Magical Realism guides our thoughts to magic which guides my thoughts to fairy tales. This month a fourth season of the show Once Upon a Time on ABC is to premiere. This show takes classic fairytales from the Grimm brothers and puts a twist on each. It brings all the fairytales together into one universe. They were brought into our world, the "real world,"through a curse taking away all magical aspects of this society and replacing their lives with normal lives. What it really did was it mixed magic and realism. This show focused more on the real stories instead of the Disney versions. Every character seems more real.
This middle part *Spoiler Alert*
When magic is brought back to their world, the magic starts to blend with the reality. Magic becomes their reality, but the "real aspects" of the show are not lost with the return of magic. Instead magic enhances reality.
The main protagonist denies magic and instead uses modern "Magic." Ironically, she has the best magical abilities of them all, as she was born of true love. For those of you who haven't seen the show, what about regular fairytales? How does magical realism play a role?
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2 comments:
I think a key difference between regular fairytales and Latin American magical realism is the setting of the stories. In fairytales, the setting is often "a land far, far away". The setting itself is completely fictional, and in this made up land anything is possible. This differs from stories like One Hundred Years of Solitude, which is set in Macondo, a city which itself is based off of actual Latin American cities. Although it is not an actual place, it is based off of one, and is therefore based in realism. The setting represents the differences in the novel - fairytales are completely made up, yet magical realism has some truth to it, even if it is a fictional story.
I agree with Isabel that there are differences from the two different types of stories that we are presented with. If we are talking about Latin American stories, particularly 100 Years of Solitude, then we take more realistic views of life. Yes the book has magical realism aspects throughout every page, but the ideals are as old as time. There is love, betrayal, war, and death. In many of the "Disneyfied" versions of fairytales these subjects are made to seem less brutal(not counting Mufasa's death scene).
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