The truth-telling power of fairy-tale
September 9th, 2012 | Filed under: Art Theory, Film and Video | Add a Comment »(First of all, if you don’t know about Gobelins, consider this an introduction. Gobelins, reader, reader, Gobelins — a French animation school that’s putting out some of the most consistently beautiful and inspiring short films I’ve seen over the past few years.)
Now, as to the film above — if I told you, in facts, figures, and real-world stories, about the relationship between Germany and the rest of Europe between WWI and WWII, it would be interesting, even revealing. But to see the subject tackled in this abstract, magical way, illuminates the feeling of what happened in a way that no history textbook could ever hope to achieve.
This is what fiction and fairy-tales can do. They take real things and re-frame them so that we can understand them in a de-familiarized context. And, in doing so, they tear at and rebuild the deep places of our souls.