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black_sluggard) wrote2012-09-25 12:30 pm
black_sluggard) wrote2012-09-25 12:30 pm
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(Essay) Brian Froud: Returning Faeries to Their Roots
This is the essay I spent Friday night and Saturday writing for my Visual Language & Culture class. I wound up getting an 80 on it, which is fucking merciful considering the paper was written in less than 36 hours, and I had time for only minimal proofreading. This let me pass with a B- in the class, and I'm incredibly freaking relieved at that.
I've decided not to proofread this essay further before posting it, because I feel it preserves the spirit of desperation in which the paper was written.
Brian Froud: Returning Faeries to Their Roots
The dominant conceptualization of faeries today is that of magical, yet benign beings of idle fantasy, figures which make their home in the realm of children's entertainment. Audiences and consumers are frequently greeted with the heavily merchandised images of these delicate creatures, such as Disney's Tinkerbell and her very marketable friends, in the form of toys, stickers, clothing and school supplies. Yet to accept the prominence of these images at face value is to forget the powerful role faeries originally played in mythology and folklore as household gods and personifications of nature. In the 1970s, British fantasy illustrator and conceptual artist Brian Froud was ready to remind us by providing a very different vision of them indeed. In his art book, Faeries, written with illustrator Alan Lee; its followup Lady Cottington's Pressed Fairy Book, written with Terry Jones; and his design work on the popular film Labyrinth, made in collaboration with Muppets creator Jim Henson, Froud approached faeries from a vastly different perspective than modern audiences were accustomed to. And through a postmodern questioning and deconstruction of common presentations, he has introduced new audiences to a fascinating view of the world that is actually very old indeed.
To appreciate what Froud has done with faeries, one must have some understanding what the history of their portrayal in art has been. In the Victorian age, faeries held the popular fascination that vampires and zombies hold today. Faeries were all over the various forms of entertainment of the day, the subjects of popular literature, poetry, operas and ballets. Their popularity, combined with the increasingly low costs of production afforded by the Industrial Revolution, made them a popular motif in the decorative art appearing in many middle class homes. In fine art, faeries became a means of expressing sexuality at a time when the subject was at its most repressed, as the inhabitants of the faerie realm represented a sort of fantastic other which could be gazed upon without guilt. As editor and essayist Terri Windling states in her article "Fairies in Legend, Lore, and Literature", "Paintings of the nude were deemed acceptable so long as those nudes sported fairy wings" (Windling, "Fairies in Legend, Lore, and Literature" 3). Yet it is really the Victorians' romantic view of childhood which most effected the depictions of faeries in art. Increasingly, the years of childhood were being seen as a time when children should be sheltered in their innocence. New stories were penned for the consumption of children which had been stripped of much of the darkness such tales originally held, providing light, harmless images of fantasy in stark contrast to the dreary, crowded landscapes of increased industrialization (Windling, "Fairies in Legend, Lore, and Literature" 3).
While there were a few minor revivals, for the most part interest in faeries waned in the early part of the twentieth century. The true revival of interest in the mythic occurred in the early 1970s, when J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings began the rise to its great popularity. As a scholar of Old English literature and folklore, Tolkien's elves were rooted in the earlier mythic traditions. His works soon commanded the attention of teenaged and adult readers everywhere, leading an older audience to reclaim the sort of fantasy stories usually reserved for children (Windling, "Fairies in Legend, Lore, and Literature" 4). It was in this atmosphere of revived interest in fantasy that Froud promised to make his name.
In art school, Froud had been captivated by the fairytale illustrations of Arthur Rackham, and his new-found interest lead him to study first the folklore of England, and then of other cultures as well. After college, Froud worked as a professional illustrator in London for five years before moving to Dartmoor. There, he shared a house with fellow illustrator Alan Lee (Windling, "Making the Invisible World Visible"). In 1975, in response to the recent success of the picture book Gnomes by Dutch artist Wil Huygen, publisher Ian Ballantine asked the pair to create a book on faeries. But where Gnomes was lighthearted fare in line with the prevailing tone and aesthetics of fairytale art, Faeries developed into something darker, more mature, and entirely different (Froud and Lee 3; Windling, "Fairies in Legend, Lore, and Literature" 4). In his introduction to the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of the book, Froud says of the project, "Both Alan and I wanted to be as true to the subject as possible and to portray faeries as they really are. So we went back to the original source material and folklore description. We made nothing up. . . . We were painting pictures of faeries with their original power reinstated, not just airy whimsey" (Froud and Lee 3).
Faeries had a tremendous impact on fantasy literature and the depictions of faeries and similar beings therein. This impact can be seen in such popular novels as Emma Bull's War of the Oaks, Susanne Clarke's bestselling Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, and Neil Gaiman's Stardust, as well other media including comic series, like Gaiman's The Books of Magic and Mike Mignola's popular title Hellboy. Says Windling, ". . . indeed, it's rare to find fairy art today (or fairies in film, or fairy fiction) that doesn't owe a debt, to some degree, to this influential book" (Windling, "Fairies in Legend, Lore, and Literature" 4).
Despite the international success of Faeries, publishers were reluctant to commit to the production of further books on the subject. Remembering these obstacles, Froud says, "So I said to myself: What do I have to do to convince a publisher that there's an audience for my faery art? I decided a humorous approach might open the door; it might perhaps be less intimidating than a 'serious' book on the subject" (qtd. Windling, "Making the Invisible World Visible"). This was the attitude with which Froud's next project, Lady Cottington's Pressed Fairy Book, began. Written with Monty Python's Terry Jones in 1994, the Pressed Fairy Book mimicked the form of a book of pressed flower craft—an artistic pursuit popular among ladies of the Victorian era. Presented as the keepsake of a young girl of that times, the faeries within the book appeared in contorted positions, like flowers pressed beneath wax paper. Intertextuality is a quality that is achieved within a work by referencing the meanings of another text into its own (Sturken & Cartwright 446). By framing the Victorian usage of faerie imagery within the trappings of idle hobby, Froud constructed a very effective parody. Where, in Faeries, Froud approached his subject meticulously, like a naturalist cataloging the exotic fauna of the mythic, this new book mocked the bowdlerization of faeries by Victorian artists as the superficial observations of the invisible realm by childish, fumbling dilettantes.
In the eighties, Froud was approached by Jim Henson, who had been impressed by his earlier illustrations. They wound up collaborating on two movies together, The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth (Windling, "Making the Invisible World Visible"). While The Dark Crystal enjoyed a measure of commercial success, Labyrinth failed to meet its original budget. However, since its initial release, the film has attained cult status. In an interview for Devon Today, Froud said of Labyrinth, ". . . the film is being constantly rediscovered and becoming meaningful for new generations, despite being made in 1985. It seems that we achieved what we wanted with Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal—to create a myth" (qtd. Cracknell). This rediscovery has taken numerous forms. In 1999, The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth were released on DVD, and the spectacular success of their sales lead the Jim Henson Company to produce a spiritual successor to the films in the form of Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean's MirrorMask (Weiland).
Perhaps the strangest example of the film's continuing legacy, in 2005 comic book publisher Tokyopop entered into a partnership with the Jim Henson Company to publish a comic book sequel to Labyrinth. Called Return to the Labyrinth, the book was written by Jake T. Forbes, with art by Chris Lie (Dacey). This choice of publisher is an interesting one. Capitalizing on the popularity of Japanese comics and animation, Tokyopop is best known for its translations, localizations and adaptations of imported materials, though it also produces original English-language works with a strong Japanese influence. Return to the Labyrinth is one of the latter. While Froud's contributions to the film's story and his designs had their roots in ancient English folklore, the Henson Company's partnership with Tokyopop has managed to target the new, young audiences discovering Labyrinth for the first time through the use of the explosively trendy Japanese "manga" style witin an American product. This unexpected blending reflects on the unpredictable flow of globalization, and the resultant increasing migration of cultural properties through trade. As, Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright state, ". . . even cultural products that appear to be 'national', such as Hollywood films, are made and circulated through global networks" (Sturken and Cartwright 407). Examining the comic through the lens of globalization, Return to the Labyrinth represents an interesting coming together of several disparate styles and cultural influences through the forces of global marketing.
Our text defines postmodernism as being characterized, among other things, by its critique of the modernist faith in progress (Sturken and Cartwright 454). If the whimsical sylphs of Victorian art can be said to have arisen in response to early Industrialism, then perhaps the Postmodern era's reintroduction of traditionally folkloric faeries to our literary discourse—beings that are dangerous, powerful and alluring—can best be seen in the context of the growth of the modern environmentalist movement. Where the Victorians bore witness to the birth of industrial "progress", it is the lot of recent generations to bear witness to its damaging consequences. "Traditional cultures have always recognized and honored the animate spirits of the earth," Froud says, "but in western culture we've rather left that behind, to our spiritual cost, and ecological peril. Now we're beginning to recognize how important it is to have a vibrant relationship with the land beneath our feet—and that the old stories and mythic imagery can aid this process" (qtd. Windling, "Making the Invisible World Visible"). In uncovering the dark, deeply sewn roots of faeries, Froud is not simply reminding us of stories we had forgotten, but reminding us of our responsibility to nature by returning power, voice and agency to the beings which once represented it.
Works Cited
Cracknell, Guy. "Jim Henson, The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth." Devon Today Dec. & Jan. 2001: n. pag. World of Froud. Web. 21 Sept. 2012.
Dacey, Katherine. "Muppet Manga Mania: Jim Henson's Legends of the Dark Crystal and Return to Labyrinth." PopCultureShock. N.p., 21 Dec. 2007. Web. 22 Sept. 2012.
Froud, Brian, and Alan Lee. Faeries: Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2002. Print.
Froud, Brian, and Terry Jones. Lady Cottington's Pressed Fairy Book. London: Pavilion, 1994. Print.
Sturken, Marita, and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture. 2nd ed. Oxford; New York: Oxford UP, 2009. Print.
Weiland, Jonah. "Putting on the "MirrorMask": Executive Producer Michael Polis on the Film." Comic Book Resources. N.p., 6 Aug. 2004. Web. 22 Sept. 2012.
Windling, Terri. "Fairies in Legend, Lore, and Literature." Endicott's Journal of Mythic Arts. The Endicott Studio, 2006. Web. 21 Sept. 2012.
Windling, Terri. "Making the Invisible World Visible: Brian Froud Brings Folklore to Life." Realms of Fantasy Dec. 1998: n. pag. World of Froud. Web. 21 Sept. 2012.
I've decided not to proofread this essay further before posting it, because I feel it preserves the spirit of desperation in which the paper was written.
Brian Froud: Returning Faeries to Their Roots
The dominant conceptualization of faeries today is that of magical, yet benign beings of idle fantasy, figures which make their home in the realm of children's entertainment. Audiences and consumers are frequently greeted with the heavily merchandised images of these delicate creatures, such as Disney's Tinkerbell and her very marketable friends, in the form of toys, stickers, clothing and school supplies. Yet to accept the prominence of these images at face value is to forget the powerful role faeries originally played in mythology and folklore as household gods and personifications of nature. In the 1970s, British fantasy illustrator and conceptual artist Brian Froud was ready to remind us by providing a very different vision of them indeed. In his art book, Faeries, written with illustrator Alan Lee; its followup Lady Cottington's Pressed Fairy Book, written with Terry Jones; and his design work on the popular film Labyrinth, made in collaboration with Muppets creator Jim Henson, Froud approached faeries from a vastly different perspective than modern audiences were accustomed to. And through a postmodern questioning and deconstruction of common presentations, he has introduced new audiences to a fascinating view of the world that is actually very old indeed.
To appreciate what Froud has done with faeries, one must have some understanding what the history of their portrayal in art has been. In the Victorian age, faeries held the popular fascination that vampires and zombies hold today. Faeries were all over the various forms of entertainment of the day, the subjects of popular literature, poetry, operas and ballets. Their popularity, combined with the increasingly low costs of production afforded by the Industrial Revolution, made them a popular motif in the decorative art appearing in many middle class homes. In fine art, faeries became a means of expressing sexuality at a time when the subject was at its most repressed, as the inhabitants of the faerie realm represented a sort of fantastic other which could be gazed upon without guilt. As editor and essayist Terri Windling states in her article "Fairies in Legend, Lore, and Literature", "Paintings of the nude were deemed acceptable so long as those nudes sported fairy wings" (Windling, "Fairies in Legend, Lore, and Literature" 3). Yet it is really the Victorians' romantic view of childhood which most effected the depictions of faeries in art. Increasingly, the years of childhood were being seen as a time when children should be sheltered in their innocence. New stories were penned for the consumption of children which had been stripped of much of the darkness such tales originally held, providing light, harmless images of fantasy in stark contrast to the dreary, crowded landscapes of increased industrialization (Windling, "Fairies in Legend, Lore, and Literature" 3).
While there were a few minor revivals, for the most part interest in faeries waned in the early part of the twentieth century. The true revival of interest in the mythic occurred in the early 1970s, when J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings began the rise to its great popularity. As a scholar of Old English literature and folklore, Tolkien's elves were rooted in the earlier mythic traditions. His works soon commanded the attention of teenaged and adult readers everywhere, leading an older audience to reclaim the sort of fantasy stories usually reserved for children (Windling, "Fairies in Legend, Lore, and Literature" 4). It was in this atmosphere of revived interest in fantasy that Froud promised to make his name.
In art school, Froud had been captivated by the fairytale illustrations of Arthur Rackham, and his new-found interest lead him to study first the folklore of England, and then of other cultures as well. After college, Froud worked as a professional illustrator in London for five years before moving to Dartmoor. There, he shared a house with fellow illustrator Alan Lee (Windling, "Making the Invisible World Visible"). In 1975, in response to the recent success of the picture book Gnomes by Dutch artist Wil Huygen, publisher Ian Ballantine asked the pair to create a book on faeries. But where Gnomes was lighthearted fare in line with the prevailing tone and aesthetics of fairytale art, Faeries developed into something darker, more mature, and entirely different (Froud and Lee 3; Windling, "Fairies in Legend, Lore, and Literature" 4). In his introduction to the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of the book, Froud says of the project, "Both Alan and I wanted to be as true to the subject as possible and to portray faeries as they really are. So we went back to the original source material and folklore description. We made nothing up. . . . We were painting pictures of faeries with their original power reinstated, not just airy whimsey" (Froud and Lee 3).
Faeries had a tremendous impact on fantasy literature and the depictions of faeries and similar beings therein. This impact can be seen in such popular novels as Emma Bull's War of the Oaks, Susanne Clarke's bestselling Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, and Neil Gaiman's Stardust, as well other media including comic series, like Gaiman's The Books of Magic and Mike Mignola's popular title Hellboy. Says Windling, ". . . indeed, it's rare to find fairy art today (or fairies in film, or fairy fiction) that doesn't owe a debt, to some degree, to this influential book" (Windling, "Fairies in Legend, Lore, and Literature" 4).
Despite the international success of Faeries, publishers were reluctant to commit to the production of further books on the subject. Remembering these obstacles, Froud says, "So I said to myself: What do I have to do to convince a publisher that there's an audience for my faery art? I decided a humorous approach might open the door; it might perhaps be less intimidating than a 'serious' book on the subject" (qtd. Windling, "Making the Invisible World Visible"). This was the attitude with which Froud's next project, Lady Cottington's Pressed Fairy Book, began. Written with Monty Python's Terry Jones in 1994, the Pressed Fairy Book mimicked the form of a book of pressed flower craft—an artistic pursuit popular among ladies of the Victorian era. Presented as the keepsake of a young girl of that times, the faeries within the book appeared in contorted positions, like flowers pressed beneath wax paper. Intertextuality is a quality that is achieved within a work by referencing the meanings of another text into its own (Sturken & Cartwright 446). By framing the Victorian usage of faerie imagery within the trappings of idle hobby, Froud constructed a very effective parody. Where, in Faeries, Froud approached his subject meticulously, like a naturalist cataloging the exotic fauna of the mythic, this new book mocked the bowdlerization of faeries by Victorian artists as the superficial observations of the invisible realm by childish, fumbling dilettantes.
In the eighties, Froud was approached by Jim Henson, who had been impressed by his earlier illustrations. They wound up collaborating on two movies together, The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth (Windling, "Making the Invisible World Visible"). While The Dark Crystal enjoyed a measure of commercial success, Labyrinth failed to meet its original budget. However, since its initial release, the film has attained cult status. In an interview for Devon Today, Froud said of Labyrinth, ". . . the film is being constantly rediscovered and becoming meaningful for new generations, despite being made in 1985. It seems that we achieved what we wanted with Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal—to create a myth" (qtd. Cracknell). This rediscovery has taken numerous forms. In 1999, The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth were released on DVD, and the spectacular success of their sales lead the Jim Henson Company to produce a spiritual successor to the films in the form of Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean's MirrorMask (Weiland).
Perhaps the strangest example of the film's continuing legacy, in 2005 comic book publisher Tokyopop entered into a partnership with the Jim Henson Company to publish a comic book sequel to Labyrinth. Called Return to the Labyrinth, the book was written by Jake T. Forbes, with art by Chris Lie (Dacey). This choice of publisher is an interesting one. Capitalizing on the popularity of Japanese comics and animation, Tokyopop is best known for its translations, localizations and adaptations of imported materials, though it also produces original English-language works with a strong Japanese influence. Return to the Labyrinth is one of the latter. While Froud's contributions to the film's story and his designs had their roots in ancient English folklore, the Henson Company's partnership with Tokyopop has managed to target the new, young audiences discovering Labyrinth for the first time through the use of the explosively trendy Japanese "manga" style witin an American product. This unexpected blending reflects on the unpredictable flow of globalization, and the resultant increasing migration of cultural properties through trade. As, Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright state, ". . . even cultural products that appear to be 'national', such as Hollywood films, are made and circulated through global networks" (Sturken and Cartwright 407). Examining the comic through the lens of globalization, Return to the Labyrinth represents an interesting coming together of several disparate styles and cultural influences through the forces of global marketing.
Our text defines postmodernism as being characterized, among other things, by its critique of the modernist faith in progress (Sturken and Cartwright 454). If the whimsical sylphs of Victorian art can be said to have arisen in response to early Industrialism, then perhaps the Postmodern era's reintroduction of traditionally folkloric faeries to our literary discourse—beings that are dangerous, powerful and alluring—can best be seen in the context of the growth of the modern environmentalist movement. Where the Victorians bore witness to the birth of industrial "progress", it is the lot of recent generations to bear witness to its damaging consequences. "Traditional cultures have always recognized and honored the animate spirits of the earth," Froud says, "but in western culture we've rather left that behind, to our spiritual cost, and ecological peril. Now we're beginning to recognize how important it is to have a vibrant relationship with the land beneath our feet—and that the old stories and mythic imagery can aid this process" (qtd. Windling, "Making the Invisible World Visible"). In uncovering the dark, deeply sewn roots of faeries, Froud is not simply reminding us of stories we had forgotten, but reminding us of our responsibility to nature by returning power, voice and agency to the beings which once represented it.
Works Cited
Cracknell, Guy. "Jim Henson, The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth." Devon Today Dec. & Jan. 2001: n. pag. World of Froud. Web. 21 Sept. 2012.
Dacey, Katherine. "Muppet Manga Mania: Jim Henson's Legends of the Dark Crystal and Return to Labyrinth." PopCultureShock. N.p., 21 Dec. 2007. Web. 22 Sept. 2012.
Froud, Brian, and Alan Lee. Faeries: Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2002. Print.
Froud, Brian, and Terry Jones. Lady Cottington's Pressed Fairy Book. London: Pavilion, 1994. Print.
Sturken, Marita, and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture. 2nd ed. Oxford; New York: Oxford UP, 2009. Print.
Weiland, Jonah. "Putting on the "MirrorMask": Executive Producer Michael Polis on the Film." Comic Book Resources. N.p., 6 Aug. 2004. Web. 22 Sept. 2012.
Windling, Terri. "Fairies in Legend, Lore, and Literature." Endicott's Journal of Mythic Arts. The Endicott Studio, 2006. Web. 21 Sept. 2012.
Windling, Terri. "Making the Invisible World Visible: Brian Froud Brings Folklore to Life." Realms of Fantasy Dec. 1998: n. pag. World of Froud. Web. 21 Sept. 2012.