The Enchanted Screen: The Unknown History of Fairy-Tale Films (review)

Jack Zipes’s The Enchanted Screen is a welcome addition to the study of children’s cinema and film. In part, the book is a history of fairy tale films from around the world of which few people have ever heard, let alone seen or studied as part of the discipline of children’s cinema and film. But along with revealing this otherwise unknown history of the fairy tale film and the oral tradition from which it originally came, the book also challenges what many people still believe: the idea that Disney was and is the dominant force in the production of fairy tale films. To argue this point, Zipes highlights the “vast international production of fairy-tale films since the 1890s” (xi) that both complements and stands in opposition to Disney. Drawing on the work of Bloch, Freud, Adorno, and other left-leaning critics, The Enchanted Screen finally buries once and for all the notion that Disney rules the fairy tale film market and, in the process, unearths all the other “cinematic gems” from Japan, South Korea, Mexico, Australia, and New Zealand which have been produced since the late nineteenth century. In this context, the book also makes a terrific contribution to discussions about diversity in children’s cinema and film here in the United States. Presented in three parts, its global reach is admirable.

Early chapters in part one provide a wide-ranging history of the fairy tale film. Zipes discusses many of the social and historical conditions from which this genre emerged. This history is also personalized somewhat, as Zipes looks at its foremost pioneers, including Georges Méliès and the early, innovative, pre–Mickey Mouse Walt Disney (before Disney became corporate, in other words). For example, chapter three is an extended review of the life and times of Georges Méliès. Zipes notes how the French filmmaker made over 520 films between 1896 and 1913, many of which were adaptations of the tales of Charles Perrault. In particular, Zipes focuses on Méliès’s versions of Cinderella (1899, 1912), Little Red Riding Hood (1901), and Bluebeard (1901). Other critics, myself included, have written briefly about the contributions of Méliès, who, as Zipes points out, was a “fanatic magician and man of the theatre turned into an obsessed and inspired filmmaker” (32). What is really valuable in The Enchanted Screen, though, is the depth of Zipes’s knowledge about all things fairy tale, including the fairy tale films of Méliès, whose influence, according to Zipes, extended all the way to the “early fairy-tale cartoons and animated films not to mention other live-action films of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s” (48). Part one concludes with a discussion of how the fairy tale film influenced and eventually evolved into the animated cartoons and feature-length movies of the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s.

Part two continues to reveal a number of fairy tale films from around the world, while critiquing Disney. Zipes looks at such topics as the many representations of Snow White, the legacy of the Cinderella films, and the motif of abuse and abandonment, particularly as it appears in the many versions of Hansel and Gretel. In the case of the latter, Zipes examines animated and fairy tale versions from the United States, Canada, and as far afield as Korea. Writing about the Korean version of Hansel and Gretel by Pil-Sung, he contends that it contains a “brilliant vision and critical exploration of the brutal treatment of innocent children in our contemporary world where barbarity often blends with civility or exists in high tension with civility” (208).

In part three, Zipes situates fairy tale films in the context of the human propensity to engage in wars—“Endless wars, big and small, on every continent” (349). Overall, his concluding chapter, “Fairy-Tale Films in Dark Times: Breaking Molds, Seeing the World Anew,” argues that despite the tendency of human beings to slaughter one...