Shen, Qinna

English

Scholarship;  Research;  and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College

Bryn Mawr College
Scholarship, Research, and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr
College
German Faculty Research and Scholarship German
2016
Book Review: Fairy-Tale Films beyond Disney:
International Perspectives. Edited by Jack Zipes,
Pauline Greenhill, and Kendra Magnus-Johnston.
Qinna Shen
Bryn Mawr College, qshen@brynmawr.edu
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Shen, Qinna 2016. Book Review: Fairy-Tale Films beyond Disney: International Perspectives. Edited by Jack Zipes, Pauline Greenhill,
and Kendra Magnus-Johnston. Fabula. Volume 57.3-4: 354–358.
Fairy-Tale Films beyond Disney: International Perspectives. Edited by Jack Zipes, Pauline 
Greenhill, and Kendra Magnus-Johnston. New York: Routledge, 2016. Pp. xviii + 355. 
Paperback $49.95. ISBN 978-0-415-70930-9. 
 
Disney and Hollywood films contribute significantly to America’s soft power around the world. 
Resistance against US cultural imperialism has been widespread but arduous. Jack Zipes, whose 
antipathy toward global Disneyfication is well known, calls attention in the first chapter of this 
volume to “the great cultural tsunami of fairy-tale films,” observing that “globalization and 
postmodern technology have provided filmmakers throughout the world with the means to 
challenge the Disney worldview and conventional narrative” (7). This long-awaited volume 
brings together an international array of authors who explore national or regional fairy-tale film 
histories on every continent but Antarctica. In general, the authors examine Disney’s hegemony 
in a given nation or region and describe the efforts that have been made to challenge it. To that 
end, authors extrapolate distinctive national specificities of the fairy-tale films they discuss. A 
recurrent theme in the chapters is the tension between the maintenance of national characteristics 
and their erosion in the face of globalization and the onslaught of blockbusters from Disney and 
other American corporations. Admittedly, it is hard to compete with Hollywood’s commercial 
successes. The chapters nonetheless convincingly demonstrate the vitality of fairy-tale films 
around the world and cite many that display more aesthetic experimentation and critical 
capacities than Disney productions do. In addition, readers are introduced to important authors, 
collectors, filmmakers, and their works. 
In order to achieve its global perspective, the volume must define fairy-tale films broadly. 
A number of the regions surveyed here (e.g., Asia, Africa, Australia, and South America) have 
hardly produced any noteworthy straightforward film adaptations of classical European tales. 
Instead, filmmakers draw on their own local cultural legacy, adapting stories, legends, and myths 
that are comparable to European fairy tales in narrative, structure, and motifs. Many of the 
adaptations, however, are not billed as fairy-tale films. One reason for avoiding the fairy-tale 
label is that, as Bacchilega points out in her chapter on Italy, filmmakers are afraid of “limiting 
one’s audience to children in an already small market” (105). Therefore, fairy-tale-like narratives 
are often combined with elements of other film genres, such as horror, fantasy, comedy, or 
thrillers, and audiences perceive them as such.  
During the second half of the twentieth century, the international appraisal of Disney’s 
influence shifted from rather positive to negative. In the early days, many filmmakers were 
indebted to Disney’s innovative animation technology. Even Soviet live-action filmmakers such 
as Sergei Eisenstein were influenced by Disney’s works and production methods, while Snow 
White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), for example, “remained a highly-esteemed film for Soviet 
animators” (Balina and Beumers, 126). But as Disney gained a virtual monopoly in the 
animation market, its rapacious impact was perceived as unwelcome. The Danes, fellow 
countrymen of Hans Christian Andersen, believed they could “build an entire film industry to 
animate his tales” and “could outperform Walt Disney, who was considered a capable artisan, 
but no true artist” (Oxfeldt, 110). The chapters point out schools of animation in other countries 
that rival Disney’s successes. In Japan, Hayao Miyazaki’s and Isao Takahata’s anime films use 
traditional hand-drawn animation in unconventional ways and go beyond the Disney model 
(Zipes, 2). In addition, Japanese fairy tales rarely end with “happily ever after” as Disney’s do 
(Napier). The animation techniques of Italian filmmakers Anton Gino Domeneghini and 
Emanuele Luzzati provides a stylistic alternative to both Disney’s classic and computer-animated 
models (Bacchilega, 104). Indeed, Soviet animated shorts could also surpass Disney (Balina and 
Beumers, 132). In France, which has a long anti-American intellectual history, postwar 
reimaginings and queer tales challenge Disney’s fairy-tale hegemony (Duggan). But as the 
French critic Pascal Vimenet commented, “Disney animation remains a reference, positive or 
negative” (Duggan, 64).  
Instead of attempting to summarize the content of each of the book’s twenty chapters, I 
will focus on some of the general observations and conclusions that emerge from the richly 
informative and insightful essays. But first, it will be helpful to describe the contours of the 
book, which begins with three general chapters. After Zipes sets the stage for the giant “cultural 
tsunami” of fairy-tale films, Kendra Magnus-Johnston examines live-action biopics of authors, 
collectors, and filmmakers associated with the fairy-tale canon, including Andersen, Jacob and 
Wilhelm Grimm, George Méliès, Walt Disney, and J. M. Barrie, and notes how the biopics 
recast the lives of these figures. Sofia Samatar treats global representations of tales from A 
Thousand and One Nights as one example of “traveling orientalism” and a visual spectacle of the 
exotic (39). Then the volume turns to regional traditions, beginning with four chapters on 
Western European fairy-tale films in Great Britain (Paul Wells), France (Anne E. Duggan), 
Germany (Jack Zipes), Italy (Cristina Bacchilega), and the Scandinavian countries (Elisabeth 
Oxfeldt), and then moving eastward to cover the very important traditions in Soviet and post-
Soviet Russia (Marina Balina and Birgit Beumers), the Czech Republic and Slovakia (Peter 
Hames), and Poland (Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak and Marek Oziewicz). Four chapters treat 
Asian countries: Japan (Susan Napier), the People’s Republic of China (Jing Li), India (Sadhana 
Naithani), and Korea (Sung-Ae Lee). The remaining chapters deal with African (Jessica Tiffin), 
Australian (Elizabeth Bullen and Naarah Sawers), Canadian (Pauline Greenhill and Steven 
Kohm), and Latin American (Laura Hubner) fairy-tale films, with a concluding chapter by Jack 
Zipes on American fairy-tale films and their future. 
The essays give overviews of the development of fairy-tale films in conjunction with 
each territory’s political history as well as its cinema history, with which fairy-tale films are 
inextricably intertwined. Indeed, focusing on fairy-tale films leads several of the authors to 
conclude that this genre constitutes a significant part of national cinema. The chapters also 
pursue individual themes, for example, suppressed desire and the aesthetic innovation in British 
animation; the use of Aesopian language in Communist and post-Communist Eastern Europe; 
romance and gender politics in post-revolutionary China; the fairy-tale aspect of Bollywood 
films, which generally show fewer critical tendencies; a predilection for horror in Korean tales; 
the lost child motif in Australian films; crime in Canadian examples; and decolonization and 
societal problems in Latin America’s novo cinema. What distinguishes fairy-tale films outside 
the U.S. from Disney/Hollywood treatments is a dose of realism as well as the subversive 
function with which fairy tales are endowed. 
The volume’s global approach to fairy-tale films strongly demonstrates the North-South 
divide and, with it, the prevalent anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles in many regions, 
including India, Korea, Africa, and South America—places traditionally regarded as belonging 
to the Third World—as well as the erstwhile colonies Australia and Canada. The chapters on 
these areas address indigenous traditions, the colonial legacy, and postcolonial fairy-tale films. In 
Africa, for example, beast fables assisted colonialization in constructing the continent as “wild” 
and “primitive” (Tiffin, 230). The Japanese colonizers in Korea also used fairy tales for 
propaganda purposes. In the anti-colonial struggle, these places resisted European and US film 
imports and developed nationally distinctive cinemas. The book contains many references to the 
use and abuse of fairy tales by colonizers and political regimes. 
In the final chapter, Zipes concludes that “[a]ctually, we can never get ‘beyond’ the 
Disney production of fairy-tale films in the twenty-first century. That is, we can never get 
beyond notions of the well-made conventional fairy-tale film with its stereotypical characters and 
beyond the commercial exploitation of oral and literary fairy tales and marketing that panders to 
the lowest common denominator among viewers,” which Zipes identifies as the marketers 
themselves (278). But in light of the improvement that is already taking place in Disney’s gender 
depictions, Zipes remains hopeful that change will come, and also from within Disney. 
Therefore, fairy-tale films, even those by Disney itself, must go beyond Disney. 
This is an ambitious and well-edited volume. Praise aside, an inadvertent mistake in the 
preface may escape many readers: the editors have confused “the Republic of China” (xvi), 
which today refers to Taiwan only, with the People’s Republic of China, which Li’s chapter in 
fact discusses. This error is, however, more than offset by the volume’s conscious and 
conscientious endeavor to break out of Eurocentric research by embracing a global study of the 
fairy-tale film. The film summaries are enjoyable to read and the analytic discussions are 
accessible to nonspecialists. The most famous fairy tales of Andersen and the Brothers Grimm 
have become a repertoire for world cinema to draw on. It is intriguing to see how a story can be 
adapted and reinterpreted in various new ways, adding national and cultural flavor to a 
traditional tale. Teachers of fairy tales may discover here lesser-known films that lie outside the 
conventional European or Disney canons and are suitable for classroom use. In this way, the 
laudable anti-eurocentric practice in scholarship can be translated into pedagogy. 
 
Qinna Shen, Bryn Mawr College 
 


Book Review: Fairy-Tale Films beyond Disney: International Perspectives. Edited by Jack Zipes, Pauline Greenhill, and Kendra Magnus-Johnston.

https://repository.brynmawr.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1015&context=german_pubs

Book Review: Fairy-Tale Films beyond Disney: International Perspectives. Edited by Jack Zipes, Pauline Greenhill, and Kendra Magnus-Johnston.

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Scholarship; Research; and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College