The trend--to recast old (timeless, rather) fairy tales into a contemporary mold--fascinates me.
In recent years, Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty and now, Snow White has been remade into three unique, and going by my personal experience of having seeing Red Riding Hood (she is "little" no more), eminently watchable films.
Snow White and the Huntsman reverses the assassin into the protector as the evil queen's hit man ends up becoming Snow's bodyguard. In Red Riding, the woodsman is also Red's lover and undergoes significant personal sacrifice, including giving up his human identity (he becomes the wolf he is appointed to slay) just so he can be her life-long lover during the day and protector at night.
The 21st century Sleeping Beauty undertakes to participate in a game of self-induced sleep, just so she can eke out a living and pay for college tuition. Beauty is bored with life and offers to put up her young body, if not for sale, then at least for voyeuristic pleasure of her clientele of ageing, wealthy males, who as the saying goes, cannot "get it up" anymore.
What binds the films together is the fact that none of the fairy tales are "fairy-like." They take us back to the older, bleaker moral and physical landscape of the original Grimms Brothers' tales. As A.O. Scott observes in his review of Snow White, these tales were told to scare children into sleep and/or submission, whereas Disney converted them into vehicles of consolation. The chocolate-velvet textures were Disney re-inventions.
The darker sides of fairy tales have been suppressed by the lightening-up Disney machinery. Now its time for the darker side to come into full-fledged light.
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