Why do we tell stories about impossible things? What is the point of examining something which we can never experience?
Stories tell us who we were, who we are, and who we might become. Fairy tales are particularly important because they are a way to study history. We can tell a great deal about our past by studying what it valued and dreamed. Storytellers are a type of historian, but one less plagued by exact fact and detail. They perform stories which make up our cultural consciousness, but also adapt and change these stories. This means that a storyteller sits in a unique binary position, as they are responsible for both translating the past and reading the current room, or understanding what their audience wants to hear.
Fairy tales and folklore are prominent sources for Hollywood. We have seen many adaptations of tales like Snow White and Cinderella, to the extent where film has become one of the ultimate forms of folklore storytelling. It feels as though our culture has moved past traditional storytellers like the Brothers Grimm, as you do not need to read their work to recognize their stories.
While film has become one of the most successful vehicles for stories, in doing so, it feels like we have lost our traditional storytellers. When I say that, I don’t mean literary authors. I mean the person who stood by the fireside and spoke nonsense. Not just family gossip or memories, but stories. In the age of cinema and mass production, we have erased the storyteller as an individual. Sure, some directors are hailed as storytellers, and rightfully so, but there are so many other figures which contribute to a film’s story and are rarely acknowledged. This begs the question: have we forgotten our storytellers, or have we simply adapted them?
The Storyteller and The 10th Kingdom sit on either end of this question. Both miniseries want to reintroduce traditional fairy tales and to illustrate why these stories and practices remain relevant. The projects come from radically different positions about the same discussion. Jim Henson’s The Storyteller is interested in recreating the atmosphere and tone of obscure stories, while also imbuing its subject with a modern perspective and innovative technology. The 10th Kingdom is interested in how recognizable fairy tales fit and impact modernity. What unites these projects is that each suggest that stories outlive the people who tell them, as the characters continue to grow beyond our control. While The Storyteller highlights this by showing the timeless nature of the tales, 10th Kingdom does so by showing how dangerous it can be to forget your past and the stories which impacted it.
The Storyteller
The Storyteller was a short-lived television series created by the incredible Jim Henson. It had two seasons, one which focused on old fairy tales and the other on Greek mythology. Like Henson’s other projects, this series was a mix of actors and intricate puppetry and technical wizardry. Henson respected television as an medium, one as worthy as any film. It didn’t matter if it was just a single episode, every moment and detail was significant, an opportunity even. Television likewise gave Henson the freedom to pursue short and strange stories which would not have translated into feature length film. Although the series was not a huge success, it was Henson’s last project, and certainly one of his most heartfelt endeavors.
Each episode of The Storyteller focuses on a different story as told by the Storyteller (John Hurt). Hurt’s character is crucial to the stories, as he not only tells them but often interacts with other characters. This highlights the role of the storyteller as someone who possesses great knowledge but also a bit of magic, specifically the ability to connect both phrases and people effortlessly.
Likewise, Henson’s project is so unique because he focuses on early iterations of famous fairy tales, those which are not well known. For instance, his version of Cinderella comes from “Sapsorrow”, a more obscure version of the story. While the show focuses on these older stories, Henson installs progressive values in these works. For example, “Sapsorrow” revisits evil stepsisters, disguises, falling shoes, and a handsome Prince, but also makes Sapsorrow’s journey into a class commentary. The episode transforms the passive Cinderella character we know into a strong and independent woman, one who becomes her own fairy godmother and can see beyond class division. This transformation suggests that just because a story is old, its age does not diminish its value for modern audiences.
Another example of modern perspective in The Storyteller is “Hans My Hedgehog”, a version of Beauty and the Beast. The story begins with the wife of a farmer who wishes desperately for a baby, only to birth a hideous hedgehog they name Hans my Hedgehog. Hans eventually leaves his abusive father and village to makes his fortune in the woods. Many years later, he saves a lost King, and as a reward, the King offers him the first thing to greet him when he returns home. This turns out to be the Princess, whom Hans asks to marry. Although she hates the idea, the Princess agrees because she believes that going back on a promise is uglier than anything else in this world. On their wedding night, Hans sheds his quills and transforms into a man. The Princess discovers this and is given terrible advice by her mother: throw the quills into the fire. This burns Hans’ flesh and causes him to run away. It is only after the Princess tracks him down, and embraces him, that Hans’ curse is broken.
What is progressive about this story, and perhaps more so than Beauty and the Beast, is that the curse must be broken by two versions of faithful love. First, Hans must find love within himself, and only then can shed his skin, which symbolizes his ability to accept both parts of himself. He has already done this by the time he meets the Princess, which means that the story is primarily interested in her transformation, not the Beast. The Princess must reconsider who she is, who she can trust, and what she is capable of. As such, both she and Hans learn to accept themselves before they can accept another person. The only way to break the curse is by embracing Hans as he is, as her hug pushes his quills back into him. This means that Hans is never separated from his quills, they are always inside of him.
Episodes such as this demonstrate that revisiting older stories does not mean that they remain fixtures of the past. Henson decided to find what was innovative about the story and focus on that. Rather than trying to emulate the original moral attached to Beauty and the Beast, Henson tries to find how these stories fit modernity. In doing so, his project suggests that older stories continue to adapt and shift alongside their audience. While he reintroduces the traditional Storyteller, he uses this figure to create a specific ageless tone to the story, one which brings it closer to the viewer. The episodes are not an impersonal display, or a story which we are just listening to. They are an ongoing conversation between you and the Storyteller, which emphasizes that stories are created by both their teller and their listener.
The 10th Kingdom
The 10th Kingdom also includes a modern perspective by illustrating how the stories we know appear in our world. Stories like Snow White and Rapunzel are not some decrepit documents, nor something which belongs to childhood. Their stories continued to develop after we heard them, and now they threaten to enter our world.
For those unfamiliar, The 10th Kingdom is an amazing television miniseries/film about a woman and her father who are sucked into a fairy tale world. Our world is the mythical 10th kingdom, which can only be accessed by a magic mirror. The show is like an earlier version of Once Upon a Time, but better. It deals with child abuse, postpartum depression, imperialism, colonialism, and violence, all through fairy tales. As such, the show illustrates how fairy tales fit with our modern understanding of the world. They are a way to recognize certain traits in our society, but in an indirect way. Many of the characters we encounter in the show are different or more violent than what we would have thought, meaning they are a reflection of what our society has become, and the issues which are important there. It essentially suggests that stories are not an escape but a mirror, one which amplifies and distorts the very features we were running from.
While The 10th Kingdom does not include a traditional storyteller, it focuses on what it means to tell a story, and the structures and themes which compose storytelling. It demonstrates that storytelling is an inherently political act as it positions one perspective versus another. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is important to keep in mind. What makes The 10th Kingdom stand apart is the way it argues that stories themselves often change to fit a specific role, as do their characters. As such, the project is interested in treating stories as an important method for reconciliation and growth but also as a tool of suppression and ideology. Because the series refuses to distance our world from the fairy tale world, it argues that it is important to pay attention to the way we tell and listen to stories.
The commonality between The Storyteller and The 10th Kingdom is that they give stories the opportunity to change. Neither are the ultimate versions of the story, and they instead focus on the temporality of storytelling. Both projects are thus interested in retelling stories and highlighting the mechanics, both beautiful and ugly, which underlie the act of storytelling. While The Storyteller returns to the past, it and The 10th Kingdom utilize a fuller and more contemporary model for reinvention and nostalgia.