Original subtitles

[fanfare music playing]

[narrator] Once upon a time,

there was a beautiful, downtrodden girl with an evil stepmother.

Then a fairy godmother granted her wish to go to a ball,

-where, at the stroke of midnight… -[clock chimes]

…she lost her glass slipper.

-But a prince found it… -Huh.

[narrator] …and when he finally tracked her down,

they fell in love and lived happily ever after.

You know the story.

Or maybe you know this story.

There was a beautiful, downtrodden girl with an evil stepmother.

Then some magical fish bones

granted her a wish to go to the New Year's festival,

where she lost her teeny tiny golden shoe.

-But the king found it… -Hmm.

…and when he finally tracked her down,

they fell in love and lived happily ever after.

-And her evil stepmother… -[growls]

…was crushed to death by stones in a cave.

And in Greece, a similar story was once told.

Except this beautiful, downtrodden girl was bathing in a river,

when an eagle swooped in and stole her sandal,

which it then serendipitously dropped right into the lap of a king.

Spoiler alert: When he finally tracked her down,

they fell in love, and they lived happily ever after.

And there are plenty more.

Downtrodden girl.

Magical intervention.

Loses her shoe, meets her love.

Girl, magic, shoe, love.

Back in 1893,

a folklorist recorded 345 different versions of Cinderella

told all around the world.

Today, we think that number is in the thousands,

and it's not just Cinderella.

Many of the fairy tales you know and love exist in dozens of different countries.

Why do we keep telling versions of the same story?

What is it about fairy tales?

Ready? Let's go.

[man 1] Between these covers, we find these immortal favorites.

[man 2] Do you remember when you were small

hearing the story of Red Riding Hood?

Remember, when the clock strikes 12:00,

you must be home by then.

[man 3] Remember the lovely princess who was bewitched into a deep slumber

until her Prince Charming came to break the spell?

Come on, wake up! Wake up! You lazy good-for-nothing!

Come on, wake up!

When we talk about fairy tales, often we use the term

to think about things that are unrealistically good.

[Negga] You know the image,

reproduced in so many movies, TV shows, advertisements.

[Grady] And the camera sort of freezes on this impossibly beautiful moment.

And often we're hearkening specifically to the idea

of the ending of a Disney movie.

[Negga] In 1937, Walt Disney,

animator extraordinaire,

co-inventor of Mickey Mouse,

released Snow White, the rollicking story

of a beautiful girl, her evil stepmother,

and seven adorable dwarfs of varying temperaments.

What?

[Negga] It was his first ever full-length animation movie

and made in Multiplane Technicolor,

as they boasted in the movie's marketing.

[man] More than 250,000 paintings like these

were created by Walt Disney and his staff of artists.

[Negga] Many copied frame by frame from a recording of these reference actors,

so the characters looked and danced like real people.

As opposed to,

well, cartoons.

Like these earlier Disney films.

Production was so ambitious that newspapers labeled it his folly.

But when Snow White came out, they changed their tune.

It became an international sensation.

You could buy Snow White accessories, Snow White dolls,

a vast array of dwarf-inspired hats,

and the first movie soundtrack ever sold.

If you adjust for inflation,

Snow White still ranks among the highest-grossing movies ever made.

And it created the playbook for many Disney hits that followed.

[Grady] This fantasy of ball gowns, and castles,

and a poor young girl who has to find her happy ending,

probably by marrying a prince.

There's nothing wrong with any of that,

but it's doing a very different thing from the earlier fairy tales.

[Negga] If you want to know what fairy tales are really about,

you have to ask the true experts.

It's a thing

that, uh, might be on movies,

might be on books.

It needs a main character. It's magical.

Um…

A fairy tale is basically a story

which has

pretty characters who say beautiful speeches.

A fairy tale is

not real.

It's just a story.

[in Spanish] That comes from another world, a world of magic,

full of creativity, of many colors.

I mean, a completely different world from the one we know.

[Negga in English] And those definitions are pretty accurate.

It might make sense to think of these stories

as tales about metamorphosis and transformation.

[Negga] Cinderella's rags turn into a beautiful dress.

Snow White comes back to life with a true love's kiss.

Jack's beans sprout a plant tower that stretches beyond the clouds.

All fairy tales have mystery and magic in them.

[Negga] But so do a lot of stories that aren't fairy tales,

so it might help to know what a fairy tale isn't.

First, a fairy tale is not a legend.

Legends are all stories with historical basis,

set in a real time, a real place.

A fairy tale setting should be ambiguous,

which is why they often start with "Once upon a time."

Or in Czech, "Beyond seven mountain ranges,

beyond seven rivers."

Or in Arabic,

"There was, oh, what there was,

or there wasn't, in the oldest of days and ages and times."

A fairy tale is also not a myth.

Which is often a sacred story, or a foundational story.

A charter narrative about how a civilization began.

-[Negga] In other words a religious story. -[hissing]

And lastly, a fairy tale is not a fable,

which are stories told specifically to convey a moral or message,

often by way of a pair of talking animals.

Like The Hare and the Tortoise,

which shows us, you know, slow and steady wins the race.

[tortoise] I am not afraid.

I'll race you, and I'll win.

[Negga] Fairy tales can have a moral element,

but it's not always that clear what it is.

Jack and the Beanstalk appears to be pro-stealing.

At least from ogres.

It's a simple story. It's skeletal.

The forces of good and evil.

Not much nuance in there at all.

[Negga] And they tend to follow a similar arc.

The hero and their world is established,

then the villain enters and does something villainous,

the hero comes up with a plan to fix it, gets some magical help.

There's a struggle, they escape, get rewarded. The end.

There are a lot of stories that follow this arc.

And only a small subset

involve a pretty princess who's rescued by a prince and then gets married.

Folklorists are Disney haters.

It's a corporate fairy tale. It's top-down.

And in some ways, what it has done is to give us a standardized version

that has erased all of these local variants.

[Negga] Like all those Cinderellas.

Japan had its own Cinderella, Hachikazuki,

and her story was uniquely Japanese.

She's protected by a magic bowl stuck to her head,

a Buddhist symbol.

But when Disney's version of Cinderella came to Japan,

she became a cultural phenomenon,

featured in movies, books, accessories,

and the All-Star Dream Cinderella wrestling tournament.

Or take the Russian version of Snow White, preserved in this Soviet-era cartoon,

which has the famous magic mirror,

and the poisoned apple,

but the seven dwarfs are seven knights.

And their relationship to Snow White is a little different.

[in Russian] As you know, you're our sister.

All seven of us here are in love with you.

[Negga in English] But even before Disney's Snow White conquered the world,

the tale it's based on had pulled off a similar feat.

A somewhat darker German folktale,

Sneewittchen, which Disney clearly nods to.

The dwarfs' house is a classic medieval Germanic design.

So is the castle, with its rounded towers and iron finials,

and Snow White's upturned collar, and puffy, slashed sleeves.

That original German version had become so famous

because of one of the great marketing coups in literary history.

Turning fairy tales

into kids' stories.

[bouncy music plays]

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were librarians and amateur folklorists

living in Prussia, now Germany, in the early 1800s,

a period when Napoleon's empire was rapidly expanding,

threatening, they thought, to eclipse German heritage entirely.

So they traveled the country, collecting folk stories.

[Tatar] They wanted to capture the remnants of a storytelling tradition

before it disappeared.

Stories that had been told by adults to other adults,

with children present at times.

[Negga] In 1812,

they published a book titled Children and Household Tales,

because the tales were about children,

not for children.

Well, this is their version of Rapunzel.

There's a beautiful girl with magical hair,

who's imprisoned in a tower by an evil sorceress,

Mother Gothel.

One day, a prince climbs up her hair to enjoy her company.

-Rapunzel gets pregnant and has twins… -[babies crying]

…so Gothel banishes them to the wilderness.

They got terrible reviews.

The book was panned.

[Negga] A leading critic called it "pathetic and tasteless."

And they decided, "Okay, we're gonna listen to these critics."

"We're gonna make those stories more child-friendly."

[Negga] By their final edition,

the prince just chats to Rapunzel.

Nobody gets pregnant.

And then the prince's eyes get poked out by thorns.

[groans]

Child-friendly in 19th-century Germany meant more violence.

A book called Shock-Headed Peter

was a best seller at the time,

with stories like a boy who sucks his thumb,

and gets it chopped off by giant scissors.

Or a boy who doesn't want to comb his hair,

so he ends up looking like this,

and his parents stop loving him.

These were cautionary tales

warning them about the dangers of curiosity.

Becoming a manual of manners for children.

[Negga] In the Grimms' version of Cinderella,

the stepsisters cut off chunks of their feet

to try to jam them into the slipper,

but they're thwarted by a pesky pigeon.

And it says, "Coo-coory coo, there's blood in the shoe."

It's a rhyming couplet. I don't actually remember it.

[Negga] It's actually…

Rook di goo, rook di goo!

There's blood in the shoe.

The shoe is too tight.

This bride is not right!

[Negga] Later, the birds come back, and peck out their eyes.

I have this very clear memory of being about three,

and just being, like, super into it, and being like,

"Yes, this is what these evil people deserve. Get 'em."

[Negga] As the book spread internationally,

editors added illustrations.

[Tatar] That is a real inflection point.

They became part of what we now call bedtime reading.

[Negga] Inspiring other writers, like Denmark's Hans Christian Andersen,

to make up fairy tales of their own.

But in their prologue, the Grimms made a pretty magical claim.

Their stories were ancient,

linked to the earlier and simplest forms of life.

There had often been the assumption that a lot of these stories were very old.

And that's because we find many of the same stories in different cultures,

cultures that we know are related to one another.

[Negga] More than a century before the Grimms,

Charles Perrault had published a hit book of fairy tales in France,

which included a lot of the same stories.

There had been earlier writers too,

and it was possible that they had actually invented these stories,

and then they spread like wildfire.

A lot of these stories

may just simply be very catchy.

They may just be really entertaining stories

that people love hearing and love telling,

so therefore may not be ancient in origin at all.

[Negga] But solving that mystery

was next to impossible.

Take Little Red Riding Hood.

This map is a snapshot of all the times a version of the story was written down.

By a missionary in West Africa, a poet in China,

or two brothers in Germany.

But in between all of those recorded stories

are thousands of miles and hundreds of years.

Now, that's very similar to the problem that evolutionary biologists have

in trying to reconstruct the history of life,

because only a tiny fraction

of all the species that have ever existed have left any trace at all.

[Negga] But by tracking a certain trait or gene,

they're able to show how species evolved

and even prove the existence of shared ancestors

that are long extinct.

And Tehrani took the same approach.

The core DNA of Little Red Riding Hood is simple.

A child, or children,

is isolated from a parent, then tricked by a predator,

who is pretending to be a beloved relative.

But there are also lots of mutations.

In Europe, the predator is a wolf.

In China, it's a tiger.

In Africa, an ogre.

In some stories, the child wears a red riding hood.

And in others, the child is a goat.

Sometimes, the child dies or…

A passing woodcutter comes and cuts open the wolf's stomach

and rescues Little Red Riding Hood from it.

[Negga] And other times…

She doesn't need a man to rescue her.

She figures out a way to get away from the wolf herself.

[Negga] And based on all those variations,

Tehrani traced how the story must have spread.

[Tehrani] You get a kind of family tree of versions of Little Red Riding Hood.

[Negga] Fanning out into three continents,

and splitting off into smaller branches as details were added or lost.

This tree tells its own story

of the places a tale traveled,

and of the generations of people who shared and loved it,

and made it their own.

By tracing any branch back,

you can also see which stories share an ancestor.

Like the Grimms' version.

Their proudly German tale

is a direct descendant of Perrault's French one.

One of the Grimms' main sources had actually been a family friend,

the daughter of French immigrants.

Who probably were familiar

with the version that Perrault had first written down.

[Negga] But Perrault definitely hadn't invented it.

The original Little Red Riding Hood predates any famous book,

originating at least a thousand years ago.

But we're not sure from where or when.

[Tatar] We imagine human beings gathered around campsites,

telling stories to each other.

One, to pass on ancestral wisdom,

and also for the sake of entertainment.

These stories have been passed down from generation to generation

for a long, long time.

[Negga] Beauty and the Beast, that's 4,000 years old.

Jack and the Beanstalk is 5,000.

And the oldest fairy tale they studied…

You find in Germany, and in Western Europe,

and in Eastern Europe, and in Western Asia,

lots of these different populations that can be traced way back

to the last common ancestors.

[Negga] Six thousand years ago.

Five thousand five hundred years before we invented printing.

Four thousand before we invented paper.

Two thousand before we first wrote a story down,

the Epic of Gilgamesh.

It was first told right around the time we figured out how to make bronze,

a civilization-changing event.

Which may be why the story is The Smith and the Devil.

[Tehrani] The blacksmith makes a deal with a malevolent, supernatural figure.

He wants to be able to weld any materials together

to be the greatest blacksmith that's ever lived.

And in return, he will give up his soul.

[Negga] If you haven't heard that story, you've heard a version of it.

I had to be at that there crossroads last midnight

to sell my soul to the devil.

I offered my soul to Satan,

if he would raise the Hessian from the grave to avenge me.

Would you be willing to make a deal?

Name your price.

[Negga] In Christian societies,

it's become a story about the dangers of ambition,

but in the original version…

[Tehrani] The first thing the blacksmith does

is sticks the devil to the spot, so the devil can't move.

So he gets to be this kind of best blacksmith of all time

and also gets to keep his soul, so he tricks the devil.

Fairy tales have been

beta tested for a really long time.

They are stories that have just been honed down

to a series of very evocative, specific details

over centuries and centuries of retelling.

[Negga] It's story survival of the fittest.

As a story evolves, it sheds anything superfluous.

That's why the characters and plots are so simple,

which means they can be easily adapted to the times.

There are so many evil stepmothers because before the 20th century,

it was pretty common for women to die in childbirth.

And Disney's Cinderella got a pumpkin carriage

because when Charles Perrault originally wrote that version down,

people were excited about pumpkins.

They were the cool new crop brought over from the Americas.

Some of the earliest movies

by legendary illusionist Georges Méliès

were versions of Cinderella and Bluebeard.

The not-so-child-friendly story of a woman who discovers that her new husband

has a habit of murdering his wives.

And then Lotte Reiniger moved them into a whole new world,

cutting puppets and choreographing their shadows,

producing the true first full-length animated movie.

And this film, a 1916 version of the Grimms' Snow White,

played to packed theaters

barely able to hold the crowds of people desperate to see it.

Including, the story goes,

a young boy named Walt,

who was so enchanted by it that he grew up to make his own version.

Disney has created the one story that we all know.

And so, in that sense,

you could say that it's had a kind of negative cultural effect.

But Disney kept the stories alive.

Were it not for Disney,

many of these fairy tales might have disappeared.

Fairy tales are very much a product of the time in which they are made.

If you look at Snow White,

that's a movie made in the '30s.

The feminine ideal at the time,

who is sweet and industrious, and cleans,

and is a sort of passive ideal of womanhood and of femininity.

[Negga] Disney also famously only hired white men in creative positions.

As the company explained in this rejection letter,

quote, "Girls weren't even considered for their training school."

But times have changed.

Frozen is the first Disney animated movie to be directed by a woman.

[Tatar] Which was inspired by Andersen's story of The Snow Queen,

but which becomes a kind of hymn

to the solidarity of sisters,

and the solidarity of women in general.

In many ways, when we rewrite the fairy tales to be more feminist,

we're not really going forwards so much as we are going back.

[Negga] The writer Madame d'Aulnoy

gave us the term "fairy tale" back in the 17th century.

And in her version of Cinderella, the beautiful, downtrodden girl

is nicknamed "Little Clever Girl,"

because she triumphs by outsmarting her enemies

and making friends in high places with the fairies.

[Grady] She spends the whole time being nice to all of her enemies,

but the moral that you're given at the end of this version is

it's really funny when you're nice to people who are terrible,

and then you beat them anyway.

[Negga] As fairy tales moved on from campfires into homes,

then onto pages and finally screens,

some stories faded into the shadows.

But today more than ever before,

we have access to different branches,

different trees, different forests entirely.

The film Coco introduced millions to Mexican folklore

about the importance of remembering your ancestors.

Moana was based on Polynesian folk traditions

that remind us to care for our communities.

And Japan's Hayao Miyazaki

has given the world tales about the horrors of violence,

and respect for the natural world.

A theme shared by the Celtic folklore

that inspired the film Wolfwalkers.

[Tatar] The great thing about going global is

that we realize that there's this golden chain of folklore

that unites all of us.

That is, these stories can get us talking across continents,

across cultural divides,

across linguistic divides.

Fairy tales are stories that have survived for thousands of years for a reason,

because they help us think about these problems

that are fundamental to the human experience.

The very best folktales

are the ones that are both highly adaptable,

but also ones that really speak to kind of fundamental truths,

fundamental concerns, that are going to be relevant

to all humans everywhere and at every time.

I learned that don't talk to strangers,

and always listen to your parents

or the family you know.

If I saw the wolf, I would just keep walking, not talk to him,

go to grandmother's house,

and just eat, no stopping.

You don't always have to

wear something pretty

or look pretty

to be pretty from the inside.

If the person liked you,

or they wanted to be your friend, they will like you for who you are.

[in Spanish] If we believe and trust ourselves,

we can move forward, no matter what.

[Negga in English] And they lived peacefully and prosperous.

Or happily and contentedly until the end of their days.

Or in happiness and luxury to this very day.

Or happily ever after.

Or snip, snap, snout, and then the story was out.

[closing theme music playing]