ABSTRACT
The development of animation at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries opened up breathtaking creative possibilities for re-imagining and playing with the traditional fairy tales.69 The great pioneers such as J. Stuart Blackton, Arthur Melbourne Cooper, Émile Cohl, and Winsor McCay, among others, demonstrated in diverse styles and techniques that live and inanimate objects could be drawn, molded, and sculpted and then arranged and rearranged to be photographed frame by frame. Once the frames were projected on film in some kind of narrative order or sequence, they appeared to assume a reality of their own. The created images or illusions were similar to the miraculous transformations within an oral and literary fairy tale except that, in this case, the fairies did not weave and control the magic, that is, the destiny of the characters and objects in a narrative. The animators were in charge, and they made sure that spectators knew who was acting godlike and creating the images that they were viewing and admiring. Consequently, it is important to consider the conditions of early animation in America and Europe and the role of the animator in general, for all this has a bearing on the animator’s productive relationship with the fairy tale.
