How beastly! Two films re-imagine fairy tales for teens

Wolves! Ugly beasts! Beautiful girls in hoods! Dark woods! Magic! 

Two films being released in March -- Beastly and Red Riding Hood -- are re-imagining  traditional fairy tales for modern teen audiences. Historically, fairy tales have been revised to suit the sensibility of that era's  audiences.  Some critics chafe at Walt Disney and his studio's interpretations because the animated versions do not keep to the 'traditional' script. But Disney knew, as fairy tale scholars know, that fairy tales are appealing, in part, because at their core they weave interesting stories with issues that the audience wants to work out and contemplate.  The re-interpretations enable each generation to embrace and analyze the core stories and related issues through their own lens.

Fairy tales started as oral tales, and as we all know, when you tell stories aloud you change them to adapt to the audience.  These new films are doing the same thing -- seeing if they can mine the contemporary adolescent interest in the gothic,  darkness, issues of beauty, while trying to understand and unravel universal problems.

The creators of the new films, or at least the trailers, seem to have a bead on contemporary teen and young adult audiences.  For Red Riding Hood, the director is Catherine Hardwicke, who directed the enormously successful first Twilight film and the troubling Thirteen (2003).  Red Riding Hood is played by Amanda Seyfried who is the cute, slightly over dramatic girl in Mamma Mia! (2008), Dear John (2010), and Letters to Juliet (2010). She brings to the role experience in the TV series Big Love (2006-11) and Atom Egoyan's Chloe (2009). Also starring are Lukas Haas (great as a child in Witness (1985) and recently in Inception) and Gary Oldman (who I just talked about while teaching films based on Dracula since he starred in Coppola's vision). The trailer makes the film look like a Twilight fairy tale -- probably a clever calculation that will make the film have good box office.  Here's the link to the trailer of Red Riding Hood.

Beastly is set in contemporary times and is based on "Beauty and the Beast." The trailer shows the lead, played by Alex Pettyfer, as a pretty boy Beastlywho is good looking, probably a rich football player, and popular.  (Pettyfer was interesting in Alex Rider (2006). Through a magic curse, he becomes disfigured, in an interesting way.  It takes the love of a girl, played by High School Musical's Vanessa Hudgens, to see beneath the surface of his unusual appearance.

"Beautiful people get it better" is the opening line of Beastly's trailer. The line is curious here because the beautiful person is a boy, not a girl.  For years, feminists have criticized beautiful images of girls, so it's interesting just in the twist of that role being played by a boy. Will feminists consider the problems of handsome boys and men as well?

Clearly inspired by the success of the Twilight series and probably by Harry Potter and Disney, the previews show films with the moody gothic sensibility so popular with teens as they retell familiar stories in either a contemporary setting Vanessa Hudgens and Mary Kate Olsen star in Beastly(Beastly) or a dark forboding, northwoods type setting (Red Riding Hood).  I assume that the tremendous success of Tim Burton's dark Alice in Wonderland film is bouying the studio's hopes.  There are similar merchandising efforts, though not as overwhelming as for Burton's Alice. Also just reading a review in the Miami Herald for I Am Number Four, which also stars Pettyfer and is similarly aimed at the YA audience, has a similar story arc to Twilight.  Hollywood loves to get on the bandwagon.

By the way, I've also been told by our local tween that beastly means great, cool, fantastic.

Group reading of Lincoln's Farewell Address at Milner Library

Stovepipe hats, amazing hoop skirt fashions, and train whistles carried us back 150 years during a group reading of Lincoln's Farewell Address at ISU.  We were part of a national record-breaking effort to have the most people reading en masse.  The reading was the short speech that Abraham Lincoln said to well-wishers as he left Springfield, Ill., to his new position as President in Washington, D.C.  The words are heartfelt, melancholy, yet hopeful.

I would like to thank the librarians at ISU's Milner Library who helped organize the event and particularly asked if Jacob would enjoy leaving school for awhile and participating in the event as one of the lead readers.  We were happy to have him participate in a different educational setting for a few hours.  He appreciated being part of the interesting Lincoln event.  He wore the stovepipe hat that my parents bought for him at Lincoln's birthplace in Kentucky.  He also wore a black t-shirt from the Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, which we have visited many times.  We thought it was great to see his name as a lead reader in the program.  And it's cool that he's in the lead of the article by the Pantagraph reporter.

When the Lincoln re-enactor gave the speech again after our first mass reading, he had a wonderful way of conveying the sadness and optimism that the new President must have felt. Gary Simpkins, playing Lincoln, understood the gravity of the situation that the Illinois man was facing.

The reading was also the kick-off for the Sesquicentenial of the Civil War.  Guess I'll have to work to remember how to spell that word because remembering the 150th anniversary of the Civil War is going to be an important moment to recollect the War Between the States.  Sometimes that seems long ago.  Then we read books, such as Russell Freedman's wonderful Lincoln: A Photobiography or Candace Fleming's The Lincolns: A Scrapbook, visit the battlefields of Gettysburg or Antietam or Shiloh, see the first capital of the Confederacy in Montgomery, contemplate the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., listen to the wistful tunes of the day, re-read Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, examine dagguereotypes, consider the long-term effects of slavery, listen to the continuing battle of states rights vs. federal rights, and suddenly those days don't seem so long ago.  The historical anniversary is welcome.

Knight Letter Review

Thanks to Claire Imholtz for her  review of The Place of Lewis Carroll in Children's Literature in Winter 2010 issue of The Knight Letter, which is The Newsletter of the Lewis Carroll Society of North America.  She concludes that it's a "most informative, enlightening, and highly recommended book, an important addition to the literature of general Carrollian readers and academics."  That was generous of her and I appreciate her thorough review and generally positive notes.

I have been in touch with editors at Routledge, the book's publisher, and may have more positive news about it soon.  I'll post more info when it's available.

Mary Blair's "It's a Small World"

Mary Blair's artwork and creative ideas for Disney are legendery.  She had a modernistic, more abstract vision that Walt Disney appreciated but was very different from the drawings in his animated films that are rounder, softer in town and cuter, in a different way.  Blair is so revered at Disney that she is lauded in a special section of Disneyland's museum area as a Creative Innovator.  She's in a hall of luminaries that includes astronauts, inventors, politicians, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Walt Disney and others.

A chapter in my book, The Place of Lewis Carroll in Children's Literature, has a section critically analyzing a book recently published by Disney that uses Mary Blair's conceptual art for Disney's Alice in Wonderland film along with a text loosely adapted from Lewis Carroll's by children's author Jon Scieszka.  Here's a link to a presentation, with images, based on that chapter.

For this blog on our Disneyland trip, I am posting photos of the "It's a Small World" ride to show what it looked like during the Christmas 2010-2011 season.  The music had been changed to an amalgam of the original "Small World" tune along with Christmas carols.  The dolls and scenery within the ride had been decorated for Christmas to reflect the different culture's Christmas, or end of the year, celebrations. 

A panorama of "It's a Small World" at night

Floating along the front of the ride, while going into the ride buildingThe clock area where the dolls come out and walk around.

Floating into the ride during the day

The ride during the day. It's much whiter and doesn't have the same presence within the park as it does at night.

Inside the ride the colors are bright, the dolls look rather cute, slightly dated but still charming and over the top.

The music is constantly playing, a little like treacle. Note the poinsettias and other holiday decorations

Just happy to be in front of "It's a Small World"

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Disneyland!

Disneyland is still the most magical place on Earth I'm happy to report. Like so many kids who watched Disney's Sunday night TV show, I was fascinated with Disneyland in California.  My parents took our family once, in the late 1960s.  When we arrived in Disneyland, I wanted to go everywhere, see everything that I had seen on television.  Instead, my parents made us stop on Main Street.  Not to watch a parade, or wait in line to see Mickey Mouse, or anything interesting like that.  No.  My parents, always pharmacists, wanted to hang out in the drug store on Main Street USA.  It's not like they hadn't seen drug stores before.  They worked in them.  They even collected a few antique drug store items.  But they couldn't budge for what seemed like an hour as they looked at every detail of that drug store.  I don't remember them complaining something was wrong with it -- as Disney people work hard to get the essence right.  But I do remember being enormously disappointed at my introduction to Disneyland.

This year, my son, my wife and I visited Disneyland before going to MLA in downtown LA.  We have been wanting to go for years.  Some of us have never been and some of us hadn't been for a very long time.  So the experience was new and exuberant for us.  I'll post some of the photos from our trip over a few blog posts.There's always a light in the apartment above the fire station to remember when Walt Disney lived at Disneyland.

Main Street Disneyland at night. The drug store isn't there any more. We did have to check.The fireworks over the castle were particularly spectacular. The firework show told a story and featured a flying Tinkerbell.We had to get our photo taken with the Mad Hatter and Alice, of course.