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The Enchanted Screen: The Unknown History of Fairy-Tale Films. By Jack Zipes. New York: Routledge, 2011. 435pp.
This impressive book contains all the best of what readers of Marvels & Tales expect from Jack Zipes: wide-ranging and meticulous scholarship, feminist sensibility, sharp insights, firm opinions, and accessible theory and analysis. The Enchanted Screen will undoubtedly be the work on fairy-tale films for some time. With few exceptions - such as the plethora of studies of Disney cinema and Disney culture - until relatively recently there has been little analysis in the English language of fairy-tale films as such. And those movies that have received considerable attention, for example, Jean Cocteau's classic La belle et la bête (1946), have for the most part been addressed without much savvy about their traditional and popular sources. Articles here and there, including several in Marvels &> Tales, examine a particular item of fairy-tale cinema. Some works on specific tales or tale types include discussions of fairytale films individually or collectively, representing scholars who are familiar to readers of this journal, such as Marina Wamer, Jessica Tiffin, Donald Haase, and Sandra L. Beckett (as well as, of course, Zipes himself). Most such studies look primarily at feature-length films, animated or live action. The sheer number of movies with fairy-tale plots, characters, and imagery might intimidate a lesser scholar than Zipes. The Internet Movie Database (IMDB), for example, lists 899 films under its keyword "fairy-tale." Only some six months ago that number was 860, and 2011 has already seen at least two new "Little Red...