Breezes from Wonderland: A Forum for Folklore, Children’s Literature, and Storytelling

Here’s Maureen Dowd on the stunning film version of Andersen’s “The Red Shoes.” Pressburger and Powell’s brilliant film brings Andersen’s story into the twentieth century, with a doomed heroine torn between love and ballet. Here’s Dowd on the Andersen story:

“The Red Shoes” is based on a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale of the same name about a little girl who becomes vain about her red shoes and gets confused about her priorities. As in the movie, the shoes force the girl to dance day and night, and then she dies. But the fable has an even grimmer coda: The girl asks an executioner to cut off her feet.

Interesting that Dowd left out an important element in Andersen’s tale: the girl’s conversion experience at the end–her recognition that piety and prayer are superior to beauty and mobility.

 Published in:Children's Literature, Uncategorized |on November 16th, 2009 |No Comments »

 http://www.boston.com/ae/movies/articles…

Ty Burr worries that children’s stories translated into the cinematic medium risk losing their “innocence.” He makes the point that successful stories for children “address profound aspects of childhood while seeming to look the other way.” Films, by contrast, refuse to look away and offer so much information that little room is left for the imagination. I was reminded of early anxieties about sound film. In an essay on the Culture Industry, Horkheimer and Adorno worried that film would leave “no room for imagination or reflection of the part of the audience.” The “victims” of sound film are so “absorbed” by what takes place on screen that they end up equating the cinematic spectacle with reality.

Looking at Burr’s inventory of cinematic adaptations that “work” or “don’t work,” it seems fairly obvious that the success of an adaptation has little to do with “too much information.” The MGM version of The Wizard of Oz is actually better than the book, and it is full of fanciful excesses. Or take Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Why does one work and the other fall flat?

Here’s Bollywood’s update of “Aladdin and the Magic Lamp,” a story added to the French translation of the Arabian Nights by Antoine Galland, who had the tale from a Syrian storyteller. Aladdin may have his origins in Arabic cultures, but he is actually Chinese, though living in an Islamic culture in China. Note that the press copy for this film describes India as the “land of myths and legends”–a not so subtle effort to claim that Aladin is really an Indian hero. Is the new spelling part of an effort to make Aladin native?

“A Tale of Secrets and Mysteries, Power and Passion, and a Loser”–the trailer reminds us that fairy-tale heroes often begin as simpletons, numbskulls, dummies, or, in today’s terminology, losers.

This is the second Bollywood production, the first going back to the 1960s. “Everything is possible. Look at this!” is spoken with a distinctly U.S. midwestern accent.

Thanks to Holly Hutchison for sending me a link to the trailer.

Here’s the website for the trailer and a press release follows:

 http://www.apple.com/trailers/independen…

From the land of myths and legends – India – comes a fantasy adventure for the entire family. Directed by Sujoy Ghosh, ‘Aladin’ is a modern re-imagining of the classic tale of ‘Aladin and The Magic Lamp’. Aladin Chatterjee (Riteish Deshmukh) lives in the city of Khwaish, an orphan who has been bullied since childhood by Kasim and his gang. But his life changes when Jasmine (Jacquiline Fernandes) gives him a magic lamp – because it lets loose the genie Genius (Amitabh Bachchan). Desperate to grant him 3 wishes and seek the end of his contract with the Magic Lamp, the rock-star Genius makes Aladin’s life difficult until the real threat looms on the horizon : the ex-genie Ringmaster (Sanjay Dutt). Why does Ringmaster want to kill Aladin? What is the dark secret about Aladin’s past that Genius is carrying? And what is Aladin’s destiny? Find out more in this swashbuckling fantasy adventure film from Eros Entertainment and Boundscript Motion Pictures.

Psychologists at UCSB and at the University of British Columbia make the following claim: reading texts that challenge our ability to make meaning also enhances cognitive mechanisms related to implicit learning functions. The researchers had their subjects read a story by Kafka, then tested them on detecting patterns and structures. Below is a link to a fuller report on the study in The Guardian. The findings remind me that nonsense and the surreal challenge us to do the work of creating meaning in ways that “realistic” narratives do not. Noam Chomsky’s “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” was constructed as a sentence that produces nonsense in semantic terms, yet the minute we read it, we work hard to make sense of it by turning literal meaning into figurative meaning. “Colorless” becomes “dull” and green becomes “immature,” and so on. Is there poetry in Chomsky’s “nonsense”? And what drives us to turn the nonsensical and surreal into something meaningful?

This week, in my course on the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen, we read Bruno Bettelheim on the uses of enchantment and what he calls the “struggle for meaning.” Robert Darnton’s famous essay “Peasants Tell Tales” has the subtitle “The Meaning of Mother Goose.” The psychoanalyst and the historian provide competing models for constructing the “meaning” of fairy tales, with one arguing that children make psychological sense on their own of fairy tales, and the other making the case for the fairy tales as repositories of folk wisdom and programs for survival.

And to return to Kafka: his stories have often been compared to fairy tales. Patrick Bridgwater’s Kafka: Gothic and Fairytale elaborates on the fairy-tale quality of Kafka’s shorter narratives, pointing out resemblances to fairy tales and to what he calls the anti-fairytale.

Here’s to more nonsense in children’s books. And now, more than ever, I understand the importance–if not the meaning–of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.

 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/sep…

 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/22/books/…

“There Was a Child Went Forth” by Walt Whitman

Spring

by Karla Kuskin

Just returned from a wonderful conference at Hollins University in Roanoke. Hollins runs a summer M.A. degree program in Children’s Literature that attracts many notable writers, illustrators, and scholars. I was deeply impressed by the vibrant intellectual community that forms there–great talks and lively conversation in a utopian setting, complete with grazing horses on campus. (Margaret Wise Brown is a graduate of the university.) This summer, Ruth Sanderson, Candice Ransom, Tina Hanlon, Amanda Cockrell, and Brian Atteberry (among many others) are on the faculty. Above an illustration from Ruth Sanderson’s “Twelve Dancing Princesses.”
Here’s a link to the M.A. Program at Hollins:
 http://www.hollins.edu/grad/childlit/chi…

Here's the link to the trailer for Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, coming to a theater near you in March.  Here's hoping that Tim Burton does better with Lewis Carroll than he did with Roald Dahl.

alhttp://www.traileraddict.com/trailer/alice-in-wonderland/teaser-trailer

Notice anything interesting about the house and balloons?

In Trumpet of the Swan, the “splendid sensation” of flight inspires Louis to say: “I never knew that flying could be such fun. This is great. This is sensational. This is superb. I feel exalted, and I’m not dizzy.” In Feeling like a Kid, Jerry Griswold has a wonderful chapter on “Lightness” and writes with expressive intensity about Peter Pan, The Light Princess, Mary Poppins, The People Could Fly, and other books. He recently reviewed the new Disney Pixar film Up for the LA Times.

 http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/new…

Anyone have more information on the test screenings?

 http://pictureyear.blogspot.com/2009/06/…

Over a year ago, rumors began to circulate that the $75 million dollar film of “Where The Wild Things Are” was in trouble. Directed by Spike Jonze, with a script by Dave Eggers, monsters from the Jim Henson company, and music by Karen O (of the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s), the film adaptation of the Maurice Sendak children’s classic had intriguing creative/hipster potential. But the word was that it too dark and scary and the actor playing the mischievous Max had failed to impress the brass at Warner Brothers. Test screenings were reputedly disastrous.

It’s now slated for an October 2009 release, but if the above trailer is anything to go by, it certainly looks visually impressive. I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

nbsp;http://loislowry.typepad.com/lowry_updat…

Lois Lowry has a blog, and you can follow her travels, travails, and triumphs on line. Don’t miss the moving recollection of Anthony, a child who participated in the Fresh Air Program and spent three summers with the Lowry family.