Fairystories
Sep. 25th, 2006 05:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lotesseSo there’s this DVD in the school library of an old tv show called “Jim Henson’s The Storyteller.” They ordered it for the fairy tale class I took last year, some of you might have heard of it. For those who haven’t, it’s a set of nine half-hour fairy tales, produced, designed, and in a few cases directed by Jim Henson. Labyrinth? Dark Crystal? That Jim Henson.
The thing that I love about them is they’re the pure, unscrewed-with stories that I learned as a little girl. It’s hard to see much in Disney when you were raised on non-at-all toned down editions of the Brothers Grimm, not to mention the unadulterated morbidity of Hans Christian Andersen. Grownups always think that children can’t handle the grotesquerie of pure fairy tales, always cut out the upsetting bits, not realizing that those are the most important. I think I could handle it more as a five-year-old than I can now. Henson knows how to tell fairystories. And he picked my most darling ones—The Three Ravens, Thousandfurs, and one that’s pretty close to East O The Sun, to be telling.
I hadn’t watched the East O The Sun episode before—Henson calls it “The True Bride”—but the Boy is a crazy lover of Henson and so we took the whole thing out last night and. Out of nowhere, while we’re watching it, there’s Aslan. I’ve never seen him caught on screen before, but oh he made my heart beat faster and my breath come short, just as Aslan always should, though he’s never given his name properly ☺. The story’s a mangle of several different taletypes, and the girl starts off the prisoner of a troll who makes her perform three impossible tasks. And she’s alone and hopeless and crying and then Aslan appears to her and tells her to go to sleep and trust him and when she wakes up the tasks are completed. And when he lover is carried off by the troll’s daughter—to what ought to be the castle that lies east o the sun and west o the moon, but they left that bit out—Aslan carries her on his back, running through the clouds faster than any horse could ever be. And of course the little girl is a blonde, just like my own Lucy Pevensie.
It made me cry. I love it when Aslan comes to me from someplace totally unexpected.
Beyond Aslan, there’s a fair amount of other glory: “The Three Ravens” features Jonathan Pryce as the grieving King and Miranda Richardson as the schemeing stepmother who marries him after the death of the Queen and torments his children. I wonder if Tim Burton saw this before casting “Sleepy Hollow,” because I swear to god she plays the exact same character. And the love-interest of “The True Bride” is a very very young Sean Bean, looking absolutely delish. The soldier from Pirates of the Carribean is in the background of one of them, you know the one: “and no ship that has black sails couldn’t possibly not be the Black Pearl…”
The Boy and I are agreed. We must buy this and own it and watch it every night of our lives. Jim Henson fairy tales. With Aslan. And Bean. How could life better be?
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The thing that I love about them is they’re the pure, unscrewed-with stories that I learned as a little girl. It’s hard to see much in Disney when you were raised on non-at-all toned down editions of the Brothers Grimm, not to mention the unadulterated morbidity of Hans Christian Andersen. Grownups always think that children can’t handle the grotesquerie of pure fairy tales, always cut out the upsetting bits, not realizing that those are the most important. I think I could handle it more as a five-year-old than I can now. Henson knows how to tell fairystories. And he picked my most darling ones—The Three Ravens, Thousandfurs, and one that’s pretty close to East O The Sun, to be telling.
I hadn’t watched the East O The Sun episode before—Henson calls it “The True Bride”—but the Boy is a crazy lover of Henson and so we took the whole thing out last night and. Out of nowhere, while we’re watching it, there’s Aslan. I’ve never seen him caught on screen before, but oh he made my heart beat faster and my breath come short, just as Aslan always should, though he’s never given his name properly ☺. The story’s a mangle of several different taletypes, and the girl starts off the prisoner of a troll who makes her perform three impossible tasks. And she’s alone and hopeless and crying and then Aslan appears to her and tells her to go to sleep and trust him and when she wakes up the tasks are completed. And when he lover is carried off by the troll’s daughter—to what ought to be the castle that lies east o the sun and west o the moon, but they left that bit out—Aslan carries her on his back, running through the clouds faster than any horse could ever be. And of course the little girl is a blonde, just like my own Lucy Pevensie.
It made me cry. I love it when Aslan comes to me from someplace totally unexpected.
Beyond Aslan, there’s a fair amount of other glory: “The Three Ravens” features Jonathan Pryce as the grieving King and Miranda Richardson as the schemeing stepmother who marries him after the death of the Queen and torments his children. I wonder if Tim Burton saw this before casting “Sleepy Hollow,” because I swear to god she plays the exact same character. And the love-interest of “The True Bride” is a very very young Sean Bean, looking absolutely delish. The soldier from Pirates of the Carribean is in the background of one of them, you know the one: “and no ship that has black sails couldn’t possibly not be the Black Pearl…”
The Boy and I are agreed. We must buy this and own it and watch it every night of our lives. Jim Henson fairy tales. With Aslan. And Bean. How could life better be?
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no subject
Date: 2006-09-25 10:45 pm (UTC)Oh yes. I want to see this now.
no subject
Date: 2006-09-25 11:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-26 02:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-26 05:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-26 03:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-26 05:31 pm (UTC)