Reality, Magic, and Other Lies: Fairy-Tale Film Truths by Pauline Greenhill

Reviewed by: Reality, Magic, and Other Lies: Fairy-Tale Film Truths by Pauline Greenhill Allison Craven (bio) Reality, Magic, and Other Lies: Fairy-Tale Film Truths. By Pauline Greenhill. Wayne State University Press, 2020, 265 pp. Pauline Greenhill’s wide and pioneering scholarship on fairy-tale media already contains a wealth of applied research on the social relevance of magical narratives. Her most recent monograph more directly probes ways in which fairy tales speak to reality and how magic intersects with science, factuality, or the “realm of empirical possibility” in fairy-tale media (128). The imperative is situated in the present “dystopian times” when magic and wonder “can be as necessary as science, the ordinary, and reality” (29). While acknowledging that fairy-tale films are somewhat in the “eye of the beholder,” and that the specific examples reflect her “personal enthusiasms” in the field (17, 14), Greenhill offers a range of angles on reality and fairy tale: collisions of magic and science in LAIKA Entertainment’s stop-motion animation (chapter 2) and the fairy-tale cinema of Tarsem (chapter 3); ethnography of the fictions of the Quebec storyteller Fred Pellerin (chapter 4); and reality interfaces in many mediations of “Hansel and Gretel” (ATU 327A, chapter 5), “The Juniper Tree” (ATU 327A, chapter 6), and “Cinderella” (ATU 510A, chapter 7). The case studies are critically rich, thought-provoking, and valuable repositories of Greenhill’s virtuosic scholarship. At times, the central premise about fairy-tale truths is elusive, like a swinging trapeze to catch and ride, although not for want of explanation. The first chapter of introduction provides generous context and several precedents that illuminate Greenhill’s aims, among them, Suzanne Magnanini’s (2008) exploration of fairy tales as prescientific knowledge and Dorothy Noyes’s (2015) work on fairy tales and social science (22–23). Instances of gender and cultural change that make former “impossibles thinkable” also foreshadow how fairy tales can, in words from Pellerin, “overcome the real” (9, 229). The “contested” terms “reality and science,” which are broadly aligned, as she notes, in post-Enlightenment thought with what is “objective and true,” are flexible scaffolds that, at times, topple the discussion into more generalized terrain of fiction and reality rather than fairy tale specifically (15). When Greenhill insists that a “scientific system” for unmasking fairy-tale truths is not the aim, some irony emerges (for me at least)—given how “science” figures in the book—considering the rigor and method of the project at hand (14). The first section, “Studio, Director, and Writer Oeuvres” concerns “scientific or factual approaches to truth and reality” (14), beginning with close [End Page 144] scrutiny of the credit sequences and trailers from four LAIKA features: Coraline (2009), ParaNorman (2012), The Boxtrolls (2014), and Kubo and the Two Strings (2016) (chapter 2). LAIKA’s “science” of production is shown “in the service of magic” as Greenhill analyses the uncanny (illusion of the) agency of puppets through the creators’ playful exposure of the production technology in these sequences (65). The auteur Tarsem’s use of historical cinematic technologies in fairy tale mise-en-scène and his regimes of costume, casting, and transnational location-chasing in Mirror Mirror (2012) and The Fall (2006) evoke “heterotemporalities” and “heterospatialities,” which, Greenhill argues, transcend the separation of diegetic and production realities (71–84), while “science versus magic” is “directly thematic” (84) in his television series Emerald City (2017). The ethic of transculturalism and science-magic interplay in Tarsem’s cinema “literalize[s] the politics of fantasy,” she argues (92). A highlight of the book is the discussion of Pellerin and Luc Picard’s fairy-tale films of his stories, Babine (2008) and Ésimésac (2012). A master class in the folkloristic paradigm of ostension, Greenhill’s expertise as a folklorist and a Canadianist enlivens the nuances of magic, realism, and legend in the reputation among Quebecois of Pellerin and his village of Saint-Élie-de-Caxton that is fictionalized in the stories, which, in Pellerin’s own words, “surrealizes itself” (99). Narrative variety and methodological departure from film analysis accompany Greenhill’s account of a field trip to Saint-Élie-de-Caxton where she finds herself interpellated into the...

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