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'The fairy tale has become one of the dominant cultural forms and genres internationally, thanks in large part to its many manifestations on screen. Yet the history and relevance of the fairy-tale film have largely been neglected. In this follow-up to Jack Zipes’s award-winning book The Enchanted Screen (2011), Fairy-Tale Films Beyond Disney offers the first book-length multinational, multidisciplinary exploration of fairy-tale cinema. Bringing together twenty-three of the world’s top fairy-tale scholars to analyze the enormous scope of these films, Zipes and colleagues Pauline Greenhill and Kendra Magnus-Johnston present perspectives on film from every part of the globe, from Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, to Jan Švankmajer’s Alice, to the transnational adaptations of 1001 Nights and Hans Christian Andersen.
'Contributors explore filmic traditions in each area not only from their different cultural backgrounds, but from a range of academic fields, including criminal justice studies, education, film studies, folkloristics, gender studies, and literary studies. Fairy-Tale Films Beyond Disney offers readers an opportunity to explore the intersections, disparities, historical and national contexts of its subject, and to further appreciate what has become an undeniably global phenomenon.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
Notes
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Contents indexed selectively.
Contents
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Australian Fairy-tale Films,
single work
criticism
(p. 233-245)'In this chapter's first section, we explain why we do not include Aboriginal narratives and, therefore, why we focus on the European fairy-tale tradition's influence in regard to the Australian fairy-tale literature of the 1890s and the films we later discuss. We draw attention to the recurring trope of the "lost child" as a signifier of the anxieties of colonial identity. The centrality of national identity in Australian cinema, complicated by the fluctuating fortunes of the domestic film industry, has also had an impact on the production of fairy-tale films in Australia. We outline these matters in the second section, where we survey a range of fairy-tale films made since the 1970s, asking what makes a fairy-tale film Australian. Finally, we present three studies based on what we identify as the dominant and emergent features of Australian fairy-tale films. Our aim is to be representative, not comprehensive, and to focus on films that are distinctly Australian in flavour. The first study returns to the lost-child figure. The second discusses revisionist fairy-tale films, focusing on how an Australian cultural disposition inflects the "happily ever after" ending. The last study discusses recent developmental short films, which we suggest may herald the birth of uniquely Australian fairy tales.' (pp.233-234)
