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 to start the holidays. You’ll find out that the Pied Piper had money troubles and was working out of his van. Santa Clawz is a wormhole-travelling wildman who began the holiday tradition of sneaking into houses to counteract the effects of war. Instead of dropping bombs, he dropped gifts. He was also descended from grizzly bears.

The story unfolds over a series of partially animated illustrations that are gorgeously detailed, showing squiggly pen lines inside every detail. These pictures are backed by a dense and mysterious soundscape.

What C Merry seems to be doing is connected the world’s most charming tales for children to the much deeper and darker subterranean world of mythology. It works. She has created a mystical world of danger and beauty.

You can also read the entire illustrated tale at the author’s blog.

Here’s a 1950s Soviet animated version of the classic fairy tale ‘Beauty and the Beast.’

Parts 1 – 2 after the jump…

Part 2:

Part 3:

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.

I posted about this filmmaker’s previous film, The Black Dog’s Progress.

You can visit the filmmaker’s site at SmallTimeInc.com.

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 after World War II.

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 the joint in a most amusing tirade.

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 to the first American children’s book and how he was so convinced he’d written a great book that he framed the pencil stub he’d written it with.

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 genesis than has been commonly thought.  The Chronical Review has an interesting article about the different theories on the origin of some of the world’s most retold stories.  The article points out how confusing and complex the history of fairy tales becomes when you consider that many of the most familiar tales are shared across different cultures.  Jack Zipes, a leading translator and adapter of fairy tales says that “It’s absurd to create a dichotomy. The literary and the oral thrive off one another.”

Purchase Fairy Tales: A New History (Excelsior Editions)