Filming fairies: popular film, audience response and meaning in contemporary fairy lore

The last two films to be considered are animations. Faeries, originally called The Fairy Oak, was developed in 1999 and shown in 2001 as the Boxing Day special on ITV (HIT Entertainment PLC 1999). The screenwriter was commissioned to create an original plot based on fairy legends. The story combines the motifs of eating in fairyland, changeling and human woman married to the fairy king, and a couple of nasty underworld goblin types. The villains have no wings, although the leader can change into a crow. Script consultations made use of folk texts and examined the possibility of depicting the fairies without wings. This, however, was abandoned since they did not look sufficiently non-human. The resulting fairies, therefore, have the insect wings first popularised by Victorian fairy painting and by now an integral part of how we visualise fairies. The fairies always remain the same size; but when the human characters enter the fairy world, they are reduced to the same scale as the fairies. Although no themed products accompanied the film, the children who attended the London premiere came in costume and were given fairy or elf wings. Fern Gully: The Last Rainforest with its fairies and its ecological values was released in 1992. Here too, the fairies have insect wings and the humans are reduced in size to interact with them. Profits were donated to preserving the rainforest and the Smithsonian Institute was consulted, both of which reinforced the film's ecological credentials (Wikipedia.org; http://imdb.com/title/tt0104254). Uniquely, this film is not set in an Old World rural environment, but in the Australian rainforest, although the fairies still look very European. All the other films set the fairies, at least by implication, within a European world.

Conclusion

When asked about his film Willow, George Lucas stated that the fantasy genre creator needed to create "an immaculate reality that exists for the moment of the movie." This is no doubt true, but the nature of that reality also lies in the hands, or rather the perceptions, of viewers. Reactions to films like the ones discussed here challenge a number of assumptions about how audiences react to fantasy and can deepen our understanding of the ways in which popular audiences, like folk audiences, shape the traditions transmitted through mass-culture media. Tolkien's reluctance to sanction a film version of Lord of the Rings was due in part to his belief that fantasy should engage the imagination of the audience and that filming would shatter the illusion (Mallinson 2002, 1-9). However, a significant part of the audience for such films seems to be as interested in how the fantasy is created as in the fantasy itself (greenmanreview 2). Many films, not just those involving fantasy effects, produce a "making of" feature that is basically an extended advertising trailer for the film itself. If special effects are part of the film, such features invariably explain how they are done, and extra features explaining special effects are now standard additions to videos and DVDs. Far from ruining the mystique, this seems to reinforce the experience for audiences who can simultaneously enter into the fantasy and understand how it is created.