Once upon a time, there were these things called fairytales. The Brothers Grimm collected them into books. Fathers, mothers and grandparents spun them to little tikes sitting by the fireplace on a stormy night.
They were stories of magic, princesses, monsters, and heroes. For hundreds (if not thousands) of years, mankind has been exposed to fairytales of all kinds.
Lately, there have been some drastic changes in how fairytales are presented in movies and on television.
Fairytale movies are becoming almost as popular as vampire movies (although it could be argued that they are a subgenre of fairytale movies; alas, that is a topis for another time).
However, the movies are not exactly like the fairytales they are based on. Instead, Hollywood is giving them new approaches to the classic tales.
Jack the Giant Slayer recently came into theaters. The film is based on Jack and the Beanstalk as well as Jack the Giant Killer, but it adds new elements to the story mash up. Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters and Snow White and the Huntsman are two other fairytale films that have been given new plot points and twists.
The silver screen is not the only place you can see revamped fairytales. Television is quickly joining its big screen counterparts in the creation of more updated fairytale stories.
ABC’s Once Upon A Time completely modernizes many fairytale classics, including Snow White, Rumplestiltskin, Red Riding Hood, Pinocchio, and many others. All of these characters are thrown together in a modern setting (and I’m pretty sure everyone having amnesia is in the plot somewhere).
So what is the point of all this? Traditional fairytales are being exposed to a new generation.
I am sure that there are people who had never heard some of these stories before seeing them in movies, especially with a growth in television watching and a drop in book reading.
This is a chance for stories and the lessons they tell to be presented in the way that they would be best received.
But why were they modernized? Couldn’t they have just made a movie adaptation set when the original stories were set?
Well, sometimes it is harder to connect with something you do not really understand. I know I understood the feeling of being flung into a role completely different from what you are used to better from Parent Trap than from The Prince and The Pauper.
Sure, they were not really the same story, but the message was the same. The difference is I could relate to being a twelve-year-old girl as opposed to English nobility.
Why make changes to the plot? We could just modernize them. But the thing is that even by modernizing a fairytale, you are adding a new twist to the story.
Fairytales are stories, and stories change over time. The “original” stories were most likely passed down as oral traditions before they were written down.
If you have ever played the telephone game, you know how quickly plot points can be changed. Things can be easily added or forgotten.
As time goes on, we take old stories and tell them the way that we want to tell them. The fact that we have outlets that reach such a large audience just make it easier to spread the updated stories farther than we could in the past.
Ever since the magical stories that we dearly love were created, fairytales have been evolving. Recently, both television and movies have been showing the drastic changes that these stories are undergoing as a part of an ever-changing, story-telling community.
Becki Brown
Senior Features Editor