What I like about fairy tales is that they highlight the emotions within a story. The situations aren’t real, with falling stars and pirates. But what you do relate to is the emotions that the characters feel.
I think, at a child’s birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift should be curiosity.
‘Once Upon a Time’, ‘Mirror Mirror’ – those shows and films focus on women and their conflict with one another. What the heck is going on in contemporary fairy tales? Women are not dominating the world; they are not evil.
Once upon a time there was a Queen who had a son so ugly and so misshapen that it was long disputed whether he had human form. A fairy who was at his birth said, however, that he would be very amiable for all that, since he would have uncommon good sense.
What the Greeks and Romans considered myths, we consider fairy tales. We can see how very clearly the myths, which emanated from all cultures, had a huge influence on the development of the modern fairy tale.
Just about every science whiz can tell you how he or she took apart the TV or the radio when they were kids just to see how it worked. To see what the world was made of. Well, when I was a kid, I took apart fairy tales to see how they worked. To see what the world was made of.
Sometimes you have to censor books. When I read ‘Peter Rabbit,’ I skip the part about Peter’s father ending up in one of Mrs. McGregor’s pies. I also hid the book of ‘Grimm Fairy Tales.’ They’re just too grim for my grandkids. Reality will come soon enough.
When I was born, I was born very prematurely so I was very tiny and small. And so, my mom just nicknamed me Pixie, like a little fairy.
The universe has a much greater imagination than we do, which is why the real story of the universe is far more interesting than any of the fairy tales we have invented to describe it.
‘Ocean’s Kingdom’ is a fairy story with no subtext, no resonance – it’s not about anything except its water-logged plot.
If you are watching a fairy tale, that’s why you go to fairy tales: you want these uncomplicated stories and uncomplicated characters. But if it’s meant to be real life, you want there to be some reflection of your experience and have something you can hook into.
When I was a child, I wanted to be… a fairy. I still do, really, except that now I’ve now graduated to wanting to be a pixie.
As long as you keep one foot in the real world while the other foot’s in a fairy tale, that fairy tale is going to seem kind of attainable.
If you can make it as a children’s party fairy, you can make it anywhere.
You can get this feeling of the English or Scottish or Irish or Welsh fairy, but it is by nature very elusive. It would be possible to pin down a German fairy, but the English one just vanishes, becomes the shadow under the trees.
It has been a fairy tale for an outsider, bouncing from one film set to another, choosing my films as assertively as those films chose me. And through this journey I have not once faced the dreaded syndrome of the ‘casting couch.’
One of my favourite messages about ‘The Pirate Fairy’ is that the story is about appreciating your own talents.
My life has been nothing short of a fairy tale.
All the ancient classic fairy tales have always been scary and dark.
Everytime a child says ‘I don’t believe in fairies’ there is a a little fairy somewhere that falls down dead.
The naturalist worldview is a good way to feel grounded and feel part of something that isn’t based on fairy tales. It’s based on observable facts in the human and in the biological history of the planet. I think that can be a source for comfort.
Well the wedding in the words of the Archbishop of Canterbury was a fairy tale and there was a huge public impress, investment of goodwill, affection and indeed money in this Institution. It was a huge success at the time.
From as far back as I can remember, I always loved the King Arthur stories, fairy tales, mythology – things like that. So it was very natural for me when I came to write the ‘Prydain’ books to sort of follow that direction.
I was born an only child in Vienna, Austria. My father found hours to sit by me by the library fire and tell fairy stories.
I am not sure how much good is done by moralising about fairy tales. This can be unsubtle – telling children that virtue will be rewarded, when in fact it is mostly simply the fact of being the central character that ensures a favourable outcome. Fairy tales are not, on the whole, parables.
I think it would be hard to find an American who, during their first week at Cambridge didn’t genuinely feel like it was fairy tale.
My parents read me fairy tales every night and I used to believe I was a fairytale princess, like every young girl. I had all the Disney dressing-up costumes and would play every character.
I’m a child of the Disney Renaissance, so the new classics are near and dear. I suppose this is a legend more than a fairy tale, but ‘Mulan’ is easily my favorite. Not only is it a fun, action-packed, beautiful movie, but it’s so important for young girls to have.
Even as a kid, I read ‘Jung – Reflections and Individuation In Fairy Tales’; all the inner circle of Jung was a real huge thing for me.
When I was a kid, both my mom and my dad worked night shifts, so we would spend a lot of time at my grandfather’s house. He taught at UCLA and was just really into history. Before bed, when other kids heard fairy tales, he would tell us about the American founding fathers and the beginning of democracy.
I like to escape; I like to write when I go on a walk – I’m kind of very fairy that way. I get inspired by the wind. Or when I daydream, that’s when I write.
The point is, how do you know the Guarantee Fairy isn’t a crazy glue sniffer.
I have a daughter, Hanna, and I never read fairy tales to her. But I did tell her bedtime tales and made up many tales involving ‘Gory the Goblin’ and other creatures that I borrowed from the Grimms’ tales and other tales I knew.
There is no heaven or afterlife for broken-down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.
Whoever will be free must make himself free. Freedom is no fairy gift to fall into a man’s lap. What is freedom? To have the will to be responsible for one’s self.
Fairy tales and folk tales have always played a role in my writing in one way or another.
The words ‘fairy tales’ must accordingly be taken to include tales in which occurs something ‘fairy,’ something extraordinary – fairies, giants, dwarfs, speaking animals.
Throughout any given season of ‘The Bachelor,’ the women exclaim that the experience is like a fairy tale. They suffer the machinations of reality television, pursuing – along with several other women, often inebriated – the promise of happily ever after.
Folk tales, fairy tales, religion, the occult – these are the things I’m most passionate about, even more than cinema. And I’m very passionate about cinema.
If you see the magic in a fairy tale, you can face the future.
The entire economy relies on the suspension of disbelief. So does a fairy story or an animated cartoon. This means that no matter how soberly the financial experts dress, no matter how dry their language, the economy they worship can only ever be as plausible as an episode of ‘SpongeBob SquarePants.’
There seems to be a real taste for the fantastical these days. People like to get back into their imaginations. Maybe there’s something a little nostalgic about ‘Grimm’ and the fairy tales that they grew up with. And it’s a very unique approach to the procedural side of things.
Tink is the voice of the youth. I’m not one of those artists who talks about unrealistic things or fairy tales. I’m not talking about expensive things and cars. I’m actually talking about what’s going on in my life and every teenager’s life, too.
Writing is writing to me. I’m incapable of saying no to any writing job, so I’ve done everything – historical fiction, myths, fairy tales, anything that anybody expresses any interest in me writing, I’ll write. It’s the same reason I used to read as a child: I like going somewhere else and being someone else.
If I wasn’t a singer, I would be a fairy princess.
I played a bee! It was a Polish fairy tale we performed at school when I was seven or eight. I had wings fixed to me.
The escape to an unchallenging fairy tale can be very nice and I’m all for that, but film can also challenge you to confront the realities of our world.
As cynical as I can be, there’s always a part of me that believes in love and the fairy tale.
Many people think fairy tales and retellings of fairy tales are only for children, but I’m not the only writer to take an old tale and retell it for a sophisticated adult audience.
I also like the whole idea of fairy tales and folk tales being a woman’s domain, considered a lesser domain at the time they were told.
Through machinery, man can exert tremendous powers almost as fantastic as if he were the hero of a fairy tale. Through machinery, man can travel with an ever increasing velocity; he can fly through the air and go beneath the surface of the ocean.
To portray an iconic character has been brilliant in itself, and to be able to do that on a show like ‘Once Upon a Time’ enhances that because the show puts a spin on characters and makes them very different and puts core values that are very different that aren’t in the original fairy tales a lot of people relate to.
