This is a 1928 version of Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Little Match Girl,’ directed by French film great Jean Renoir and Jean Tédesco. The story is a simple one about the visions of a poor match girl as she freezes to death in the snow. It’s a loose adaptation that actually seems rather rigid and [...]

C Merry has created an epic rambling fairy tale that weaves her own modern perspective through the classic stories that children have been familiar with for centuries. The result is both humorous and unsettling. C Merry combines these tales with mythology and Christmas to explain things that have been long forgotten. It’s a beautiful way [...]

Here’s a 1950s Soviet animated version of the classic fairy tale ‘Beauty and the Beast.’ Parts 1 – 2 after the jump…

This 1954 RKO Radio Pictures film was based on Engelbert Humperdink’s opera and directed by Michael Myerberg. Be warned: the actress who plays Gretel gives what is possibly the single worst vocal performance in the history of animated films!

Stephen Irwin is the animator behind this horrifically beautiful and mysterious film. Its heart is located right in the deep dark forests of fairytales, but its story is a conflagration that puzzles even while it astounds. Irwin slyly weaves two films together inside an old cathode ray TV tube to create his fascinating hybrid horror. [...]

Lotte Reiniger, the animator who made the oldest surviving animated feature, The Adventures of Prince Achmed, created this version of Hansel and Gretel in 1955. It uses her cutout silhouette technique.

Ray Harryhausen, the great stop-motion animator of dinosaurs, sea creatures and dancing skeletons made this version of Hansel and Gretel in 1951. The dolls are a bit off-putting if I must be honest about it. But it’s got some great movement and settings.  This is one of a series of films he made for children [...]

In this Oscar-Nominated short, Granny O’Grimm’s Sleeping Beauty, directed by Nicky Phelan and produced by Darragh O’Connell, old Granny tells a tale that goes a bit off the rails as all good stories should do.  It’s hilarious.  It’s got a maniacally angry ‘elderly fairy’ who crashes the fairy tale party and spreads her bile around [...]

This is the oldest known film version of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, made in 1910. It was made by the Selig Polyscope Company and did not involve the author, L. Frank Baum. Smithsonian Magazine has an article called Frank Baum, the Man Behind the Curtain. It describes how Baum came to write what amounted [...]

The traditional notion of where fairy tales come from suggests that people like the Brothers Grimm listened to oral folktales handed down through the generations and wrote them down with little embellishments.  But now, in a book called Fairy Tales: A New History, Ruth B. Bottigheimer argues that fairy tales have a much more literary [...]