Dead Tree Alert: Snarkily Ever After
In this week's print Time, I sneak-peek Shrek the Third and look at how that movie franchise--with plenty of help in the book, TV and theater businesses--has made fairy-tale parodies bigger than the original fairy tales themselves:
All this has been a welcome change from generations of hokey fairy tales with stultifying lessons: Be nice and wait for your prince; be obedient and don't stray off the path; bad people are just plain evil and ugly and deserve no mercy. But palace revolutions can have their own excesses. Are the rules of fairy-tale snark becoming as rigid as the ones they overthrew? Are we losing a sense of wonder along with all the illusions?
Shrek didn't remake fairy tales single-handed; it captured, and monetized, a long-simmering cultural trend. TV's Fractured Fairy Tales parodied Grimm classics, as have movies like The Princess Bride and Ever After and the books on which Shrek and Wicked were based. And highbrow postmodern and feminist writers, such as Donald Barthelme and Angela Carter, Robert Coover and Margaret Atwood, used the raw material of fairy stories to subvert traditions of storytelling that were as ingrained in us as breathing or to critique social messages that their readers had been fed along with their strained peas.
But those parodies had a dominant fairy-tale tradition to rebel against. The strange side effect of today's meta-stories is that kids get exposed to the parodies before, or instead of, the originals.
Much of what I write about here goes beyond fairy tales to the general snarkification of kids' entertainment: a movie like Shark Tale, for instance, is crammed with enough easy pop-culture references and topical jokes that it has the shelf life of a raw shark steak on a hot sidewalk. (Part of what I love about Pixar's movies, on the other hand, is that they actually seem intended to be timeless.)
It's hard to write about the subject without sounding like a cranky old man, but the irony is, this kind of movie gets made in part to please cranky old parents. So I'm curious about the experience of parents out there: do your kids get exposed to the original fairy tale first, or the postmodern meta-parody Happy Meal version?
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1
idigress jr. always gets the true fairy tale first - then I tell her that the re-inventions are just some other people's idea of what went on!
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2
James-
I have two boys (2&4). I think it is high time we Gen-Xer's give our children back their childhoods. Why do we have to pass down our cynical and "snarky" attitudes to them so early. I think the US should be able to move on from its idea that animation (CG or hand-drawn) has to be for kids. Japan has no problem making anime fully intended for adults and I'm not talking about porn. Shrek could easily be a movie not intended for a child audience. Enough of it is over the heads of the Happy Meal crowds that we only expect them to sit through it because it is animated. The pendulum may have now shifted from animated movies that parents are willing to sit through to animated movies that kids are willing to sit through for their parents. And by the way, I just got through watching a couple of corny episodes of the Transformers season 1 DVD with my 4 year old. Zero pop-culture references. -
3
James:
Your article was very interesting, and fairly in line with my own line of thinking on fairytales/storybooks. I think the "Shrek" movies are fun, but they're like frosting - empty calories, and no so great three hours (or viewings) later. The writers of "Shrek" throw just about any joke they can get their hands on at the screen, just to see if it will stick. Which means a lot of jokes that won't make much sense 20 years from now. Give me Disney's "Beauty and the Beast" over that any day.
I think this disposable joke syndrome is one of the reasons that the more recent fractured fairytales are less appealing on repeat-viewing than some of the older and more gentle ones. As a "tween," one of my favorite series of books was the "Enchanted Forest Chronicles" by Patricia C. Wrede. The books skewered fairytales, but only the pomposity and the quixotic rules, not the magic. You could read the books straight, with little or no knowledge of fairytales, and still enjoy them. And one book featured the "Right Honorable Wicked Stepmothers' Traveling, Drinking, and Debating Society's-Men's Auxiliary." How can you not love a book with a group like that in it?
I think a certain level of snark and meta-reference is OK, so long as the children in the audience aren't left feeling like they are being excluded from a super-secret club. For that matter, I find it enjoyable to go back as an adult and re-watch hyper-meta shows I enjoyed as a child like "The Simpsons" and "Animaniacs," because now I can enjoy them on a whole new level. Heck, even Sesame Street has meta (Placido Flamingo, anyone?). If the meta means that parents actually watch what their children watch, instead of sending Jr. off to watch Barney by himself, then that can only be a boon to society.
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