Fantasy Literature
Related: About this forumFairytales 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 wont be white have provoked a backlash, as did the launch of Disneys 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
CrispyQ
(38,138 posts)jimfields33
(18,581 posts)Hollywood can do this. Its been proven.
ExWhoDoesntCare
(4,741 posts)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)Have a great Sunday!
Hugh_Lebowski
(33,643 posts)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)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)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)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)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?