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Jilly_in_VA

(10,838 posts)
Sun Jun 4, 2023, 02:07 PM Jun 2023

Fairytales have always reflected the morals of the age. It's not a sin to rewrite them

Should we update classic stories with modern morals? Two film-based kerfuffles have reopened the question. Reports that the next James Bond “won’t be white” have provoked a backlash, as did the launch of Disney’s The Little Mermaid, which features a black Ariel.

Negative “review bombing” of the film, which has been the target of criticism since its lead actor, Halle Bailey, was announced, caused the Internet Movie Database to make a rare intervention and change its ratings system. There is abhorrent racism on show here – about which perhaps little more needs to be said. But alongside it is a broader, longer running argument that might be worth addressing. Namely, that 21st-century mores – diversity, sexual equality, and so on – should not be shoehorned into old stories.

General outrage greeted “woke” updates to Roald Dahl books this year, and still periodically erupts over Disney remakes, most recently a forthcoming film with a Latina actress as Snow White, and a new Peter Pan & Wendy with “lost girls”. The argument is that too much fashionable refurbishment tends to ruin a magical kingdom, and that cult classics could do with the sort of Grade I listing applied to heritage buildings. If you want to tell new stories, fine – but why not start from scratch?

But this point of view misses something, which is that updating classics is itself an ancient part of literary culture; in fact, it is a tradition, part of our heritage too. While the larger portion of the literary canon is carefully preserved, a slice of it has always been more flexible, to be retold and reshaped as times change.

Fairytales fit within this latter custom: they have been updated, periodically, for many hundreds of years. Cult figures such as Dracula, Frankenstein and Sherlock Holmes fit there too, as do superheroes: each generation, you might say, gets the heroes it deserves. And so does Bond. Modernity is both a villain and a hero within the Bond franchise: the dramatic tension between James – a young cosmopolitan “dinosaur” – and the passing of time has always been part of the fun.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/04/contemporary-values-no-place-in-fairytales-you-must-be-living-in-a-fantasy-world

9 replies = new reply since forum marked as read
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Fairytales have always reflected the morals of the age. It's not a sin to rewrite them (Original Post) Jilly_in_VA Jun 2023 OP
A writer friend self-published some re-crafted fairy tales & some of the comments are scathing! CrispyQ Jun 2023 #1
I think remakes are lazy. Hollywood should do new stories with POC as leads. jimfields33 Jun 2023 #2
Without retellings, most fiction wouldn't exist. ExWhoDoesntCare Oct 2023 #8
Fair enough. I definitely didn't put the thought of storylines into at least numbers. jimfields33 Oct 2023 #9
It's one thing to update a cartoon universe like The Little Mermaid Hugh_Lebowski Jun 2023 #3
Why is it entirely different? ExWhoDoesntCare Oct 2023 #7
Read the original stories and you'll be surprised The Blue Flower Jun 2023 #4
Snow White ExWhoDoesntCare Sep 2023 #5
People have been rewriting classic literature of all kinds ExWhoDoesntCare Oct 2023 #6

jimfields33

(18,581 posts)
2. I think remakes are lazy. Hollywood should do new stories with POC as leads.
Sun Jun 4, 2023, 02:35 PM
Jun 2023

Hollywood can do this. It’s been proven.

 

ExWhoDoesntCare

(4,741 posts)
8. Without retellings, most fiction wouldn't exist.
Sun Oct 15, 2023, 05:39 AM
Oct 2023

There aren't as many unique stories as you think. All writers and filmmakers are working from a few basic plots and character tropes that get recycled over and over again--and have since man first put pen to paper.

jimfields33

(18,581 posts)
9. Fair enough. I definitely didn't put the thought of storylines into at least numbers.
Sun Oct 15, 2023, 09:12 AM
Oct 2023

Have a great Sunday!

 

Hugh_Lebowski

(33,643 posts)
3. It's one thing to update a cartoon universe like The Little Mermaid
Sun Jun 4, 2023, 02:58 PM
Jun 2023

It's something entirely different to mess with the fact that James Bond and Sherlock Holmes, part of legitimate literary canon ... are a couple of British dudes.

Halle Berry has no business being cast as James Bond. Make her a new IP, based loosely on Bond ... that's been done like 1000 times, in fact with male and female actors/characters.

Beloved fairy tales should be handled similarly. Don't call it 'Hansel and Gretel' if the two main characters are the same gender, just call it something else that makes reference to it.

MHO, fwiw

 

ExWhoDoesntCare

(4,741 posts)
7. Why is it entirely different?
Sun Oct 15, 2023, 05:34 AM
Oct 2023

Did you get upset about Akira Kurosawa redoing King Lear in Ran? Or how Kumonosu-jō is a retelling of Macbeth? Or how Warui Yatsu Hodo Yoku Nemuru is Hamlet all over again? And all with Japanese actors, rather than the original white characters they're portraying.

By the way did you get at all upset when Hollywood replaced the Japanese actors in the hugely iconic Seven Samurai with white actors in The Magnificent Seven? Or how they had white actors in Inferno to replace the Japanese cast of Yojimbo? In both cases, Hollywood replaced the exceptional talent of Toshiro Mifune with Eli Wallach in the former, and Jean Claude Van Damme in the latter.

So does this mean you're okay with cultural appropriations when white people do it to minorities, but not when minorities do it in reverse?

The Blue Flower

(5,632 posts)
4. Read the original stories and you'll be surprised
Sun Jun 4, 2023, 03:41 PM
Jun 2023

They're violent and full of disturbing imagery. For example, in the original novel Pinocchio, the puppet kills the cricket by squashing it with a shoe to shut up its nagging. The stories have been laundered for generations.

 

ExWhoDoesntCare

(4,741 posts)
5. Snow White
Thu Sep 14, 2023, 03:39 AM
Sep 2023

Ends by the villagers making her stepmother dance in shoes of iron that have been heated up in a fire.

Let's say that one surprised me when I was six years old and reading an unabridged Grimm's Fairy Tales.



 

ExWhoDoesntCare

(4,741 posts)
6. People have been rewriting classic literature of all kinds
Sun Oct 15, 2023, 05:18 AM
Oct 2023

Since fiction writing came into being. Like scientists, all artists such as writers stand on the shoulders of the giants who came before them.

I mean, really, what is John Steinbeck's East of Eden but a modernized Cain and Abel? Or Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South other than a Victorian retelling of Pride and Prejudice? Or the film Clueless but a 20th-century retelling of Emma? Or, heck, an entire industry known as Regency romance? Those books--every single one of them--are all offshoots of Jane Austen's oeuvre, in some form, but especially Pride and Prejudice.

And let's not even get into all the modern retelling of classic lit from the perspectives of villains or other ancillary characters.

Or the many retreads in foreign countries. Akira Kurosawa's Ran is King Lear in montsuki and kimonos. The enormously successful Japanese manga sensation, Hana Yori Dango, is a modern update of Pride and Prejudice that has ratcheted up live-action TV series versions in multiple Asian countries (Japan--twice, China--twice, Taiwan, South Korean, India, Vietnam--and possibly more).

You can go through literally centuries of books and over a century of TV and films, and see stories getting recycled, over and over again, with new twists of all kinds. So why were most of those okay, but these new adaptations aren't, other than the idiotic racial/gender issue?

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