Fairy Tales 2010

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Little Red Riding Hood

This is a wonderfully modern, commercial, animated rendering of the story. This is clearly an animation of the Grimm's sanitized version (as referenced by Little Red Ridding Hood's house being on South Grimm Street--and then if you look carefully, at 0:38 she turns right on Perrault street!), but here I think it works perfectly well, because just as the Grimm's story removes the magical and fantastical elements from the original story (along with all the sexual innuendo) this version even further removes even the fairy tale elements, and turns the story into something that looks like a cross between google maps, Lego's, and the emergency instruction manual you find in the back seat pocket on airplanes. I am a fan of animation in general, and strictly two dimensional animation like this, but what I love most about this is that it completely reduces the entire story to symbols and modern day advertising: the random parts of the VW van, the house cross-sections, the hunter's rifle, the grandmother's nutritional facts. Everything is listed with its prices, everything is shown as objects for consumption. This, in my mind, is effectively LRRH as an infomercial (but without the C-grade stars and hokey announcers), this story is not taking place "Once upon a time" it is taking place now, in some uniform quotidian suburban (video game?) setting with prefabricated homes and GPS. I am very taken by this video one because I think the animation is great, but also because I love how it turns this "moral/educational" Fairy Tale into exactly three minutes of advertising, without actually losing the story at all.


PS. you can see the whole video and the street names and words better if you watch it in HD (720px) on YouTube, the embedded version does not really do it justice!

2 comments:

  1. Hey! This video was very cool and modern. I can't believe someone did it for a school project! I really can't; the attention to detail is unreal and must have taken forever! I really like bright, aesthetic computer animation like this, pokemon/ikea/airplane safety manual style. It was very clever too; I enjoyed the nutrition facts of Granny. Goes to show that you don't need dialogue or literary filler to share this classic story in a new, interesting way. And of course nothing says 21st century like trance music.

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  2. I agree that this commercial takes away from the story aspect and simply represents it in two dimensional symbols. However, I do think that this is very telling of our society. We use every day things that people are familiar with to market a product. In this sense, it makes a good advertisement. But in the story sense, it takes away from the overall meaning and cultural implications of the past.

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