-
What is a fractured fairytale?
A fractured fairy tale is a story which makes use of a traditional fairy tale but restructures and reimagines.
-
Why Are Witches Green?
We all know witches ride brooms and keep black cats for sidekick pets, but why the green witch? That tradition started quite recently, but we can also find links that stretch back to antiquity. The history of witches is terrifying and sad and is basically the story of marginalised people. Worse, people around the contemporary […]
-
Kiki’s Delivery Service Symbolism and Story Structure
Kiki’s Delivery Service is a Studio Ghibli film released in 1989. This film was always popular in Japan but — though it’s hard to remember now — Studio Ghibli films didn’t take off in the West until 1997 with the release of Princess Mononoke.
-
Which Witch’s Wand Works by Poly Bernatene Analysis
Which Witch’s Wand Works? is a 2004 carnivalesque picture book in which two sister witches are the stand-ins for children. Alliteration features strongly in this story — not only do we have the title of the book (and of the fictional TV show they argue over), but also the names of the main characters, Rattle, […]
-
The History of Hansel and Gretel
Hansel and Gretel is one of the best-known fairytales. Almost everybody knows the basic story but, more than that, this tale is the ur-story for many seemingly unrelated modern ones. For example, whenever a character meets a character in a ‘forest’ (whether the forest is symbolic or not), the audience is put in mind of wicked cannibalistic witches.
-
Witches In Children’s Literature
The Weirdness Of Using Witches In Modern Entertainment Witches are female equivalent of storybook pirates in that the character is based on something very real and disturbing. I’d like to append ‘in our past’ but very disturbingly, It’s 2013 And They’re Burning Witches. See also: Woman Brutally Murdered in Papua New Guinea After Being Accused of Sorcery, from […]
-
Thirteen O’Clock by Enid Blyton Analysis
I have conflicted views about Enid Blyton, but Thirteen O’Clock story is relatively free of the problems I (and many others) have taken issue with in these slightly more enlightened times. We still have a story in which a young patriarch-in-training helps an older female character out by tending to her minor injury and finding a lost cat, […]