Michelle Anya Anjirbag

University of Antwerp | UA · Department of Literature

Fairy-tale Justice: The limits of good versus evil in complicated worlds through ABC's Once Upon a Time Once Upon a Time as a television series uses the television series medium to draw equivalency between Disney fairy tale and the English children's literature canon specifically for an adult audience through the police procedural format. The ahist...

This paper examines three films that mark Disney’s foray into postmodern fairy-tale narratives to determine if these attempts to move beyond or complicate Disney princess or fairy-tale narratives are successful. Drawing from fairy-tale studies and age studies, it particularly examines how gendered narratives and stereotypes operate within these nar...

Invited speaker and participant (plenary roundtable), 15 May 2024, University of Glasgow, UK, (online presentation).

Presented at Narrative 2024, Panel: The Archive of Childhood (Hybrid) 17 April 2024, Newcastle University, UK (online presentation).

While Disney as a corporation has expanded beyond the adaptations of classic fairy tales and children’s literature that cemented its primacy as a source of animated family entertainment for the past 80 years or so, fairy tales and princess narratives are still a hallmark of the corporation. Likewise, Disney’s fairy-tale aesthetic is recognizable ac...

When interviewed by Vogue about her design choices in the 2015 live-action Disney Cinderella, costume designer Sandy Powell refers to Cinderella’s “glass” slipper, fashioned for the screen from Swarovski crystal and absolutely impossible to wear let alone walk or dance in, “the ultimate fetish shoe” (Powell qtd in Camhi). “Cinderellas” wear a varie...

Contemporary fantasy, like its generic predecessor the fairy tale, holds the potential to subvert societal norms and stereotypes. Retellings often redress gender norms that become embedded in adaptations through the recycling of various characters, themes, or motifs, but is often entangled with other indicators of identity, such as age. While criti...

As with other twenty-first-century rewritings of fairytales, Cinderella is Dead by Kalynn Bayron complicates the classic ‘Cinderella’ fairytale narrative popularized by Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm for new audiences, queering and race-bending the tale in its decidedly feminist revision of the story. However, as we argue here, the novel a...

With an aesthetic rooted in fairy-tale magic and wonder (Anjirbag 2020, 2018), Disney’s properties seem ripe for fan takeover and reinvention. Easter eggs in Disney animated film have long-teased theories of an interconnected movie universe, and fan theories on the matter abound. For example, there is the Pixar Theory (Negroni 2013) which postulate...

This paper explores the recently published Vintage Books picture book series “A Fairy Tale Revolution” to determine what might be ‘revolutionary’ in these postmodern retellings by Rebecca Solnit, Malorie Blackman, Kamila Shamsie, and Jeanette Winterson individually and as a corpus. If Angela Carter unlocked fairy tales in such a way that they could...

Review of "Recasting the Disney Princess in an Era of New Media and Social Movements" ed. by Shearon Roberts

This dissertation deconstructs Disney’s corporate commodification of multiculturalism and diversity to examine the impacts versus the stated intentions of a US-centric corporation with conservative roots to become more diverse and multicultural in its depiction of race and ethnicity in a more globalized world. I argue that while the Disney Renaissa...

Books such as Polly Shulman’s The Grimm Legacy series, and made-for-television films and television series such as The Librarians and Warehouse 13 incorporate the idea of a library or repository where artefacts connected to various stories are stored that facilitates new adventures, not through retelling, but by using the space of the library as a...

The transmediation involved in recent Walt Disney Company productions including "A Wrinkle in Time," "Black Panther," "Thor: Ragnarok," "Coco," and "Moana" engage with a process of visualizing the nonvisual in ways that have heretofore differed from past Disney offerings. These films respond to calls for increased diversity, unlocking the potential...

Retelling – and reinterpreting – fairy tales is not a new phenomenon, but rather a tradition that reaches back to 16th-century Europe. This lecture will explore the social and cultural history of the term “contes des fees” from which we derive the term “fairy tale,” and use this to consider contemporary understandings of fairy tales, why this form...

This article examines the castle as an icon signaling medievalism in Disney films, and through it, how Disney maintains a core aesthetic of whiteness across its brand, especially in the fairy-tale films. It specifically examines how the castle title cards root a sense of historicism in three live-action remediations of classic fairy-tale films: Mal...

The transmediation involved in recent Walt Disney Company productions including A Wrinkle in Time, Black Panther, Thor: Ragnarok, Coco, and Moana engage with a process of visualizing the nonvisual in ways that have heretofore differed from past Disney offerings. These films respond to calls for increased diversity, unlocking the potential of imagin...

Silencing doesn’t always refer to the removal of sound; it can also refer to the overwriting of a narrative or a recontextualization of events. Instead of removing a narrative – censorship that then leaves a gap to be questioned – changing the dialogue, inserting a new narrative, or changing the circumstances of remembering the events in question c...

Review for Jeunesse: Young people, Texts, Cultures, Vol. 11, no. 1, 2019 of: Greenhill, Pauline, Jill Terry Rudy, Naomi Hamer, and Lauren Bosc, editors. The Routledge Companion to Media and Fairy-Tale Cultures. Routledge, 2018. Citation: Anjirbag, M. “Intermedial Borders and Global Fairy-Tale Cultures”. Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures, V...

Books such as Polly Shulman’s The Grimm Legacy series, and made-for-television films and television series such as The Librarians and Warehouse 13 have reconfigured the idea of myth, folklore, and fairy tale – in terms of how and where narratives might be accessed and by whom – in the contemporary public imagination. Each series incorporates the id...

As the consciousness of coloniality, diversity, and the necessity of not only token depictions of otherness but accurate representations of diversity in literature and film has grown, there has been a shift in the processes of adaptation and appropriation used by major film production companies and how they approach representing the other. One clea...

As consciousness of coloniality, diversity, and the necessity of not only token depictions of otherness but accurate representations of diversity in literature and film has grown, there has been a shift in the processes of adaptation and appropriation used by major film production companies and how they approach representing the other. One clear ex...

Adapting well-known narratives close together creates space for cross-generational interrogation of well-known figures and their symbolic projected roles in societies, as seen in the live-action remakes of Disney Classic films, such as Cinderella (2015), Maleficent (2014), and Beauty and the Beast (2017). By examining the intertextual relationships...

Fairy tales reinforce cultural values and ideals and influence readers to ascribe to a particular social structure. However, they can also be used to assert a new social norm. From the Victorian era through more contemporary times, authors such as George MacDonald and Angela Carter have used fairy tale structures in original plots to subvert the re...