The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
In its simplest usage, a fairytale is a story for children. Most modern fairytales originated from the interpretations by The Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen and others like Charles Perrault, although all of these draw from earlier folk tales that have origins in oral tradition. It should also be noted that many of these, especially the Grimm Brothers originals, often have darker elements that are usually sanitised by modern child-friendly tellings.
Few fairytales actually feature Fairies. Most fairytales concern adolescents or innocents – children, orphans, princesses, while antagonists are figures like evil stepmothers or wicked witches. The story frequently requires a journey – often through The Woods – and the innocent undergoing peril to find rescue (often from a prince) and arrive at a place where they receive the gift of true love whereupon comes the refrain “… and they lived happily ever after.” The fantastic enters in the form of magic, talking animals and witches.
There have been a great many fairytale adaptations since the early days of cinema. For a time, Disney produced a series of classic animated versions and there have been a great many other works produced both animated and live-action, all drawing from classic and familiar tales. A number of these are musical and/or ballet interpretations.
There is also body of deconstructed fairytales where the elements of familiar stories are put to very different usages. The most common of these is seeing the fairytale updated into modern surroundings often with comical or less-than-innocent results, or of stories where Little Red Riding Hood encounters werewolves or Hansel and Gretel’s witch is a cannibal. Other versions posit the idea that characters from classic fairytales inhabit shared worlds.
One of the more enjoyable Disney animated films from the latter half of the 00s. Featuring Disney’s first Black heroine, this embraces its New Orleans setting and turns Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale on its head with enjoyable results
Likeable animated fantasy made for young children
Swashbuckling fairytale that treads a fine line between deconstruction and parody, while reveling in a script where the dialogue positively dances. Perfectly cast – a film that few do not come out enjoying its ebullient fantasy
Another of the cheaply made fairytale adaptations from Cannon Films with the bizarre casting of Christopher Walken as Puss in Boots
An obscure animated version of the classic fairytale that comes with excruciating puns, much slapstick and has clearly been animated on a low budget
Spinoff of the popular Antonio Banderas voiced character from the Shrek sequels, this is lightweight and amiable but can be quickly forgotten
One of the cheap fairytale adaptations that Cannon Films made during the 1980s
Catherine Hardwcke’s adapts the fairytale as a dark adult fantasy where there has been the clear intention to pitch it to Twilight audiences but the results are surprisingly good
Sumptuous, beautifully made ballet fantasy from Michael Powell based on the Hans Christian Andersen fairytale. A Technicolor spectacle at a time when most films were still made in black-and-white
Syfy Channel film that seems to offer the intriguing premise of a Modernised Little Red Riding Hood but only deals with this in the vaguest ways. Otherwise this is a standard werewolf film and contains maybe the crappiest CGI wolf transformation scenes ever
Another of Cannon Films cheaply made fairytales with Amy Irving starring in an adaptation of Rumpelstiltskin
German animated film about the adventures of Snow White’s Seven Dwarves. Lightweight and trivial, this feels like it has come along ten years too late to the fad for fairytale parodies and mash-ups we had in the mid-2000s with films like Shrek and Hoodwinked!
Before this was spun out into a series of ho-hum sequels, the original was an animated film that burst with a freshness and a series of winning voice characterisations
Shrek was a fresh and original hit. The first of four insipid sequels, this seems to merely coast by on our liking of the characters while upping the fairytale parody
The fourth of the Shrek films. By this point, the freshness and originality of the first film has been buried under animated film formula, while the plot is a tired rehash of It’s a Wonderful Life
The third of the Shrek films settles in with a formulaic blandness where the characters turn up more because everyone expects them to than the film finds much for them to do
The Asylum made Avengers Grimm as a copycat of The Avengers films, featuring a team-up of fairytale heroines, and so for the release of Suicide Squad they made this sequel featuring a team-up of fairytale villains. Both films are utterly incomprehensible and require you to essentially ignore the originals
A softcore erotic version of the popular fairytale. Largely the film gets the fairytale over and done with in the first eight minutes and thereafter focuses on the erotic tumblings of Beauty awakened in the present-day
One of the finest of all Disney animated films, an adaptation of the fairytale made with the full artistic resources that studio could bring to bear
One of the cheap fairytale adaptations made by Cannon Films in the 1980s. A dreary impoverished run through by the numbers with Morgan Fairchild as the Wicked Stepmother and Tahnee Welch in the title role
Catherine Breillat, a director usually known for tackling issues of female sexuality, adapts the classic fairytale in a muddled effort that singularly fails to fly either as fairytale or deconstruction
In the early 2010s, we had a series of fairytales rewritten as dark adult fantasies; The Asylum served up their own cheap copies – this was their version of Maleficent. Directed by actor Casper Van Dien, this not uninterestingly plays out as a fantasy adventure that follows the prince’s attempts to enter the castle
A musical adaptation of Cinderella from the Sherman Brothers, behind the hit of Mary Poppins
Lightweight British animated adaptation of the Hans Christian Andersen fairytale made for children
The Hallmark tv mini-series version of the Hans Christian Andersen fairytale is lushly produced but tends to plod when it should come to life as fantasy
One of the better of Cannon Films cheap fairytale adaptations featuring a grandly over the top Diana Rigg as the Wicked Stepmother
Caroline Thompson, a regular Tim Burton scriptwriter, directs a uniquely revisionist version of the fairytale in which she digs in to explain the origins of many of the familiar aspects of the story
The live-action remake of Disney’s Snow White comes surrounded by controversy on every side and served to make it a critical and box-office flop that left doubt over the future of the Disney remake industry
Beautifully made and very adult version of the fairytale, which seems determined to play up the terror aspect of the title, resulting in a work that seems a long way away from Disney
The second of 2012’s Snow White films after Mirror Mirror, this turns the fairytale into an epic fantasy. Well produced but ultimately a film that lacks anything unique nor pushes far enough into the dark fantasy it promises to be
The first full-length animated film ever made and the beginning of the Disney tradition. A superlative effort, full of an adorable anthropomorphism where Disney instinctively grasps all the elements of the formula
The Three Stooges are transplanted into a retelling of the fairytale, although their slapstick inanity feels drowned out amid the maudlin banality and Cinemascope spectacle
An amazing reinterpretation of the classical fairytale as modern ballet for adults. This does amazing things to reinvent the original and is visually extraordinary
Nicely animated film from Richard Rich that tells the story of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake in which a princess is turned into a swan by an evil sorcerer
A trio of tales from the world’s oldest fairytale collection – but quite different to anything you expect … While there is all the magic, ogres and princesses, this is a beautifully lush film made for adults and less about simple homilies that about fate and its cruel twists
Studio Ghibli adaptation of a classic Japanese folktale from Hayao Hiyazaki’s mentor Isao Takahata. This is a slower, very different film than Hayao Miyazaki’s, the animation designed like a traditional Japanese woodprint. Never quite soars like Miyazaki’s films do but not without its charms
Disney fairytale Lite. The story of Rapunzel gets hiply modernised and is now no more than a cute adventure/romance about a handsome rogue and a girl who has magical hair. Eminently forgettable Disney animation.
Hallmark mini-series set in a world 200 years after the classic fairytales have occurred, this wittily deflates or contrasts classic story elements with the present-day
Animated film from Don Bluth, an insipid adaptation of the fairytale that eventually bogs down as a comic picaresque (*)
George Pal adapts the Brothers Grimm fairytale with Russ Tamblyn as a miniature youth amid colourful effects and extended slapstick scenes
Amiable British animated film for young children based on the Hans Christian Andersen fairytale
Charming Claymation animated adaptation of the Hans Christian Andersen fairytale from Russia that manages to be a mordant satire on Communism into the bargain
An adult and frequently horrific retelling of the Cinderella story from the Ugly Stepsister’s point-of-view
No relation to the disastrous Chevy Chase film, a French romantic comedy that has modernised retellings of various fairytales wound into the plot, often being deflated or turned on their head
From the great and overlooked Curtis Harrington, a Grand Old Dames film with Shelley Winters going mad in the Baby Jane vein. This also becomes a modernised retelling of Hansel and Gretel
A low-budget film that prefigures the big-budget Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters in turning the fairytale brother and sister into witchslayers in a generic fantasy adventure plot
Anthology of Brothers Grimm stories from George Pal where the brothers are wound in as characters. The film’s effectiveness is killed by Pal pitching everything down at a mawkish and simple-minded level
Strange surrealist New Zealand made film that emerges as a Brothers Grimm fairytale as directed by a David Lynch or a Guy Maddin