A Grim Fairy Tale

April 10, 2012 7:20 AM

Red is a dark retelling of Little Red Riding Hood done as a bloody, stylish animated short.
posted by quin (11 comments total)

Nicely done!
posted by Kitteh at 7:38 AM on April 10, 2012

This short represents a very smart use of human and technical resources - four animators and one background artist put together a polished, professional-looking five-minute film by very carefully allocating their time and talent. I love it when people accurately size up their own limitations (in this case, a very small crew) and make artistic decisions that take the best possible advantage of what's available to them. In this case, they made a film in which silhouettes and sketchy, unpolished frames are a strength instead of an obvious compromise. I wish I could go back in time and show this to my younger, animation-student-self as an example of how I SHOULD have planned my senior film.

My only real criticism is that music is a little heavy-handed and distracting.
posted by Narrative Priorities at 7:43 AM on April 10, 2012 [3 favorites]

a dark retelling of a fairy tale? well, I never!
posted by Legomancer at 7:49 AM on April 10, 2012 [2 favorites]

Whoa, that was good. I love that she was so intentional about finishing her kill.
posted by heyho at 9:01 AM on April 10, 2012

a dark retelling of a fairy tale? well, I never!

Well, in all fairness, it was the Grimms who sanitised the Little Red Riding Hood story. Older versions tend to end with the wolf eating Red Riding Hood, with no huntsman arriving to cut her and grandma out of its stomach. This is only a dark-grey retelling of the story, I suppose.
posted by howfar at 9:12 AM on April 10, 2012

"Well, in all fairness, it was the Grimms who sanitised the Little Red Riding Hood story. Older versions tend to end with the wolf eating Red Riding Hood, with no huntsman arriving to cut her and grandma out of its stomach."

Pretty much all the oldest versions of these familiar fairy tales were very dark and frightening with few happy endings. As usual, I highly recommend Iona and Peter Opie's The Classic Fairy Tales.

The first known printed version of Red Riding Hood appeared in Charles Perrault's, Histoires ou contes du temps passé, published in 1697. Perrault introduced the red element of the hood.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 9:56 AM on April 10, 2012

Ah, an excuse to repost a bit from the review of American McGee's Alice on Old Man Murray:

The problem with making a dark and disturbing version of Alice in Wonderland is that it's pretty dark and disturbing to begin with, which gives it little training wheels that help cultural firebrands ride it into geniusdom once every eighteen months or so. Masterminding a trippy reinterpretation of Lewis Carroll is like making a version of Crazy Traxi, only crazy! At this point, about the edgiest thing you could do with Alice in Wonderland is try to make it a little less fucking insane.

posted by Halloween Jack at 11:51 AM on April 10, 2012 [1 favorite]

The Grimms were kinda jerks in putting together their collection.

This is why the discovery of a huge new trove of unedited German fairy tales is nothing short of a revelation. These tales, only of few of which were published in the 1850s, were collected in the Upper Palatinate region of Germany by Franz Xaver von Schönwerth, a scholar intent on preserving the rapidly vanishing folk wisdom of his region. What they reveal, in abrupt contrast to the Brothers Grimm, is an equal-opportunity world where the brave and clever children are as likely to be girls as boys, and the vulnerable, exploited youths are not just princesses, but princes.

posted by Pryde at 1:12 PM on April 10, 2012 [1 favorite]

As I'm partial to happy endings (at times), I'll just leave this here
posted by Redhush at 4:53 PM on April 10, 2012 [1 favorite]

Wow, I LOVED this! Thank you!
posted by Aquifer at 8:37 PM on April 10, 2012

I wonder what it is about our era that takes a story of victimization and insists on making it into a story about wolf slaying. I'm not objecting to it- mind you, it's just honestly unusual to find a modern telling without the slant- the webcomics seem to err on the side of Red-the-monster-slayer-and-avenger-of-grannies but even the recent movie is an extension of that aesthetic.

There's a paper somewhere in the new gender ideal that demands that what's intended to be a very passive victim is no longer palatable. I'm not sure I object to the increase of efficacy but it's weird to watch the expectation shift from spunky frying pan bludgeoning action as the best I can hope for, to a certain sort of self rescuing femme version of machismo.
posted by Phalene at 1:43 PM on April 11, 2012