This article titled “Hollywood wants Red Riding Hood and Snow White to weave a box office spell” was written by Paul Harris in New York, for The Observer on Sunday 6th March 2011 00.14 UTC

Prepare for a fairytale invasion. Hollywood movie studios, in their constant quest for remakes and modern spins on old stories, are about to unleash a new wave of film versions of ancient European folktales.

The list includes an updated version of Little Red Riding Hood, two films based on the Snow White story, a movie of the old English fable Jack and the Beanstalk, a 3D Pinocchio, a version of Beauty and the Beast set in modern America called Beastly, and the unusually titled Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters.

The recent release of a new Disney cartoon version of the Rapunzel story called Tangled will be followed this weekend by the release of Beastly, whose monster is a high-school jock magically turned into an ugly freak due to his vanity and arrogance.

But the fairytale revolution will really get into top gear with the debut in the US of Little Red Riding Hood, starring the rising young actress Amanda Seyfried.

Like many of the coming rush of fairytale films, the movie takes the format of an ancient folktale, set in a village in a deep forest menaced by a predatory wolf, and gives it a contemporary feel.

In this case the project is clearly aimed at a teenage audience obsessed with awakening sexuality and the supernatural. Its director is Catherine Hardwicke of the hit vampire movie Twilight. “This Little Red Riding Hood looks completely made for the Twilight generation. It looks like it is teenage angst and very pale people,” said Professor Jonathan Gray, a popular culture expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The new films are attracting some of the biggest names in Hollywood. Jack the Giant Killer, which is to be directed by Bryan Singer, features Ewan McGregor, Stanley Tucci and Bill Nighy. The Hansel and Gretel film has signed up British actress Gemma Arterton. But perhaps the most anticipated are the twin Snow White films. Snow White and the Huntsman has Charlize Theron playing the villainous Queen, while Julia Roberts – still perhaps the biggest female star in Hollywood – has taken the same role in The Brothers Grimm: Snow White. “Julia was our first and only choice to play the Queen. She is an icon, and we know that she will make this role her own,” said producer Ryan Kavanaugh.

Nor is it just A-list actors who are being drawn to the genre. One of the main forces behind the new Pinocchio is the top Mexican director Guillermo del Toro, who is famed for his dark, fantastical visions. They may be a world away from the child-friendly film versions of the legend that most people are familiar with, but experts say his role in the new venture is no surprise.

Though previous Hollywood treatments of fairytales, such as the classic 1937 Snow White cartoon, have often been aimed squarely at family audiences, the ancient stories offer a wealth of opportunities to probe much darker themes. Beneath the magical surface of a fairytale, with its castles and princesses, often lurk ideas around sexuality, the dangers of growing up and leaving home, relationships between children and parents, and the threat that adult strangers can pose.

“Fairytales can be quite dark,” said Gray. He pointed out that the idea of locking up a pretty princess in a tower – as in the story of Rapunzel – or putting one to sleep with a poisoned apple because she is so beautiful, as in Snow White – can be seen as conservative morality fables about the dangers of young female sexual power.

“There is often a theme about the threat of female sexuality. They can be about imposing rules and limiting sexual power with acceptable boundaries. When Snow White hangs out with men, they turn out to be seven dwarves, and so they are not a sexual threat,” he said.

Such themes certainly seem to have helped attract Hardwicke to the Red Riding Hood story. In a recent interview with Newsweek, she said: “Why did she get in bed with the wolf … It represents a dark animal nature which is close to sexuality. In the traditional story, the wolf cross-dresses and lures her into bed. That’s pretty kinky right there!”

But there are other reasons behind Hollywood’s latest trend. Movie executives, faced with squeezed bottom lines and a US economy still struggling to recover from financial crisis, see fairytales as potential money-spinners. Hollywood history is littered with successful adaptations and the stories are already familiar to moviegoers, which means marketing a film becomes easier and cheaper.

“The entertainment industry’s appetite is voracious for content, plots and ideas and these fairytales work. They’ve been around for ever,” said Barry Brummett, a communications professor at the University of Texas, Austin.

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This article titled “Tangled: ironically ever after” was written by Emily Barr, for The Guardian on Friday 14th January 2011 15.00 UTC

Here is a one-question quiz for you. An animation of a Grimm fairytale is due to hit our screens in a fortnight. Do you think that Tangled is a straightforward, retelling of the brothers Grimm’s version of Rapunzel? Or might it be a wildly postmodern, turning-convention-on-its-head rollercoaster ride with a kickass heroine, a wisecracking dude of a hero, and a crone who is scared of ageing, in place of the “wicked enchantress”?

Yes, gather round, children, and sit comfortably, for it is postmodern fairytale time once again. The smashing of storytelling convention is so normal that it has become a convention all of its own. Take a familiar story. Mix it up a bit and wink knowingly at the audience over the characters’ shoulders. Repeat with a “2″ on the end, and then with a “3″.

When postmodern fairy stories work, they can be joyful, as in much of the Shrek canon, and indeed, the original post-modern fairytale, The Princess Bride from 1987. And Tangled has been well received in the States. It is Disney’s 50th animation, and one of John Lasseter’s first projects as Disney’s chief creative officer. It will be worth watching; there are not many films whose trailers entice my four-year-old girl and nine-year-old boy equally.

When they do not work, they can be dire. The DVD sale rack is littered with them: The Ugly Duckling and Me; Happily N’Ever After; Happily N’Ever After 2; and so on. Hoodwinked!, a melding of the tale of Little Red Riding Hood and a noirish detective thriller, was popular with many, but I found it a step too far. It was exhausting, and it tried too hard. It left me shouting: “Invent your own characters!” at the screen.

Not so long ago, a film of a fairytale, or indeed another traditional tale, would generally involve a faithful, though sanitised, retelling of the source material. Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, all animated by Disney, were versions of tales collected by the Grimms, and all left out the most fantastically gory details. In the Grimm story, Cinderella’s stepsisters slice off a toe and part of a heel, respectively, to force their feet into the slipper. Each fools the prince, and it is only Cinderella’s friends, the birds on the trees (kept in by Disney and expanded into a menagerie that included a community of mice), who point out the blood dripping from their shoes as he drives past with his newly betrothed. There is no fairy godmother in the Grimm version, though Disney did not invent her: she was plucked from Charles Perrault’s version of the tale. Grimm’s Cinderella is saved by the birds and her dead mother.

Meanwhile, in the Grimms’ Snow White, the wicked queen has the hunter bring her Snow White’s lung and liver, which she eats, little realising that they are the innards of a wild boar, not a girl. The story ends at Snow White’s wedding, when the evil queen discovers that “iron slippers had already been put upon the fire, and they were brought in with tongs, and set before her. Then she was forced to put on the red-hot shoes, and dance until she dropped down dead.” That is a film I would rather like to see.

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm collected folk tales from German villages, their interest mainly academic and linguistic. Their versions, while more brutal than the animations, tended to leave out (or their sources, knowing that the Grimms were staunch Christians, omitted to tell them about) the more unpalatable details.

Unlike the Tangled heroine, the Grimms’ Rapunzel gives birth to twins while exiled in the desert; in earlier versions of the story, it is her expanding waistline, rather than her slip of the tongue, that gives her acquaintance with the prince away to the witch. Sleeping Beauty was once awakened not by a kiss, but by a baby she had conceived and borne while asleep, sucking a piece of flax from her wound to lift the spell.

Disney’s Snow White, the studio’s first animation in 1937, was a girl of her times. She was happy to spend her days cleaning up after seven men and stupidly opening the door to suspect apple vendors. She was so passive about attracting her prince that she was actually dead when she met him. Similarly, Cinderella’s story seems to show us that finding a rich husband is far better than working. Pinocchio, meanwhile, gets to go to Pleasure Island, drink alcohol, smoke cigars and play pool with the boys.

Through the years, Disney heroines have evolved, slightly, with the times. Belle, of Beauty and the Beast, is entranced by books. The Little Mermaid’s Ariel is insatiably curious about humans. Aladdin’s Princess Jasmine is determined to marry whoever she wants, whereas Mulan leads an entire army into battle. The very notion of the wedding followed by the “happily ever after” has been tempered by the prevalence of sequels: we have Cinderella II: Dreams Come True and Cinderella III: A Twist in Time, implying that all is not necessarily tranquil for ever once a girl is married off. There are two sequels to Aladdin, and we are promised that Hoodwinked Too! Hood vs Evil will be along later this year.

In 2001, everything changed when Dreamworks strode confidently into the arena with Shrek. It is hard, now, to remember how exhilarating Shrek’s arrival was, with its affectionate co opting of traditional characters ranging from the three little pigs to the three blind mice. It was irreverent yet good-hearted, it winked knowingly at the audience, and it still had a happy ending.

The appeal was immediate. Most of us are familiar with the traditional characters, so to see Puss in Boots transform himself from a cute kitten into a wild warrior was enchanting; as was the gingerbread man being tortured by being dunked into a glass of milk. It was an entertaining, involving idea, and spawned a wildly successful franchise. We live in a postmodern age, the age of Twitter, and in-jokes; playing with convention and self-referencing always go down well. Shrek’s success meant that others were bound to follow, and follow they did.

In 2007, Disney gave us the enchanting Enchanted, which sees an animated princess, Gisele, sent to another world by her stepmother-in-law, emerging in modern New York. Most of the other offerings are less inspired. Would you like a copy of the straight-to-DVD Happily N’Ever After 2: Snow White – Another Bite @ The Apple? Are you sure? I have one on my desk.

When Hoodwinked came out, four years ago, I felt that it was time to stop the postmodernism. It now seemed to be a lazy way of getting an easy laugh. The studios are perfectly capable of inventing their own stories, as Pixar have done brilliantly for 25 years.

Disney says it has no plans for any more animated fairytales; and if Tangled does indeed prove to be the last, then so much the better. Perhaps we will all live happily ever after.

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