Cirrus@Austlit

'You know from the very first glance, from the very first touch, that a book created by Shaun Tan, such as Tales from the Inner City, is going to disturb you. It is going to send you spiraling from your so-called real world into a world in which you will be speechless and wordless because his marvelously peculiar drawings and paintings are so provocative and alienating. You feel as though you have been transported to Kafka’s novella Metamorphosis (1915), and, like Gregor Samsa, you awake and are incapable of knowing what has transpired and caused the world to turn upside down. The more you try to be rational, the more the world around you appears to be weird and irrational.' (Introduction)

'The fairy tale has become one of the dominant cultural forms and genres internationally, thanks in large part to its many manifestations on screen. Yet the history and relevance of the fairy-tale film have largely been neglected. In this follow-up to Jack Zipes’s award-winning book The Enchanted Screen (2011), Fairy-Tale Films Beyond Disney offers the first book-length multinational, multidisciplinary exploration of fairy-tale cinema. Bringing together twenty-three of the world’s top fairy-tale scholars to analyze the enormous scope of these films, Zipes and colleagues Pauline Greenhill and Kendra Magnus-Johnston present perspectives on film from every part of the globe, from Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, to Jan Švankmajer’s Alice, to the transnational adaptations of 1001 Nights and Hans Christian Andersen.

'Contributors explore filmic traditions in each area not only from their different cultural backgrounds, but from a range of academic fields, including criminal justice studies, education, film studies, folkloristics, gender studies, and literary studies. Fairy-Tale Films Beyond Disney offers readers an opportunity to explore the intersections, disparities, historical and national contexts of its subject, and to further appreciate what has become an undeniably global phenomenon.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.