beauty and the Beast, as examples. Each film is framed by a prince on a quest
for the proper mate, essentially a young virginal woman, a trophy princess, who will serve his vested
interests, and the quest ends with a marriage in a splendid castle, in which the prince and princess
will be attended by admiring if not obsequious servants. The manner in which the prince attains his
goal depends on the collaboration of the underlings, the dwarfs and enchanted objects, and the
ingenuity and valor of this sympathetic prince. Songs are strewed along the plot as flowers to
enliven and brighten the action, just as comic gags are used to divert us from the serious nature of
the business at hand—ruthless competition for power. But everyone knows his or her role, and their
roles are all geared to guaranteeing the happiness of their heroes, seemingly born to lead, take power,
and to be admired, as fetishist objects. They will eventually reside in a palace, a utopian realm,
that few people are privileged to inhabit, unless you are one of the chosen servants. The goal is not
only a reconciliation of conflict and the defeat of evil, but also acclamation of those who deserve to
rule by those who deserve to serve.
This crude, schematic description of how a Disney fairy-tale functions may appear to be overly
formulaic, but the formula holds true: with slight variations, it can be applied to almost all the
Disney fairy-tale films and the numerous live-action family films made by the Disney corporation
up through its recent faux parody Enchanted (2007), a film that pretends to change the Disney
model through burlesque and inane satire while pandering to consumerism. The model of most
Disney films, even when they pay lip service to changing social and cultural values, reflects the actual
structure of the operations in a Disney studio that have not been altered all that much over time.
In the formative years of the Disney studio, those years that determined the work principles, ethics,
and ideology, the guiding practices became set and were similar to other studios and corporations
that participated in establishing what Debord has described as “spectacular” relations that stem
from the mode of production and reification. Pictures and descriptions of the hierarchical
arrangements in the Disney studios are widely known and widespread. By 1930 Disney had con-
solidated power in his studio so that he ruled without question, and he divided his workers
into separate groups and departments who often worked side by side at desks, as though they
operated mechanically serving a conveyor belt in a factory. They were organized according to their
functions: cel painters, animators, musicians, gag men, storyboard producers, and directors. After
1935 Disney did not do any animating, composing, or screenplay writing and worked out of his
own personal office. However, he supervised almost every film, large and small, and his decision was
the final decision for almost all the early productions. To his credit, he sought out the very best
collaborators and rarely stinted when it came to improving the technical quality of his productions.
He also set the standard of hard work and showed great attention to detail. Most of all, he conceived
many of the ideas behind the films and decided what project would move forward and which
collaborators would work on a particular project. If there was a vision in a Disney fairy-tale film—
and his spirit lived on well beyond his death—it was a shared spectacular vision of efficiency,
exploitation, and expediency: how best to use a story to promote one’s artistic talents, make money,
market oneself, and promote a vision of how social relations should be ordered. The contents and
history of the fairy tale were only a pre-text, that is, they provided the materials to be appropriated
and adapted for production purposes that served market needs. Behind such purposes, of course,
was an ideology commensurate with the capitalist mode of production and commodity fetishism
that was intended to shape the vision of audiences so that they would want to see and consume more
of the same.
Though it would seem that there is something utopian about the Disney vision of the world,
one that was elaborated in collaboration with hundreds of mainly male artists, it is more apt, I think,
to talk about the degeneration of utopia in Disney’s schemes for fairy-tale films and how his
 De-Disneyfying Disney • 25

corporation continued to cultivate it. Jan Svankmajer, the extraordinary Czech filmmaker of
disturbing fairy-tale films, once remarked,
Disney is among the greatest makers of “art of children.” I have always held that no special
art for children simply exists, and what passes for it embodies either the birch (discipline) or
lucre (profit). “Art of children” is dangerous in that it shares either in the taming of the child’s
soul or the bringing up of consumers of mass culture. I am afraid that a child reared on
current Disney produce will find it difficult to get used to more sophisticated kinds of art, and
will assume his/her place in the ranks of viewers of idiotic television serials.41
But it is not only the taming of the child’s soul and the commodification of children, and might
I add, adults, that constitute the degeneration of utopia in the fairy-tale films of Disney, but also a
carefully planned narrative that leads to the banalization of utopia. In one of the most significant
studies of Disneyland, Louis Marin explained that
the visitors to Disneyland are put in the place of the ceremonial storyteller. They recite the
mythic narrative of the antagonistic origins of society. They go through the contradictions
while they visit the complex; they are led from the pirates’ cave to an atomic submarine, from
Sleeping Beauty’s castle to a rocketship. These sets reverse daily life’s determinism only
to reaffirm it, but legitimated and justified. Their path through the park is the narrative,
recounted umpteen times, of the deceptive harmonization of contrary elements, of the
fictional solution to conflicting tensions. By “acting out” Disney’s utopia, the visitor “realizes”
the ideology of America’s dominant groups as the mythic founding narrative of their own
society.42
Utopia, as most scholars from Thomas More to Karl Mannheim and Ernst Bloch have explained,
does not exist; it is literally no place, and yet, numerous writers and artists have created and pro-
jected their image of utopia through their works to offer an alternative to the existing state of things.
The fantastic images of utopia forge a space of play in which artists and writers experiment and
invite their readers and spectators to play with the possibilities for changing social relations under
real conditions of existence. Utopia demands an ideological critique of the status quo without limits,
for the utopic knows no limits and offers no solutions or resolutions.
From the very beginning, however, Disney set limits on the possibilities of utopia that laid out
a prescribed way of ordering the world and curbing the imagination. In fact, he sought to establish
ownership of utopia. But his theme parks and plans for the perfect city were nothing but a con-
tinuation of degenerated notions of utopia in the fairy-tale films, for like the narrative of Disneyland
outlined by Marin, they lead the viewer on a quest that legitimates a reality of violence and injustice
by making it appear, through fixed stereotypes and values fostering violence and exploitation,
that contradictions can be reconciled through a collective fantasy, namely the sets of images that
constitute a Disney fairy-tale film. The telos of all Disney’s fairy-tale films is to shape the vision of
the spectators so that they are convinced and believe that they share in the values and accom-
plishments of the narrative, thus obviating any or all contradictions. The imagination of the
spectators is thus curbed by the calculations of fantasy imposed by the film, and individual wishes
are denied or caught in the snare of the fantasy. As Marin remarks,
this brings about a rather violent effect on the imaginary by fantasy. The other side of reality
is presented (Fantasyland is Disney’s privileged place for this), but it emerges in the form of
banal, routine images of Disney’s films. They are the bankrupt signs of an imagination
homogenized by the mass media. The snare I mentioned is the collective, totalitarian form
taken by the “imaginary” of a society, blocked by its specular self-image. One of the essential
26 • Part I

functions of the utopic image is to make apparent a wish in a free image of itself, in an image
that can play in opposition to the fantasy, which is an inert, blocked and recurrent image.
Disneyland is on the side of the fantasy and not on that of a free or utopic representation.43
If the Disney fairy-tale films constrain the utopic imaginary and fix our image of utopia through
hallucinatory images, they have done this through the systematic dissemination of images in books,
advertising, toys, clothing, houseware articles, posters, postcards, radio, and other artifacts that have
mesmerized us into believing that the “genuine” fairy tale is the Disney fairy tale, and that the Disney
fairy tale promises to fulfill what is lacking in our lives, to compensate for discomforting aspects of
social reality, and to eliminate social and class conflicts forever. It plays pruriently upon the utopian
longings of people by offering and selling set images intimating that special chosen celebrities and
elite groups are destined to rule and administer just social codes that will make people happy and
keep them in their proper places. Nothing is gray in the colored films of Disney, but the color
camouflages the black-and-white view of good and evil in the world.
The Disney world view conveyed through the fairy tale is not, however, limited to Disney
productions. In fact, most American fairy-tale films and many of the British and European as well
as Japanese are variants of the Disneyfication process in the film industry. One need only view the
majority of the films of the Faerie Tale Theatre produced by Shelley Duvall in the 1980s or the
Cannon Movie series in the 1980s as well as the other numerous cheaply produced infantile films
shaped by a myriad of minor film studios to dumb down children and their parents as well to
understand how pervasive the Disneyfication of the fairy tale became in the twentieth century and
how the Disney influence continues into the twenty-first. Yet, we must never forget that, just as drug
addicts can save themselves through detoxification programs, the fairy-tale film—and the fairy tale
in general—can save itself through de-Disneyfication programs, and perhaps we can also rescue
ourselves and restore our vision so we can play with the fairy tale and social reality on our own
terms.

The De-Disneyfication of Fairy-Tale Films

As I have already noted, the fairy tale began to be adapted in many different ways by filmmakers
almost as soon as the movie camera was invented and put to use. Aside from the extraordinary work
of Georges Méliès at the turn of the twentieth century, there were interesting experimental works
produced by Émile Cohl, Chester and Sid Franklin, J. Searle Dawley, Max and Dave Fleischer, Anson
Dyer, Paul Terry, Tex Avery, and many others up through the 1930s. Most of the films were short,
five to ten minutes, and were produced to “warm-up” audiences, once feature films came into
existence. They were shown before the main feature and were intended to induce laughs through
the use of unusual twists to the plots and hilarious gags. In America, the cartoon became the most
popular short in the cinema from 1930 through the 1960s, when television more or less brought
about its demise in movie theaters.
Crucial for understanding the success and importance of the early fairy-tale cartoon is the gag.
As Norman Klein points out in his superb book, Seven Minutes: The Life and Death of the American
Animated Cartoon (1993),
gags are more than random snatches of comic relief. They use the narrative code of late
nineteenth-century popular culture. They are fables about surviving in an industrial world
when the mind is still trapped inside a rural community (translated as the cartoon village
caught inside the motion-picture machine). A plot of this sort, fractured by a variety of
gags, has a unity based on dialectical confusion. The potential for hazards is never resolved,
only examined, in chase after chase, disaster after disaster. Once again, the gag is similar to
 De-Disneyfying Disney • 27

Modernist theories from the twenties, on narrative, on epic theater, or defamiliarization. It is

the Theater of the Absurd.44
Interestingly, Disney was a master of the gags and the chase plot in almost all his cartoons of the
1920s. In his Laugh-O-Gram fairy-tale films he displayed an unusul flare for the gag and anarchy.
For instance, in Puss in Boots (1922), the young man who becomes a toreador to win the princess
is assisted by the shrewd female cat to topple the king. The fairy tale of Charles Perrault is virtually
transformed into a revolutionary gag with a young man from the folk overthrowing a popcorn-
eating king who is exposed as a bumpkin and not capable of controlling the youth that knows
how to use the latest technology to triumph over a feudal world view that is out of date. There
were other anarchical live-action feature fairy-tale films in the 1920s, influenced by vaudeville,
Chaplin, and other comedians, but they were not very successful. Even the animated fairy-tale films
had difficulty finding and holding a niche in the market because they were expensive to produce,
and because the cinema industry demanded quick and profitable releases. By the early 1930s the
Disney Studio had become the dominant producer of fairy-tale cartoons using voiceovers,
music, and Technicolor in stunning and adroit ways to set standards for the other studios and to
prepare the way for production of the feature-length Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937. The
reasons for the transformation of the fairy-tale cartoon are connected to the Great Depression
of 1929, the development of rationalized workshops or studios influenced by Fordism, the inven-
tion of Technicolor and sound, and the political and cultural need, so it seemed, for strong leaders
and harmonious living. In other words, the fairy-tale film was about to be domesticated in the
mid- 1930s. As Klein states,
a moral element is added to cartoons, which was relatively absent earlier. In order to add
moral instruction, cartoon studios turned toward domestic melodrama, which also resembles
stories in live-action cinema, and made primary use of fully animated faces and gestures. . . .
The cartoon moved from vaudeville gags to movie melodrama, with cinematic references
added. Now, audiences could see more cartoons about troubled consciences that needed
mending. . . . Disney led the way in expanding personality animation to include melodrama.
In fact, even after cartoon melodrama was exhausted and was replaced by the hyper-chase
cartoon, by 1940, Disney hung on. For another twenty-five years, that high seriousness rarely
left his work.45
In order to understand the significance of domestication and the high seriousness of Disney,
most critics have focused on Snow White (1937), but I believe with Klein that the process started
much earlier and that there are three fairy-tale films which document the process of domestication
much better: Three Little Pigs (1933), The Big Bad Wolf (1934), and Three Little Wolves (1936). Not
only did they perfect the gags by making them smoother and more didactic if not inane, but they
incorporated them in much better synchronization with the storyline and music than ever before
to bring about a fuller animation. As Michael Barrier has commented in his significant study,
Hollywood Cartoons,
None of the cartoons released on either side of Three Little Pigs in the spring and summer of
1933 come close to matching it in that regard. . . . Fairy tales and animal fables were sturdier
raw material, and now that they were open to the Disney writers, there was no reason to hope
that more cartoons would capture what most distinguished Three Little Pigs from any cartoon
that had come before: its sense of balance and completeness.46
Although it would be an exaggeration to state that most fairy-tale cartoons up until 1933 had paid
very little attention to the storyline and contents of the tale, it is clear that the emphasis had
28 • Part I

Figure 1
Burt Gillett,
The Big Bad Wolf

always been on producing as many jokes and gags for their own sake, whether they fit the story or
not, and on showing off the technical skills of the artists and cameramen. While the gags remained
important in Three Little Pigs, more attention was paid to strengthening the story by making careful
changes in the characterization of the wolf and the pigs, adding lyrics, and endowing the film with
a message that quickly captured the sentiments of American audiences in 1933. The appeal of the
film had a great deal to do with the Great Depression, poverty, and oppression, and how the story
emphasized overcoming the voracious evil wolf at the door of the helpless pigs. It is thanks to the
oldest brother pig that the younger ones can sing “Who’s afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” This ditty,
which became a national song, was repeated in the two sequels in which the big brother pig always
saves the day. It is through him that happiness is guaranteed and all conflicts are resolved. The house
as home sweet home, as a sacred place that is to be defended at all costs, is celebrated, just as the
big brother pig, whose industry, wisdom, orderliness, and strength are extolled as American values.
It did not matter to Disney and his collaborators that the country was falling apart due to the
values that counted more—exploitation, mismanagement, ruthless competition, violence, and
corruption—they saw more of a need to submit to the protection of the individual owner, big
brother pig. Though it may be stretching a point to compare this pig to the prince in Snow White
and the Seven Dwarfs, they do play similar functional roles in that they as strong admirable
characters provide the closure to the conflicts in the story and tidy up the mess that apparently
is caused by greed and voracity. The spectacular image of the strong rational leader as rescuer
concealed, of course, the real causes of antagonism and unhappiness in both the films and the social
situation of the audiences of those times, for one must always ask why the wolf is impoverished and
hungry and must resort to violence to survive, and why and how the pigs got their money and live
comfortably in their own homes that the wolf cannot afford. One must also ask why little people are
silly, stupid, and weak and cannot fend for themselves.
Once the Disney images and plots were set by 1937 and repeated throughout Walt’s lifetime, they
were not without their competition and opposition. For instance Max and Dave Fleischer produced
a number of controversial and hilarious Betty Boop fairy-tale films already in the early 1930s, but
the most fascinating fairy-tale animator was Tex Avery. Acknowledged as one of the most gifted if
not provocative animators of the golden age of cartoons, Avery directed a good number of fairy-tale
films for major film studios such as Warner and MGM and frequently undermined the studio
 De-Disneyfying Disney • 29

approaches to animated fairy tales. In Red Hot Riding Hood he begins by having his characters (Red
Riding Hood, the wolf, and grandma) protest against repeating the same old story and compel the
director to change it. In Swing Shift Cinderella, the wolf chases Red Riding Hood across the credits
until the girl points out that he is chasing the wrong woman and should be pursing Cinderella. If
anyone can take credit for the term “fractured fairy tale,” it should be Avery, for long before the
Rocky and Bullwinkle fractured fairy tales, Avery was taking apart the traditional fairy tale and using
motifs to delight audiences and unsettle the canonical tales. In Red Hot Riding Hood and Swing Shift
Cinderella, aside from the brazen erotic depiction of the young women, the major twist in the plot
involves sexy elderly women, the grandmother and the fairy godmother, who pursue the wolf, who
never loses his lustful and predatory desire for young women. The frank portrayal of gender conflict
and sexual proclivities with open endings were unique in Avery’s times and remain somewhat
unique today. Avery never made a feature-length fairy-tale film. The Fleischers made two, which
were disasters. All three animators—and there were many more as I shall show in the following
chapters—were important in the 1930s and 1940s, however, for demonstrating an alternative to the
dominant conservative trend of producing fairy-tale films represented by Disney.
By Disney, I am not referring just to the man, who was a genial entrepreneur, but to a corporate
manufacturing process that has continued well into the twenty-first century. A “good” example of
the products that have been issued since 2000 by the Disney Corporation is The Emperor’s New
Groove (2000). It is truly a putrid and stale film filled with imitative gags and scenes reminiscent of
Tex Avery’s cartoons. (Even Avery can be co-opted and commodified.) The plot is offensive: it
concerns a faux Inca emperor named Kuzco who is accidentally turned into a talking llama by his
conniving evil advisor, the witchlike Yzma, because Kuzco fires her. Kuzco himself is a vain, despotic
hipster, perhaps a model for the 1990s Silicon Valley types, who tramples upon his people for his
own pleasure. However, he learns that he cannot survive without the help of a kind peasant, Pacha,
whose village had been threatened by Kuzco, for the young emperor had ordered Pacha’s village to
be destroyed so that he could build a luxurious summer home called Kuzcotopia as a gift to himself
for his eighteenth birthday. After numerous comic adventures, Pacha helps Kuzco regain his human
form and turn Yzma into a kitten and her dumb lover into a Boy Scout leader. And Kuzco, who
supposedly has learned how to become kind, builds his utopian summer house on a hill facing
Pacha’s village.

Figure 2
Tex Avery,
Swing Shift
Cinderella
30 • Part I

The sentimental music and tendency of the drawings in each scene are intended to make the
audiences feel sorry for the wise-cracking Kuzco and also to identify with the tender-hearted sub-
missive Pacha. From an ideological perspective, the film is a disaster, for it displays South Americans
in stereotypical forms and repeats the totalitarian message that almost all the Disney films have
conveyed since their origin: the role of the peasants or little people is to help to reinstall kings,
emperors, queens, princesses, and other celebrities so that they can rule more graciously. But rule
they must and should. This is a stale message and a stale approach to fairy tales, and despite the
moderate commercial success of The Emperor’s New Groove and its television and DVD sequels, it
may not be able to withstand the de-Disneyfying opposition of filmmakers, who seek to offer a fairy-
tale vision of the world that will enable audiences to think for themselves and to grasp the forces
that are degenerating their utopian longings. As the recent Disney production, The Princess and
the Frog (2009), shows, the Disney filmmakers continue to produce for profit and the glory of the
corporate brand, while more interesting and vital fairy-tale films are receiving a great deal of
attention.
About the same time that The Emperor’s New Groove was packaged for the market along with
all sorts of books and articles to gain additional profit, the Shrek films and the Michel Ocelot and
Hayao Miyazaki animated fairy-tale films appeared and began earnestly challenging the Disney
reign. There were also several superb live-action films that made their mark in and beyond America.
This was only the tip of the iceberg. Actually, there were and are hundreds of fairy-tale films,
animated, live-action, mixed media, and digital that offer diverse perspectives on storytelling
and fairy tales. In the following chapters, I shall endeavor to paint a clear picture of the debates and
conflicts over the fairy-tale film and why we might see the world around us with more insight if we
took off our Disneyfied lenses.
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Thinking and
learning to think
 This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United
States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away
or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License
included with this ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you
are not located in the United States, you will have to check the
laws of the country where you are located before using this
eBook.

Title: Thinking and learning to think

Author: Nathan Christ Schaeffer

Editor: Martin Grove Brumbaugh

Release date: December 10, 2019 [eBook #60893]

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Turgut Dincer and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file
was
produced from images generously made available by
The
Internet Archive)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THINKING AND

LEARNING TO THINK ***
 LIPPINCOTT’S
EDUCATIONAL SERIES

EDITED BY
MARTIN G. BRUMBAUGH, Ph.D. LL.D.
PROFESSOR OF PEDAGOGY, UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA, AND
COMMISSIONER
OF EDUCATION FOR PUERTO RICO

VOLUME I

Lippincott Educational Series

EDITED BY DR. M. G. BRUMBAUGH
Professor of Pedagogy, University of Pennsylvania

VOLUME I
Thinking and Learning to Think
By Nathan C. Schaeffer, Ph.D., LL.D., Superintendent of Public
Instruction for the State of Pennsylvania. 351 pages. Cloth,
$1.25.

VOLUME II

Two Centuries of Pennsylvania History

By Isaac Sharpless, President of Haverford College. 385 pages.
Illustrated. Cloth, $1.25.

VOLUME III

Kemp’s History of Education

By Dr. E. L. Kemp, Principal of East Stroudsburg Normal
School. 385 pages. Cloth, $1.25.

VOLUME IV

Kant’s Educational Theory

By Edward Franklin Buckner, Ph.D., Professor of Philosophy and
Education in the University of Alabama. 309 pages. Cloth,
$1.25.

Lippincott’s Educational Series

 THINKING
AND
LEARNING TO THINK

BY
NATHAN C. SCHAEFFER, Ph.D., LL.D.
SUPERINTENDENT OF PUBLIC INSTRUCTION FOR
THE STATE OF PENNSYLVANIA

PHILADELPHIA
J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY
1906

Copyright, 1900
by
J. B. Lippincott Company

ELECTROTYPED AND PRINTED BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY, PHILADELPHIA,

U.S.A.
 EDITOR’S PREFACE
The progress of educational thought during the closing years of
this century has been marvellous. Professional schools have created
a demand for professional teaching by giving an increasing group of
skilled instructors to our schools. This professional activity has
caused our leading cities to provide training-schools, as integral
parts of the city system of education. Finally, our great universities
have established departments of pedagogy for the higher training in
education. As a result, the leading positions in higher schools and in
supervision are more and more demanding professionally trained
leaders.
In this auspicious awakening for professional leadership there has
come an increasing demand for standard treatises upon the
fundamental problems of education. Treatises upon the history,
methods, principles, and systems of education have appeared with
astonishing frequency. That many of these are commercial treatises
—made to sell—is doubtless true. There is always a great temptation
to profit by an active demand. Well-disposed but not always widely
trained and broadly cultured teachers, who have achieved a local
success with a method that owed its virtue to the personality of its
author and not to its intrinsic worth, have been tempted into
authorship. The wiser and nobler minds in the profession wait. The
days of unrest and experimentation, breeding discord and confusion,
have in part passed away, and the time has come when the products
of all this divergent activity may be put to the test of clear analysis
and adequate experience. This is especially true in the domains of
historic and philosophic inquiry. In experimental activity, touching
the problems of psychic life as related to its sensorium, much has
been done in a tentative way. Much must yet be done to produce
results of enduring significance.
 This series of educational treatises is projected to give inquiring
minds the best thought of our present professional life. Fundamental
problems in education will be exhibited in the series from time to
time by thoroughly trained leaders of extended experience. Teachers
may confidently accept these as authoritative discussions of the
cardinal questions of their profession.
The highest endowment of the human spirit on the intellectual
side is the power to think. Learning to think is an essential process
and end in all school work. Thinking is the intellect’s regal activity. In
a vague way, all teaching appeals to the thought-activity of the
pupil; but vagueness in teaching is as pernicious as it is common. To
exhibit the value, scope, and process of thought is of inestimable
service to the teacher. It gives specific direction to teaching
processes, and saves the child from a thousand fanciful expedients.
In the craze of the passing decade for novelty in teaching, there
has resulted an undue emphasis upon forms of so-called
expressional activity. It has been, in many quarters, forgotten that
education is noblest when it produces reflective activity. The power
to analyze and synthetize thought-complexes is the most fruitful
endowment of the intellectual life. Expression without adequate
reflection is productive of superficiality.
We have been living a life of educational expedients. The path of
educational advance is strewn with countless cast-off practices which
once claimed attention largely because of the feeling among too
many that the newest theory is the best. There has come, let us
hope, the more rational resolve to test all new and loudly heralded
theories by fundamental laws of mental activity. To emphasize the
significance of this reaction, and to afford helpful criteria of
educational processes, this volume will be found most stimulating,
suggestive, and sensible.
For the purposes of the teacher thinking may be distinguished as
follows:
 (a) Clear thinking, by which one is to understand thinking the
thing, and not some other thing in its stead. Much thinking is not
clear. The power of recall is not fully developed. The mind acts, but
is not able to assert confidently the accuracy of what it acts upon.
Much needless criticism is heaped upon schools because pupils
cannot spell correctly, solve problems accurately, recite a lesson in
history or in geography properly,—in short, because the pupil’s
knowledge is not clear. The first step in all true teaching is the step
that makes clear to the pupil the thing he is to think.
(b) Distinct thinking, by which one is to understand thinking the
thing in its relations. This phase of thinking is sometimes called
apperception. It is the second, and not the first step in thinking.
There is no value in teaching relations until the things to be related
are first clearly apprehended. Perception must precede apperception.
The pupil in the elementary school has been well taught if he has
been taught to think clearly and distinctly.
(c) Adequate thinking, by which one is to understand thinking the
thing in its essential parts. This is the analytic form of thought. The
child at first cannot think adequately. His mind thinks things as
wholes. He has not the power to think the whole and its parts, as
parts of the whole, simultaneously. He must rise to adequate
thinking only after clear and distinct thinking have become habits of
mind. The fuller phase of this activity, by which these analyzed parts
are synthetically wrought into an organic unity, is the process of
concept-making,—the essential prerequisite of all high orders of
thought. This power every teacher should possess. It is his surplus
of knowledge, the possession of which makes him easily master in
the teaching process.
(d) Exhaustive thinking, by which one is to understand thinking
the thing in its causes. This is the highest form of thinking the thing.
It gives perspective to thought-processes, and eliminates all
accidental and misleading elements from the categories of thought.
To achieve this, one must specialize. The teaching of the future must
be more and more intensive in scope. The day of the encyclopædist
is gone. The teacher of to-morrow must be a teacher who knows
one order of truth exhaustively, and who possesses the skill to incite
in others a permanent enthusiasm for that order of truth. Scientific
progress is conditioned by such teaching.
The author has brought to this discussion the matured convictions
of broad training in American and European systems of schools, and
a wide and successful experience in teaching pupils and directing
systems of education. The discussion takes on the modest but
stimulating style of the public speaker. The author has for many
years been among our foremost lecturers upon education. The
temper of the discussion is moderate and constructive. There will be
found here no wild excess, no straining after fanciful effect, no
advocacy of sensational and ephemeral methods; nor is there a trace
of pessimistic and destructive criticism of the earnest teachers who
are conscious of limitations and are reaching hopefully for help. On
the contrary, the discussion is full of real sympathy, founded upon
personal experience with teaching in all its phases, and abounds in
stimulating suggestion.
M. G. B.
October 1, 1900.
 PREFACE
For a number of years it has been the author’s duty as well as
privilege to lecture at county institutes on the difficult art of teaching
pupils to think. This led to the request that the lectures be thrown
into permanent form for publication. The lecturer who never
publishes has no pet theories to defend; he can change his views as
often as he sees fit; yet, in spite of this advantage, he cannot always
escape or ignore the art of printing. One who gives his thoughts to
the public without the use of manuscript and under the limitations of
extemporaneous speech, made necessary by the large audiences
which gather at teachers’ institutes, especially in Pennsylvania, runs
the risk of being misquoted and misunderstood; he pays the penalty
of being reported in fragmentary if not distorted forms. This
ultimately drives him, in justice to himself and others, to write out
his theories on education and to give them to his coworkers in print.
Portions of these lectures were delivered at the annual meeting of
the superintendents of New England, before the State teachers’
associations of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Florida, before the
Connecticut Council of Education, before the summer schools held
under the auspices of the Ohio State University and the University of
Wisconsin, and at several of the meetings of the National
Educational Association. The favorable hearing accorded on these
occasions induces the hope that the lectures will be kindly received
by many who teach outside of Pennsylvania, and by some who give
instruction in our higher institutions of learning.
Although no one can hope, on so difficult a theme, to say much
that will be entirely satisfactory to leading educators, surely no
apology is needed from any one who, after spending his best years
in educational work, attempts to contribute his mite towards the
solution of any of the problems which confront the teacher.
 It is assumed that there is a body of educational doctrine well
established in the minds of teachers, and that on many school
questions we have advanced beyond the border line of first
discovery. Those who assert that our educational practice is radically
wrong and in need of thorough reformation should hasten to clarify
their own views and ideas, to substitute constructive for destructive
criticism, and to give definite shape to their reforms; otherwise a
whole generation will grow to maturity and the reformers themselves
will pass away before any of their reforms will have been
accomplished. To give teachers the feeling that what they are doing
is all wrong, and to leave them without anything better in place of
what is condemned, robs them of joy in their work, makes them
victims of worry and neurasthenia, and unfits them for the care of
children. It is hoped that these lectures will be found to suggest a
better way whenever criticism is bestowed upon existing methods of
instruction.
No attempt is made to ridicule the arm-chair psychologists, or the
advocates of child study, or those patient and painstaking workers
who are honestly seeking to establish the facts of mind through
experiments in the laboratory. He who has carefully reflected upon
the art of making pupils think will not hesitate to admit that thus far
he has received more light from the standard psychology than from
the labors of those who claim to be the exponents of the new
psychology. The latter can hardly write or talk without using the
terms coined by the older students of mind; this shows their
indebtedness to those who taught and speculated before
laboratories of psychology were established. Sometimes the
experiments have only served to test and give a reason for what was
already accepted. Often they have brought to our knowledge facts of
mind which could never have been discovered by the method of
introspection. In either case the experiments have resulted in clear
gain. Let the facts of brain and mind, of nervous and mental action,
of human growth, maturity, and decay be gathered, questioned,
tested, and classified; let their bearing upon educational practice be
set forth in the clearest possible light: every resulting step of
progress and reform will be hailed with delight by all who have no
pet theories to defend.
The lecturer is limited by time, by the kind of audience which he
addresses, and by circumstances largely beyond his control. These
limitations drop out when he reduces his thoughts to writing, and a
rearrangement at many points becomes possible as well as
desirable. The expedients for relieving the strain of attention and
winning back the listless can be omitted; and omissions that become
necessary through the exigencies of the programme must be
supplied for the sake of logical sequence. Moreover, the aims which
those who engage the lecturer set before him frequently require a
modification of the line of discussion, so that a course of lectures on
a specific theme cannot always follow the same order of treatment,
although substantially the same in content and scope. Hence the
division into chapters has been adopted as preferable to the original
sequence of lectures. Nevertheless, the style of the rostrum has not
been altogether eliminated, because when oral discourse is thrown
into new forms, and the phraseology is changed for the sake of
publication, the loss in vividness, directness, and simplicity is greater
than the gain in diction and fulness of statement.
Lecturing, as well as book-making, has its peculiar temptations.
The lecturer must interest his hearers in order to hold them; he is
tempted to play to the galleries, and to omit what is beyond the
comprehension of the average audience. The book-maker, on the
other hand, is tempted to display his learning, to make a show of
depth and erudition. The student of pedagogy is supposed to be in
search of profound wisdom. Those who write for him often dive so
deep that their style becomes muddy. Unfortunately, some of the
best treatises on education have been written in the style of the
philosopher and wrought out on the plane of the university
professor, although intended for undergraduates at normal schools,
and for teachers whose meagre salaries do not enable them to
pursue courses of study at institutions of higher learning. The lucid
style of Spencer’s treatise on “Education” has done much to
counteract this tendency. Yet many of the authors of our treatises on
pedagogy seem to be haunted by a feeling similar to that of the
German professor, who, on reading the opening chapters of a new
book, and finding them to be intelligible to his colleagues, exclaimed,
“Then I must rewrite these chapters; otherwise nobody will read my
book through.”
Huxley has well described the penalty which must be paid by
those who speak or write for the purpose of being understood.
These are his words:
“At the same time it must be admitted that the popularization of
science, whether by lecture or essay, has its drawbacks. Success in
this department has its perils for those who succeed. The ‘people
who fail’ take their revenge, as we have recently had occasion to
observe, by ignoring all the rest of a man’s work and glibly labelling
him a mere popularizer. If the falsehood were not too glaring, they
would say the same of Faraday and Helmholtz and Kelvin.”
One who can never hope to rival the style of Spencer and Huxley
and those to whom the latter refers, will nevertheless do well to
emulate their skill in making difficult things plain to people who are
not specialists or experts. He who writes for the teachers in our
public schools should put aside his ambition to be considered erudite
or profound, and endeavor above all things to be understood. Vague
theories are apt to beget a bad conscience in those who teach and
to destroy the joy which every one has a right to feel while doing
honest and faithful work. Hence the writer offers no apology for
heaping illustration upon illustration in the effort to make his
meaning plain to those whom he aims to help.
There is at present great need for clear thinking and luminous
presentation of facts on the part of all who write on education for
the people or for teachers in our public schools. By a process similar
to that by which the mediæval imagination swelled the murder of
the innocents at Bethlehem into a slaughter of thousands of children
(there cannot have been many male children two years old and
under in a small Judean village), the harm which some pupils suffer
is magnified into a national crime at the feet of American parents;
the evils which result from “Bob White” societies, from children’s
parties, from church sociables for young boys and girls, are all
ascribed to the school curriculum; and reforms in home study are
proposed which never fail to provoke a smile on the face of a
healthy boy.
The hygienic conditions of the average school are quite equal to
those of the average home. The health of many children improves
during their attendance at school. The pupils who are born with a
sound mind in a sound body, who get healthful diet, enough sleep,
and treatment from their elders which is not calculated to make
them nervous or unhappy, show none of the illness from overwork,
the dulness of brain from fatigue, and the exhaustion of nervous
energy which are made to furnish the narrow basis of fact for vague
and broad generalizations. The haze in which those who must
furnish the printer a given amount of copy in a given time are apt to
envelop whatever they write has an effect like that of misty air upon
the size of visible objects. Travellers who have come into a cloud
while ascending a mountain report that a small wood-pile then looks
like a barn, a cow seems larger than an elephant, men appear as
giants, and the surrounding heights assume threatening proportions.
As soon as sunlight clears the atmosphere, objects are again seen in
their true dimensions. The moment the light of common sense
penetrates the haze and mist and fog and cloud which are used to
heighten the effect of essays upon school work, the need of radical
reform seems far less urgent; and teachers, instead of wasting their
time in worry and uncertainty, begin with cheerful heart to impart
that which modern civilization requires every child to know as a
condition of bread-winning and complete living.
There is, of course, a worse fault than obscurity of style,—namely,
dearth of ideas. The danger to which the lecturer is always exposed,
that of losing his hearers and failing to be recalled (their minds may
leave while they are bodily present), spurs to effort in two directions.
Either he will try to say something worth listening to, or he will strive
to entertain by amusing stories and incidents. If he be conscious of
a lack of talent for humor, he will try to stuff his lectures full of
sense. If the lectures here published lack in this respect, the writer is
willing to acknowledge failure.
In preparing a course of lectures it is proper to bear in mind the
difference between the lecturer, the orator, the poet, and the
philosopher. The philosopher investigates ideas and truths, explores
their essence and relations, and unfolds them in their deepest unity
and in their greatest possible compass. When this has been done
throughout the whole domain of thought, his mission is
accomplished. The poet seeks to clothe his ideas in beautiful forms.
When the idea is perfectly suited to the form and the form to the
idea, his mission is accomplished. The orator aims to move the will;
he quotes authorities, uses ideas, appeals to the feelings, and
subordinates everything to the one end of gaining a verdict, winning
a vote, or getting a response in the conduct of those whom he
addresses. The lecturer seeks to impart information. He aims to get
a response in the thinking of those whom he addresses. He tries to
reach the intellect rather than the will. Beautiful language and
exhaustive treatment are not essential parts of his mission. It is his
province to elucidate the theme under consideration, to guide the
efforts and inquiries of those who come to him for instruction, to
direct them to the sources of information, and to furnish such
incentives as he can towards independent study and investigation.
Since the data for pedagogy are derived mainly from kindred fields
of investigation, the lecturer on the science and art of education has
frequent occasion to cite authorities and to utilize the labors and
conclusions of the men eminent in the sciences which throw light
upon the growth of the child, more especially upon the development
of mind and character. The most original writers quote very little,
and those who are anxious to establish a reputation for originality
refrain from quoting others. It is the business of the lecturer to lead
the hearer to the sources of information. When anything has been
so well said that he cannot improve upon the form of statement it is
proper that he should quote the language, carefully giving the
source whence it is derived. Without doubt, when the genius
appears who will do for pedagogy what Aristotle did for logic and
Euclid for geometry, he will so polish every gem he gets from others
and give it a setting so unique and appropriate that the world will
recognize the touch of the master and acknowledge the contribution
as peculiarly his own handiwork. In painting and sculpture we look
to the past for the greatest works of art. In music the century now
closing has rivalled, if not surpassed, its predecessors. In the science
and art of education the greatest achievements belong to the future.
It is currently reported and sometimes believed that when the
president of a celebrated university was asked why he had
transferred a certain professor from the department of geology to
that of pedagogy, he replied, “I thought the fellow would do less
harm in that department.” If the story is not a myth, he probably
meant less harm to the reputation of the university. When in our day
a course in geology or logic or geometry is announced, one can
foretell the ground that will be covered. No such prediction can be
made with reference to a course of lectures on teaching. The
prophet is yet to come who will fix the scope of the science of
education and give it something like definite and abiding shape.
This volume is not designed to supplant systematic treatises on
psychology and logic. Its aim is to throw light upon one important
phase of the art of teaching. If it contributes but two mites to the
treasury of information on the science and art of education, the
labor bestowed upon it has not been in vain. Should any critic hint
that two mites are all one has to give, it may be said in reply that it
is better to give something than to give nothing at all, and that
according to Holy Writ the smallest contributions are not to be
despised if made in the right spirit. And it may add to the critic’s
stock of ideas to be informed that a small English weight, called
mite, outweighs very many of the current criticisms upon modern
education, that of this small weight it takes twenty to make a grain,
and that to a faithful teacher a tenth of a grain of helpful suggestion
is worth more than many tons of destructive criticism.
 CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I.—Make the Pupils Think 21
II.—Thinking in Things and in Symbols 35
III.—The Materials of Thought 47
IV.—Basal Concepts as Thought-Material 63
V.—The Instruments of Thought 85
VI.—Technical Terms as Instruments of Thought 99
VII.—Thought and Language 111
VIII.—The Stimulus to Thinking 123
IX.—The Right Use of Books 137
X.—Observation and Thinking 155
XI.—The Memory and Thinking 167
XII.—Imaging and Thinking 191
XIII.—The Stream of Thought 209
XIV.—The Stream of Thought in Listening and Reading 223
XV.—The Stream of Thought in Writing, Speaking, and Oral
Reading 239
XVI.—Kinds of Thinking 255
XVII.—Thinking and Knowing 269
XVIII.—Thinking and Feeling 289
XIX.—Thinking and Willing 303
XX.—Thinking and Doing 317
XXI.—Thinking in the Arts 331
XXII.—Thinking and the Higher Life 341
 I
MAKE THE PUPILS THINK

The value of a thought cannot be told.

Bailey.
He who will not reason is a bigot; he who cannot is
a fool; he who dares not is a slave.
Byron.
Reason is the glory of human nature, and one of the
chief eminences whereby we are raised above the
beasts in this lower world.
Watts.

Man is not the prince of creatures,

But in reason. Fail that, he is worse
Than horse, or dog, or beast of wilderness.
Field.

Man is a thinking being, whether he will or no. All he

can do is to turn his thoughts the best way.
Sir W. Temple.

I
MAKE THE PUPILS THINK

For the purpose of testing the quality of gold A test of teaching.

alloy jewellers formerly used a fine-grained dark
stone, called the touchstone. In the eyes of an educator good
instruction is more precious than pure gold. The touchstone by
which he tests the quality of instruction, so as to distinguish genuine
teaching from its counterfeit, rote teaching, is thinking. The
schoolmaster who teaches by rote is satisfied if the pupils repeat his
words or those of the book; the true teacher sees to it that the
pupils think the thoughts which the words convey.
Thring, who, next to Arnold, was perhaps the Thring’s practice.
greatest teacher England ever had, laid much
stress upon thinking. Sometimes he would startle a dull lad, in the
midst of an exercise, by asking, “What have you got sticking up
between your shoulders?” “My head,” was the reply. “How does it
differ from a turnip?” And by questioning he would elicit the answer,
“The head thinks; the turnip does not.”
So important is thinking in all teaching that at Views of others.
the World’s Educational Congress, in 1893, one
educator after another rose in his place to emphasize the maxim,
“Make the pupils think.” One of the most advanced of the reformers
shouted in almost frantic tones, “Yes, make even the very babies
think.” After the wise men had returned to their homes, a Chicago
periodical raised the query, “How can you stop a pupil from
thinking?” And the conclusion it announced was that neither the
teacher behind the desk nor the tyrant upon his throne can stop a
pupil from thinking. Evidently, if that which sticks up between a boy’s
shoulders is a head and not a turnip, if the pupil is rational and not
an imbecile or an idiot, he does some thinking for himself; and the
maxim, “Make the pupils think,” requires further analysis before it
can be helpful in the art of teaching.
We who teach are very apt to overestimate Thinking for one’s
thinking in our own line of work and to undervalue self. Relying on
thinking outside of the school. There is, perhaps, others.
as much good thought in a lady’s bonnet as in the
solution of a quadratic equation. A sewing-machine embodies as
much genuine thought as the demonstration of a geometrical
theorem. The construction of a locomotive or a railway bridge
displays as much effective thinking as Hegel’s “Philosophy of
History,” or Kant’s “Critique of the Pure Reason.” Most men think very
well in doing their own kind of work; in many other spheres of
activity they must let other people think for them. When the
professor of astronomy discusses a problem connected with his
science, he thinks for himself; but when he buys a piece of land, he
gets a lawyer to think for him in the examination of the title and the
preparation of the deed. The lawyer thinks for himself in the court-
house; but when he goes home to dine, he expects his wife, or the
cook, to have done the thinking for him in the preparation of the
dinner. Grover Cleveland had the reputation of thinking for himself:
many a politician found out that this reputation was founded on fact;
but when the ex-President is sick, or has the toothache, he is willing
to let a physician or a dentist think for him. In like manner, a pupil
may think very well upon the play-ground; but if the teacher, whose
very name indicates the function of guiding, fails to guide the pupil
aright, the latter may become a mere parrot in the class-room.
What, then, is involved in making a pupil think?
The difficulty in answering this question is Thinking defined.
increased by the diversity of meanings of the word
thinking. The teacher who is not clear in his use of the term may
employ exercises calculated to develop one kind of mental activity,
and then accuse the pupils of dulness because they do not show
facility in some other intellectual process. When a text-book on
mental science defines the intellect as the power by which we think,
the term thinking is used to designate every form of intellectual
activity. The Century Dictionary defines thinking as an exercise of the
cognitive faculties in any way not involving outward observation, or
the passive reception of ideas from other minds. The logician defines
thinking as the process of comparing two ideas through their relation
to a third. Many exercises of the school are supposed to cultivate
thinking in the last sense of the word, when in reality they cultivate
thinking only in the widest acceptation of the term.
The writer saw a normal school principal conduct A faulty exercise.
an exercise in thinking, as the latter called it.
Turning to one of the pupils, he said, “Charley, will you please think
of something?” As soon as the boy raised his hand the principal
asked, “Does it belong to the animal, the vegetable, or the mineral
kingdom?” Then turning to the other members of the class, he said,
“Who of you can think of the vegetable in Charley’s mind?” The
names of at least forty different vegetables were given and spelled
and written upon the black-board. At last a pupil succeeded in
naming what was in Charley’s mind. Then there was a look of
triumph upon the faces of the principal and the class, as much as to
say, “Isn’t that splendid thinking?” At least one person felt like
burying his face in his hands for very shame; for here was
resurrected from the dead an old exercise of philanthropinism which
was buried more than a hundred years ago. What should one call
that kind of mental activity? Guessing. That is all it is. The exercise
tended to beget a habit very difficult to break up after it has been
formed.
Far better was an exercise which the writer A better plan.
witnessed in a graded school. The teacher had
called the class in the second reader. As soon as all the pupils were
seated she said, “You may read the first paragraph.” Instead of
reading orally, the class became so quiet that one might have heard
a pin drop. After most of the hands were raised she called upon one
pupil to tell what the paragraph said. The second paragraph was
read and the substance of it stated in the pupil’s own words. An
omission was supplied by another pupil; an incorrect phrase was
modified by giving the correct words for conveying the thought. In
the course of the lesson it became necessary to clarify the ideas of
some. This was accomplished by a few pertinent questions which
made the pupils think for themselves. After the entire lesson had
been read in this way she dismissed the class without assigning a
lesson. Every member of the class went to his seat, took out his
slate, and began to write out the lesson in his own language. The
interest and pleasure depicted on their faces showed that it was not
a task but a joy to express thought by the pencil. The teacher had
given them something to think about; she had taught them to
express their thoughts in spoken and written language; her
questions had stimulated their thinking, and when, later in the day,
the lesson in oral reading was given, the vocal utterance showed
that every pupil understood what he was reading. There was no
parrot-like utterance of vocables, but an expression of thought based
upon a thorough understanding and appreciation of what was read.
The silent reading was an exercise in thought-getting and thought-
begetting, the language lesson upon the slate was an exercise in
active thinking through written words, and the oral expression
furnished a test by which the teacher could ascertain what she had
accomplished in getting her pupils to think.
The first thing necessary in making the pupil A suggestive
think is best shown by relating another incident. reply.
The catalogue of a well-known school announced
that the teachers were aiming to get their pupils to read Latin at
sight and to think in more tongues than one. A captious
superintendent wrote to the principal, saying, “I envy you. How do
you do it? We would be satisfied if we could make pupils think in
English.” The reply was equally sharp and suggestive: “You ask how
we make pupils think. I answer, By giving them something to think
about. If you ask how we make them think in more tongues than
one, I answer, By giving them, in addition to the materials of
thought, the instruments of thought as found in two or more
languages.”
The first step in training a pupil to think is to The first essential.
furnish him proper materials of thought, to develop
in his mind the concepts which lie at the basis of a branch of study,
and which must be analyzed, compared, and combined in new forms
during the prosecution of that study. Just as little as a boy can draw
fish from an empty pond, so little can he draw ideas, thoughts, and
conclusions from an empty head. If the fundamental ideas are not
carefully developed when the study of a new science is begun, all
subsequent thinking on the part of the pupil is necessarily hazy,
uncertain, unsatisfactory. How can a pupil compare two ideas or
concepts and join them in a correct judgment if there is nothing in
his mind except the technical terms by which the scientist denotes
these ideas? The idea of number lies at the basis of arithmetic. How
often are beginners expected to think in figures without having a
clear idea of what figures denote! What teacher has not seen
children wrestling with fractions who had no idea of a fraction save
that of two figures, one above the other, with a line between them!
How many of our arithmetics are full of problems involving business
transactions of which the pupil cannot possibly have an adequate
idea! Not having clear ideas of the things to be compared, how can
the learner form clear and accurate judgments and conclusions?
So essential to correct thinking is the Proper thought-
development of the concepts and ideas which lie at material.
the basis of each science, that we may designate
the giving to the pupil of something to think about as the first and
most important step in the solution of the educational problem
before us. In other words, the furnishing of the proper materials of
thought is the first step in teaching others to think. The force and
the validity of this proposition are easily seen if we reflect upon the
essential oneness of the manifold diversities of thinking as they
appear at school and in subsequent years.
It is universally conceded that education should Thinking in the
be a preparation for life. The thinking at school professions.
should be an adumbration of the thinking beyond
the school. The possession of enough data, or thought-materials, for
reaching trustworthy conclusions, which is the indispensable
requisite of successful thinking at school, is likewise a necessary
requisite of successful thinking in practical life. It behooves us to
inquire into the nature and foundation of the thinking of men in the
professions, and in other vocations, for the purpose of gaining
further light upon the problem before us. Let us, then, inquire into
the nature and foundation of the thinking of men eminent in a
profession or prominent in some other vocation. The professional
man may have less native ability, less general knowledge, less
culture and education, less mental power than the client whom he
advises or the patient for whom he prescribes; and yet his
inferences and conclusions are accepted as more trustworthy than
those of men outside of the given profession, because he has a
knowledge of facts and data which they do not possess. If he be a
physician, special training and professional experience have taught
him how to observe the symptoms of different diseases; how to
eliminate sources of doubt and error; how to reach a correct
diagnosis of difficult cases, and how to apply the proper remedies. If
he be a lawyer, he has been taught how to examine court records;
how to detect and guard against flaws in legal documents; how to
find and interpret the law in specific cases; how to protect the life
and property of his client. The judge on the bench is learned in the
law, though he may be ignorant of science, literature, agriculture,
commerce, and manufactures. He is aided in arriving at correct
conclusions by thought-materials which are not in the possession of
laymen.
How does the thinking of an expert differ from The thinking of
that of other men? Not so much in the processes of experts.
thought as in the data upon which he reasons. An
Teaching not a
ordinary witness may testify as to matters of fact; trade.
the expert is supposed to possess extensive
knowledge and superior discrimination in a particular branch of
learning or practice; hence he may be a witness in matters as to
which ordinary observers cannot form just conclusions, and he is
held liable for negligence in case he injures another from want of
proper qualifications or proper use of the thought-materials
necessary to form trustworthy conclusions. From this point of view
we can see new force and beauty in the remark of Fitch that
teaching is the noblest of the professions, but the sorriest of trades.
The aim of a trade is to make something that will sell; its ultimate
aim is money, a livelihood. Teaching and the other professions,
although they cannot be sundered from money-making, have a
nobler aim. This arises out of the thought-materials with which they
deal. If a teacher’s mind does not busy itself with these, he sinks to
the level of a tradesman. A very keen observer said of the head of a
large boarding-school, that he had learned his trade from the
principal of a large normal school under whom he had been trained.
The remark, if true, was severe, but significant. It was an intimation
that the substance of the thinking of these two men was business
rather than education; that their conversation about the quality of
the beef and mutton served, about the loaves of bread, the pounds
of butter, and the bushels of potatoes consumed each week,
indicated that they were thinking more of the stomach and the purse
than of the things of the mind; that their aim was a large attendance
and a large cash-balance at the end of the year rather than the
mental growth and professional preparation of their students. Their
thinking was efficient and trustworthy in the domain in which it was
exercised. It partook of the nature of trade-thinking, and lacked
professional quality because it did not concern itself with problems
of mental growth and moral training, with the proper sequence of
studies, with the educational value of different kinds of knowledge,
and with the best methods of economizing the time and effort of
their students.
In several aspects teaching is like a trade. Every Mysteries.
art has its mysteries, with which those who
practise it must be familiar if they would succeed. Teaching is no
exception; and if the annual institute or the school of pedagogy fails
to clarify these mysteries by putting the teachers in possession of
materials for thought and of methods of applying knowledge to
beget thinking which are not within the ken of the average parent
and the general public, then failure must be written over the
outcome. A mystery is a lesson to be learned. A scrutiny of the
mysteries which characterize every trade and every art will serve not
merely to emphasize the necessity for furnishing proper thought-
materials, but will be helpful also in paving the way for the
consideration of another essential in training pupils to think. Let us
view them in the concrete.
A machinist, who was also a skilled mechanic, Examples.
was compelled by circumstances to quit his trade
and to accept a position as janitor. One day the pipe leading from
the sink to the sewer was clogged. The teacher, in conjunction with
a carpenter, worked a long time to fix it, but in vain. The janitor was
called, who in a few moments overcame the difficulty by the
application of a principle in natural philosophy on which the teacher
could have talked learnedly, although he knew not how to apply it in
the given case. The janitor related how the foreman in a foundry
was baffled in the effort to bore a hole through a piece of iron until a
workman, trained under a foreign master, suggested the purchase of
two things at a drug-store by means of which the hole was easily
bored. When the druggist asked about the use that was to be made
of these chemicals, he was told that the use was one of the
mysteries of the machinist’s trade.
Next, the carpenter fixed the mortise lock of a door which needed
attention, and the others lauded the skill with which he handled his
tools and applied his knowledge. Before the three separated, the
janitor’s son came with a word which he could not find in his lexicon.
With the aid of chalk and black-board and grammar, the teacher
showed how to dig out the roots of a Greek verb and what beautiful
changes occur in its conjugation. The turn had come for the
tradesmen to admire the mysterious skill and power of the teacher.
In applying the principle of natural philosophy, the janitor made
skilful use of one or two tools which the teacher and the carpenter
had never seen. He could express thought through the tools of his
own handicraft, in ways that they could not. Each one of the three
men knew the tools and the mysteries of his own vocation. During
the entire scene there was not a logical flaw in the thinking of any
one of them. Probably there was little difference in their native
ability; certainly none in the fundamental nature of their thought-
processes. The practical difference resulted from the data at their
command and from the tools they were using to express the
thoughts peculiar to their several vocations.
The power to use tools, instruments, and Man, the tool-
machinery lifts man above the brute creation. user.
There is labor-saving machinery in thinking as well
Instruments of
as in manual labor. The more perfect the tools with thought the