From Snow White to Cinderella, the story of fairytales on film

Once, a little under 80 years ago, in a church hall in a Caithness country district, my mum watched her first ever movie: the recently releasedSnow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). “What was it like seeing it?” I asked her. “You have to remember,” she said, “how little there was there. So for me, you see, that film was fairyland.” Recently, her granddaughter saw the same film, and – her head filled with princesses as it is – was similarly struck. Now the Evil Queen has become the incarnation of ultimate fear; that cartoon bogey dwells in the storage room off the upstairs corridor, a terror to be circumvented, run past, shut away.

It’s in bridging those two extremes of enchantment and unease that the greatest fairytale films lay their claim on us. Walt Disney’s Snow White and its follow-up,Pinocchio (1940), are darker, more disturbing works than anything his studio would produce over the next 50 years. I fully comprehend my daughter’s anxiety; it echoes my own intense fear of the similar witch-figure, Eucalypta, in the (originally Dutch) children’s series Paulus the Woodgnome (1967-68). As Charles Lamb once put it, “the archetypes are in us, and eternal”. Snow White’s transformation scene, where the film noir femme-fatale queen metamorphoses into the crone, outdoes Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde; after all her clinging to beauty, we face the unsettling horror of the queen’s choosing by a potion to become a hag, and then greeting the terrifying transformation with cackling glee.

Disney was not the only fairytale teller in the field. Maybe producer Alexander Korda’s British spectacular The Thief of Bagdad (1940) is showing its age. As King Ahmad and the Princess, John Justin and June Duprez emote elegantly, like well-bred guests at an unusually thrilling Kensington cocktail party. For the sake of Ahmad, her suffering lover, Duprez capitulates to the amorous evil usurper Jaffar; “take me in your arms”, she intones, with the plucky stoicism of an ex‑Roedean girl surrendering to the blackmailing attentions of the caddish local bank manager.

Yet for all that, 75 years later the film remains just under two hours of joy. By our own standards the effects may be clumsy, but Rex Ingram performs the ogre-like Genie with a saloon-bar gusto that surpasses even Brian Blessed, while remaining somehow persuasively strange – at moments you might really believe that he embodies some non-human force. Moreover, Conrad Veidt acts the ostensibly evil Jaffar with a sensitivity and energy that at times has me rooting for him. And above all, there’s the resilient young thief of the film’s title, embodying the most profound assertion of fairytales – that the humble will be exalted and the unregarded “lowest of the low” complete the quest. Sabu was ideal for the part; the son of an elephant driver in Mysore, he was spotted on the street by the documentary director Robert Flaherty and unexpectedly propelled towards movie stardom. Like fairytales, cinema could raise up the ordinary. His presence, his mischief and his physical courage make the film, and he ends it wonderfully, lighting out for fun and adventure, like Huck Finn.

Though the movie is unexpectedly violent, fear is almost banished. With its blinded leading man and its mysterious jewel, the “All-Seeing Eye”, The Thief 0f Bagdad is an unassuming fable about vision, and how the cinema may open up for us the spectacle of enchantment – how film itself provides that “all-seeing eye”. At the beginning of the fabulous La Belle et la Bête (1946), Jean Cocteau asks a little naivety of us, that we might watch his film with the openness of a child; in The Thief of Bagdad, Sabu enters “the land of legend where all is possible when seen through the eyes of youth”. The films require us to be childlike; we wonder if we can accomplish that task. It is an unfortunate fact of life that the one thing we cannot elect to be is simple; no one can will themselves innocent, or choose to be naive. To do so is already a sophisticated gesture, a sign of our artful distance from the very artlessness we seek to inhabit.

Watching such movies, particularly the older ones, we might yet awaken our capacity for wonder. Their magical tricks are made in and with the camera; compared to our own CGI effects, they cannot help looking homemade. In 1957’sThe Singing, Ringing Tree (Das singende, klingende Bäumchen), there is the hedge of thorns that springs up before the princess; in La Belle et la Bête, the living statues in the Beast’s forest mansion; in The Thief of Bagdad, the giant Jinn rising out of the smoke released from a opened bottle. Yet they display a stronger and more beguiling charm than anything in, for instance, an X-Men movie.

Fairytale films rely on the closeness of cinema to the conjuror’s art. This was why animation and puppetry are so intrinsic to the genre; there the film itself entirely creates its own visual world, its reality an invention of art.Lotte Reiniger’s silhouette films of popular tales sketch for us a filigree world of metamorphoses glimpsed by candlelight; in another vein was Jim Henson’s glorious TV series The Storyteller (1987-89), which mixed partially transformed real actors and dark Muppet-style creatures. Henson placed shaggy, cobwebby puppets and the fake-fleshy-nosed narrator, John Hurt, in the same realm, giving the whole a misty, gilded Celtic twilight.

Yet there’s realism in such stories too: La Belle et la Bête begins with a very worldly debt; while these films play out in fairylands, they emotionally engage with the problems of this world: the ache of childlessness, of abandonment, of our need to love. They offer a spellbound path through such sufferings, pointing out moral exempla in the process, showing us the value of gentleness and humility, the benefit of an openness to others and to life. But lessons are out of fashion, regrettably calling to mind Michael Gove. It is precisely the implicit educational function of fairytales that has led to their falling out of favour with some. There may be an implicit social agenda in these tales that many now find pernicious. To some, La Belle et la Bête is a textbook example of Stockholm syndrome, with Beauty no more than a compliant Patty Hearst, and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs mere propaganda for the belief that young women are only fitted for passivity and housework. Such complaints have led to a recent spate of revisionist fairytale films, with active heroines and a blurring of the lines the old stories set up between good and evil.

With the wonderful exceptions of Disney’s Tangled and Frozen, I feel most of these movies to be disappointing failures. Their innovation and their mistake is to shunt “real people” into the tales, thrusting psychological complexity into a form that never was meant to deal in rounded novelistic characters. Instead, the best stories gave us simplified figures, and the depths were explored through the evocation of images and the potentialities of plot. Scurrying past the disasters of Amanda Seyfried in Red Riding Hood (2011) (she’s not “little” any more) orHansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters (2013), we might linger for a moment onMaleficent (2014), starring Angelina Jolie. Perhaps with Jolie’s public image in mind, the movie wants to replace the original tale’s “bad mother” figure with a good one, which is an intriguing aim, though the embarrassments of the actual film show why a fairytale is no place for cod-psychology; in practice the whole thing is, to quote Charles Dickens, a fraud on the fairies. Though an action-adventure story rather than a fairytale movie, Snow White and the Huntsman(2012) is somewhat better, with Bob Hoskins, Ian McShane and Ray Winstoneplaying cockney dwarves and Charlize Theron becoming a satisfyingly terrifying Queen.

After these films, it is something of a relief to watch Kenneth Branagh’s newCinderella, a movie that trusts the original tale’s profound simplicities. Here’s a film that permits the stepmother (played by Cate Blanchett) to be wicked – while letting us see how she might have become so. Blanchett plays the role both with pantomime gusto and with subtlety; from the moment she blasts out her Sybil Fawlty machine-gun laugh, we know the movie’s going to be good. Branagh’s understanding of acting is what’s most strongly present. Everyone shines, and there are no (or very few) ironic winks over the heads of the children. As the Fairy Godmother, Helena Bonham Carter seems to be channelling Dolly Parton, andDerek Jacobi proves genuinely moving as the dying King. Yet above all, it is Lily James who makes the film work; it is a hard thing to play goodness convincingly, to let us feel that the film’s moral – “have courage and be kind” – is not a platitude, but something affirming.

Fairytales appear to belong to a world without history, a charmed space. For some, there is no such zone. The films, the fairytales themselves, give us instead a kingdom imbued with gender politics and the workings of power. Some of the best fairytale films between the 1950s and the 70s were produced under the communist regimes of eastern Europe. It may be there is something complicit in these movies, where cultures committed to the triumph of history imagine a history-less space. Even if this is true, it proves hard for me to resist their weird allure. The Czech movie Three Wishes for Cinderella (Tři oříšky pro Popelku) (1973) is no doubt all too sweet, yet it delivers a far more convincingly active version of the heroine than American cinema has managed to produce, while inviting us to partake in a wistful winter world that is still a nourishingly earthy and rustic place.

At an even higher level, The Singing, Ringing Tree haunted my childhood, as it did for many others who were kids in the 70s. It shows us a beguiling studio world, a pantomime vision of the Grimms’ Mitteleuropa, with a painted backdrop of the distant palace, paper leaves on the trees and the transformed prince very obviously a man in a bearsuit. We watch a series of folktale bargains being made: if you bring the singing, ringing tree, I shall love you; if she will not love you, you must become a bear; you may take the tree, but the first thing on returning home will be mine. The story tells us that kindness is better than arrogance, gentleness preferable to cruelty. It’s another moral lesson, and the film’s all the better for it, though beyond instruction are the images that stay with you – perhaps unhelpfully, given the demonisation of the wicked dwarf, and the story’s commitment to redemption through a change of heart, but also through suffering.

The fairytale is both familiar to us and profoundly strange. It conjures up images from youth, just as it once gave shape to our childhood longings and fears. The ethical universe of the films they inspired is maybe out of fashion, and the methods that once brought us their magic can seem outmoded; but the enchantments these movies offer are undated, and their bewitchments perennial. They connect generations, grandparents and grandchildren sharing the same tales. Above all, they offer us entry into a necessary fairyland – a place that stands before and behind us, replenished not only with marvels and wonders and mysterious creatures, but, as Tolkien once wrote, with sun, moon and stars, with trees and rivers, with men and women, and with meanings that will always remain pertinent to this world too.