Cinderella, Snow White and Sleeping beauty - All familiar tales to many of us. Seemingly innocent, they are told as bedtime stories by grandparents, parents, and guardians. These tales of damsels in distress, however, in fact do corrupt/taint/define/slant the minds of young children.
This short animated film starts with a child that is brought to life, and is then fed with tales that corrupts her innocence, becoming a hideous creature. She then goes around "murdering" young victims in the way she was taken
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Project Title :
Damsels: a tale
Abstract (Theme/Concept)
(max 100 words) :
The inspiration of this short film is taken from the notion that fairytales poisons the minds of the young with gender role biases. Sleeping beauty, Snow White and Cinderella are portrayed as "damsels in distress" and awaits "Prince Charming" to rescue them from their pitiful lives. Although this is the belief of many feminist writers, they are still being passed down through generations of women, infecting them with the disease so to speak.
Reference works are mainly based on Are we Still Married by the Brothers Quay and the cut and paste method of William Burroughs for the narrative form.
Intended Outcome (Objective) :
Metaphorically show how the passive roles of female characters in fairytales are passed on to future generations
Target Audiences :
Audience who are open to artistic media
Project Description (How will you implement your project)
(max 500 words) :
This project will be a stop motion animation based upon my research on the feminist approach to interpretation of fairytales. Readings include; essays edited by Ruth B. Bottigheimer: Fairytales and Society: Illusion Allusion, and Paradigm, Madonna Kolbenschlag: Kiss Sleeping Beauty Good-Bye, Karen Rowe, Marcia Lieberman and Simone de Beauviour.
The film will be animated in a dark wooden room; a black widow spider; representing the persona of a mother, will open a box to reveal a baby in a womb like position. The box and the baby's position in the womb represents the innocence of a child when it is brought into life. The spider then carries the child out of the box and places her on a platter, making it seem like the spider is about to consume the baby. Instead, it reaches for fairytale books on a shelf and places it into a meat mincer. It turns the handle of the machine and then feeds the processed result of the mincer to the child. This action of feeding and consuming represents how fairytales are told to children and they consume them without questions asked. The child then transforms into a spider, and walks down an alleyway. It goes through a door and uncovers another baby in a box. It picks the baby up and the film will end there with the assumption that the deformed baby spider repeats the same sequence on another victim.
Two sets need to be built for this short film, one of a room and another of an alley. There are also three characters, a black widow spider, a baby and a deformed spider-baby. For its body, the black widow will be built out of aluminum foil and a basic wire frame and for its legs, I will thread wire through metal tubing that has been cut to size to model the different sections of the legs. I use the metal tubing so that the wire will only bend in places where the wire is exposed. Detaching the limbs of two dolls I purchased and fitting them together with wire to one of the doll's head will make the deformed spider. It will also have a light that glows through the skull for the heart.
A reinterpretation of the popular folk song "Insy Weensy Spider" in a 20th-century classical music style will be composed. There will also be spot sounds that will coincide with the short film. The choice of the background music is "happy" while the animation contrasts it with its disturbing sequences. I will be working with a music major student, Samuel Chee BAPO1A to compose and record the sound material.
References :
The Occurrence in Dreams of Material Fairy Tales - Sigmund Freud
Dog Door, Are We still Married? - Brothers Quay
Jabberwocky -- Jan Svankmajer
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