Four-Color Fairy Tales: Peter Panzerfaust.

Pan.  Pan never changes.

Wait.  That’s not true.  Peter Pan changes all the time, depending on who writes him or is playing him.  Sometimes for better and sometimes for worse.

Anyway, moving beyond quotes from video games I’ve never actually played, I’m continuing my promise of taking looks at comics that depict children’s literature (not just fairy tales) in unique and different ways.  Today, we’re headed for the battlefield of Peter Panzerfaust.

Peter Panzerfaust is a comic from a few years ago written by Kurtis Wiebe, drawn by Tyler Jenkins and published by Image Comics, with various other folks on various creative duties because it takes a lot of work to create a comic book.  Peter Panzerfaust also happens to be a war comic based on the story of Peter Pan.

Yeah.  I bet that’s not a combination you thought you’d see.

The story is told largely in flashbacks as told by Peter’s “Lost Boys”, a group of teenage orphans that ally themselves with Peter.  The story in the first volume is told by the man who had once been nicknamed “Tootles”.  He tells about how during the Second World War, the Germans had taken the French town of Calais.  Shortly after the Calais orphanage is bombed, a lone American boy named Peter shows up to rally the remaining orphans and move them to a place where they can “hunker down”.  Peter gets them to safety only to find out that there are a group of British soldiers being held nearby.  Peter and the boys stage a daring rescue and then attempt to flee Calais.  It’s in their attempt to get out of Calais that they first encounter Kapitan Haken.  Haken is a rather chilling figure of a German military officer.  And like his theatrical and literary inspiration, he has a fascination with keeping “good form”.  The story goes on but I don’t want to tell it all here.  They meet Wendy, John and Michael Darling.  They live for a while at a farm house until being forcibly moved to Paris.  In Paris, the story picks up being told by Curly.  Curly’s story is a twist on Peter’s recue of Tiger Lily.  Only this time it’s one of the lost boys that is captured, Tiger Lily is one of the rescuers and the French Resistance is involved.

This is really a rather good comic book.  As strange as the initial concept might be, the creators own the seeming mismatch of ideas and make it work with skillful application.

The character of Peter himself is noticeably Peter Pan but older and made for a different setting.  He’s still a cocky, charismatic, youthful, fun-loving braggart.  But this Peter isn’t as thoughtless and selfish as his theatrical counterpart.

Over recent years, Peter Pan has gotten a decent amount of criticism.  People, particularly scholars and adult readers, have become more and more aware of the dark undertones in the story and worrying aspects of Peter’s actions.  Despite the vengeful pirates, wild beasts and mermaids that like to drown people, I think people sometimes wonder if Peter may actually be the most dangerous thing in Neverland.  After all, Hook only hates him out of revenge and the Darling children are only in such a dangerous place because of him.  Personally, my point of view is that Peter was intended not just a celebration of childhood but also a critique of it.  More antihero than hero, Peter was supposed to be an example of why growing up while sometimes regretful is also ultimately necessary.  But my interpretation of Peter as unwittingly tragic antihero doesn’t seem to dawn on many people in media.  So, they’ve chosen to remake Peter Pan and his darkness in different ways.  Once Upon a Time chose to turn him into a conniving youth-obsessed villain.  Meanwhile, the universally panned (pardon the pun) Warner Bros. movie Pan tried to turn Peter into a Harry Potter-esque “Chosen One” (Still can’t believe I watched that cinematic turkey in theaters.  Someday, maybe I’ll hate-watch it and then post a review).  Peter Panzerfaust, on the other hand, doesn’t feel like it’s throwing the baby out with the bathwater.  Wiebe and company does this first of all by putting Peter and company in a setting where you can be absolutely sure that Peter isn’t the most dangerous thing around.  The war was going to happen and the Darlings and Lost Boys would have been mixed up in it regardless.  It’s a setting in which Peter’s daring high spirits and borderline craziness go from being something questionable to something that may be the only thing helping everyone keep their lives and their sanities.  Sure, this Peter is more grown-up.  It is partially because he’s a young man of about 17 rather than a perpetual 10-year-old boy, but also because he’s in a situation where people would have to be more grown-up.  He also doesn’t completely lose his sense of danger.  Tootles describes running with Peter like being chased by a wild dog.  Dangerous but exciting.

The comic hosts a number of references to the original story.  Kapitan Haken, naturally, has his hand severely injured by Peter and replaced.  There’s a scene like the one where the Lost Boys try to shoot Wendy out of the sky, but in this case it’s the plane she’s on.  At one point, Peter claims to be searching for a woman named Belle (insert “Tinker” where you may).  One particularly nice touch, they changed Peter’s signature cry of pride and victory.  Instead of crowing like a rooster, this Peter howls like a wolf.

I recommend this comic.  I’ve only read two volumes but I’m up for more if I get the chance.  It seems it may have caught other people’s attention as well, seeing as BBC Worldwide is interested in making it into a television series.  Before heading out to the comic shop or hitting up Amazon, keep in mind that it is a violent war comic and is rated “M” for “Mature Audiences” (so, not for the kiddies).  Beyond that, happy reading!

Fairy Tale Fandom Book Report: Once Upon a Galaxy.

Okay, so this book has been on my shelf for a while and I’ve just gotten around to reading it.  I picked it up at a fantasy book store.  You know, the kind of store that sells fantasy novels, board games and Dungeons and Dragons modules.

The book is Once Upon a Galaxy.  It’s a science fiction anthology edited by Wil McCarthy with a whole host of contributors, published in 2002.

Now, if you’ve been around Fairy Tale Fandom for a while, you know I have a soft spot for sci-fi fairy tale retellings.  So, how does Once Upon a Galaxy stack up?  It’s kind of a mixed bag, really.

There are some stories in here that I really like.  “Ailoura” by Paul Di Filippo is a really solid sci-fi take on “Puss in Boots”.  “Nanite, Star Bright” by Tanya Huff is a neat twist on “The Shoemaker and the Elves”.  One of my favorites is “The Control Device”, which is basically “Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp” if Aladdin was an Imperial pilot from Star Wars (or something similar) hiding out from the new regime.  Others weren’t so great.  “The Nightingale” and “The Emperor’s Revenge” were Andersen-derived stories that just seemed to drag on and on.  Another story, “He Died that Day, In Thirty Years” didn’t really seem to even have anything to do with fairy tales.  I certainly couldn’t pick out any parallels or motifs.  Don’t get me wrong, some of them had some good ideas.  “The Goldilocks Problem” outlined how conditions on a planet need to be “just right” in order to support life.  However, it was more of an interesting science lesson than an interesting story.  “Sleeping Beauty” by Bruce Holland Rogers deals with the question of how much everything would change while someone was under a sleeping curse, just set on a much more cosmic scale.

To tell the truth though, I’m kind of okay with this.  I’d rather see interesting new ideas that don’t quite pan out than old, tired ideas that don’t pan out.  In a perfect world, we’d have good ideas that work out swimmingly.  But I’d rather not ask for the moon if I can help it.

However, maybe the stories being a mixed bag is just something you have to expect with multiple author anthologies.  Outside of literature, you don’t see anthologies much anymore.  Not in movies or television or comic books.  Maybe varying quality is one of the reasons why.

I’m not going to tell you to stay away from this book.  However, I’m not going to tell you to seek it out either.  I told you what I thought and my opinions are purely my own (though I’ve gotten rather good at expressing them).  If you do read it, maybe you’ll see something in them that I didn’t.

Fairy Tale Media Fix: The Tale of Tales (2015)

Okay, back in the blogging saddle!

The Tale of Tales!  Matteo Garrone’s 2015 film inspired by stories from Giambattista Basile’s fairy tale collection of the same name.  The film stars such talents as Salma Hayek, Toby Jones, John C. Reilly and Vincent Cassel (huh.  Cassel was in a surprising number of European fairy tale movies around that time).

While Basile’s book was a much longer, more complicated affair featuring a framing structure and five days of stories being told, Garrone’s film is just three tales that sort of touch alone the edges.  The first story is about a queen who is so desperate to have a child that she resorts to eating the heart of a giant sea serpent to get it.  The second story is about a bored king who becomes preoccupied with raising a flea until it’s the size of a calf.  The third story is about a lecherous king and two elderly sisters who will go to great lengths to become his next conquests.

This movie is not like most other fairy tale films you’ll see out there.  First of all, it’s rated R.  In fact, it’s the first R-rated fairy tale movie I’ve ever reviewed/reacted to on Fairy Tale Fandom.  And as this is a fairy tale film aimed squarely at adults, he expects the audience to do more work in figuring out what the whole thing is about.  In family fairy tale films, the themes are usually outright stated or even sung.  However, if you ask me, what Garrone has put together is a fantasy film about the costs of obsession.  The obsession with having a child.  The obsession with sating one’s own lust.  Even the obsession with raising a giant flea.  It’s a very different approach for a fairy tale film, focusing instead on characters’ faults and failings rather than on their triumphant “happily ever after”.  All of the characters in question make choices related to their obsessions that have unexpected negative consequences for those around them.

I’d like to say this movie is a good representation of Basile’s book, but I’m not sure I can.  Like I said, the movie cherry-picks certain stories that fit a specific theme.  The essence of Basile’s book came through in its framing story and the power of the storytelling depicted therein.  Also, Basile’s book had a kind of bawdy, rustic sense of humor to it (I mentioned the use of toilet humor in another post).  The movie plays everything about as seriously as a heart attack.  Though, the sight of the giant flea is funny in kind of a strange way.

The movie itself is fine.  The stories are faithful to the originals in content if not always in tone.  The actors do a fine job playing their roles.  I liked the creature effects for the sea serpent and the giant flea, though I think they could perhaps have been more creative with the ogre they had in one of the stories.  I will say that the way the stories changed from scene to scene could leave you a little lost, but maybe the director was just trying to make sure you were paying attention.

The Tale of Tales is not a fun movie.  I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this for a fun Friday night on the couch.  However, it’s also not really a bad movie.  It was good enough and interesting enough and different enough that I thought it would be a shame not to have a copy for my own movie collection, if just to use as a reference for future posts.  Whether any of you, my faithful readers, will like it is down to personal taste.

Fairy Tale Media Fix: Charming, with special director Q&A.

Prince Charming.  The name has stuck with us for ages.  The earliest appearance of it may be in Catherine D’Aulnoy’s “The Blue Bird”, in which a character is referred to as “the Charming King”.  Later, when Andrew Lang retold D’Aulnoy’s “Story of Pretty Goldilocks”, he transliterated the name of the prince Avenant (meaning “Fine” or “Beautiful”) into “Prince Charming” and changed “the Charming King” in his translation of “The Blue Bird” into “King Charming”.  Since then, the name Prince Charming has become the catch-all term for the fairy tale prince.  Whether they’re from “Snow White”, “Cinderella”, “Sleeping Beauty” or “Rapunzel”, they’ll all get called “Prince Charming” by someone.  But as time has gone by, we’ve seen the character depicted, reinvented and lampooned.  He’s been a paragon of virtue in some stories, but he’s also been reimagined as an unfaithful cad and a vain, spoiled narcissist.  Now, a new award-winning independent short film is coming out soon that places Prince Charming in a much more unusual role: the hopeless romantic.  And through the magic of modern internet technology, I got to have a chat with the co-writer, director and star of this film, Mr. Tom Albanese:

Q. So, how did you get the idea for Charming?

A. I was studying in New York City at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre in 2012, and we put on a production of 'Into the Woods'. I played Cinderella's Prince, had a blast and wanted to know more about who this prince dealing with the 'agony' of his love not wanting him was. So I took the screenplay I was writing about a guy whose heart had just been torn into pieces by the girl of his dreams and made him Prince Charming. It suddenly had a great hook and I was stoked to write it.

Q. You mentioned 'Into the Woods'. I've noticed that some big media projects like 'Into the Woods', the 'Shrek' films and 'Enchanted' take a bit of a dim view of the Prince Charming character, making him either a cad or a fool. That's why I was quite impressed seeing that your film went another direction and made him a hopeless romantic.  Was that ever in your mind while making the film? That you were depicting the character in a way that was a little bit different?

A. Good points, well when my writing partner Chris and I were originally writing 'Charming' as a feature, we wrote the character as a big ego, bufoon, Gaston-type character. A lot of it was really funny, but it's tough to get an audience to really connect with a spoiled guy like that, which is why that type of character archetype is usually better suited for a supporting type or villian role. We had a note from the producer we worked on with the feature (when it was optioned in '13) saying that "Prince Charming has to be charming".  He was right. Chris and I turned him into a hopeless romantic type a la Hugh Grant back in his rom com prime. He was Prince Charming, but still a bumbling guy trying to find love, which both ourselves and an audience could connect more with.

Q. As I understand it, it was a bit of a long road getting Charming made into a film. Is there anything you can tell us about that process and what you learned from it?

A. Yeah, it got stuck in development as a feature and we ultimately got the rights back. I then took elements of the story and turned it into a short film. Biggest thing I learned was 'just do it'. You can always hope someone with more connections finds the passion for it you have, wait around for more money, etc. But you've got to keep moving forward. There's never going to be that 'perfect time'. You've got to create it. And I didn't want this story to sit in someone's inbox anymore. So I asked for some help from the people in my life and took the resources I had to make 'Charming'. And I'm very happy I did.

Q. To be fair, the market's a bit saturated in fairy tale films at the moment.  I hear there are two other Prince Charming movies in development right now.  Anyway, are there any scenes in the film that are your favorites?  Doesn't matter if it's in terms of writing, acting, directing, etc.

A. True, but for good reason. Most of these stories are in the public domain and established IP, so studios and companies realize they've already got a built in audience. And as long as the movies are good and entertaining, people will keep seeing them. "Beauty & the Beast" will gross over $1B. Yes, one of the Prince Charming films has been in development for a while and the animated one is trying to find distribution. There's a ton to explore with that character.

As for a favorite scene? Well, I love the scenes by the tree with Charming and Gus, as well as the transition to Hook’s bar and the scene with Cinderella. I remember rehearsing with Karla (Cinderella) a few days before we shot, saying if that scene didn’t work the movie wouldn’t. And she killed it. There’s some funny stuff in there, but my favorites are always the ones that poke at a theme and tug at the heartstrings.

Q. Now, how about more of a fun question?  Fairy tales are kind of a staple of our culture, especially when we're young.  Did you ever have a favorite fairy tale?

A. Haha, absolutely. For me as a kid it was mainly Aesop's Fables and the Disney fairy tales. 'Beauty and the Beast' was my number one. I've only recently got to reading all the originals, and while there's much more fantastical stuff like monkey butlers and evil fairies in 'Beauty', it's still a great story with great characters. Most of the classic fairy tales were originally geared for adults, right?

Now I'm curious about you! What's your favorite fairy tale?

Q. You've read my blog at least a little.  You've got to know I've got at least a half dozen.  But my philosophy has always been that most people should have at least two favorites.  One favorite that is well known and popular, and one favorite that takes a little more digging to find.  My standard childhood favorite is always "Jack and the Beanstalk".  I liked it as a kid because it didn't waste any time on romance.  But it's ultimately about a kid trying to crawl his way out of poverty and do right by his mother at the same time.  My favorite obscure one is a Grimm story called "How Six Men Got on in the World" which is about a soldier who recruits five men each with a specific super-power to trick and defeat a cruel king.  There are others too.  I'm partial to some stories that come all the way from China and Japan.  There are so many great fairy tales out there that you can't find in movie or TV form because they just won't work that way.  Either they're too weird or they follow their own fuzzy "fairy tale logic" or they just don't fit standard cinematic story structure.

Now, another question: Are there any other classic stories you'd like to tackle in film form someday?

A. I like that thinking. I've got to check out 'Six Men'. And yeah, you're absolutely right on how many work on paper and not film. I've got a ton of reading to do.

Re-imagining classic stories and characters excites me. I have a feature I'm working on that puts a twist on Bram Stoker's "Dracula". Not sure if it'll be the next thing or not due to budgetary reasons, but the odds of my next project having some fantastical creature or element is pretty good.

Q. Okay, well I know you’re a busy man what with acting, directing, writing and all that.  So, I think we’ll wrap this up with one more question.  I know you’re just about set to launch Charming online.  Where and when will my readers be able to see it?

A. Charming will be released next Tuesday, April 4th. Go to princecharmingfilm.com and it'll be available via Vimeo.

It was a real pleasure to talk with Mr. Albanese.

As for the film itself, I have watched it and liked what I saw.  It’s a little rough, as independent films tend to be.  If you’re used to watching Hollywood films, you’re going to want to check your expectations for production values at the door.  This film was made by a group of friends with the resources that were available to them.  I’ll also say that the film may rely a little too much on the Disney incarnations of the characters than I usually like.  However, I understand the need to play on familiarity.  But one thing the film really has going for it is piles and piles of heart.  I’m also just glad to see a film that takes a different approach to the Prince character.  I think as our culture has taken a fresh look at these stories, the Prince has become a bit of an easy target for parody and ridicule.  The cliché handsome prince is too easily turned into a vain, womanizing jerk.  And we’ve seen that in Into the Woods, Shrek 2, Fables and a whole host of others.

So, check out Charming when you get the chance.  Also, go over to The Willow Web to read Amy-ElizeBrown’s interview with Tom Albanese.  Amy’s a friend and true blue fairy tale fan and I’m sure she’s thought of some great questions to ask Mr. Albanese.

See you in the next tale.