MODERN FAIRY CINEMATIC NARRATIVES UNDER THE MICROSCOPE OF A NARRATOLOGIST: CRITICAL REVIEW AND DISCUSSIONS

Abstract

The research focuses on critical analysis of modern cinematic interpretations of classical literary fairy narratives. A brief analytical analysis considering the nature of the term narrative has been foregrounded. We understand narrative as a complex structure, which unfolds into narrative as a story about events and narration as the way of text or/and audiavisual construction of a story. A narrative is a representation of fictional/possible world(s) by means of verbal and/ or visual, audiovisual medium. There exist definite criteria which prove that the text is a narrative text. Firstly, human or anthropomorphic characters must be in the center of the plot, these characters are anchored in a fictional chronotope, its spatial and temporal space. One and the same story can be transmitted via different medium and by various ways. Narrative as a story is narrated (told, represented) by a narrator, who functions as the mediator. Narratologists differentiate an overt and a covert narrator, who is explicitly represented or implicitly realized in the narrative text. Cinematic narrative as a term has been suggested and developed by Seymour Chatman, he understands narration as a two-layer unit, which divides into two subcomponents, that is the narrative form as it is, the structure of narrative transmission, and second component refers to the way or story’s manifestation, as a definite materializing medium (cinematic, verbal, musical). In cinematic narratives narrative as a story is transmitted via several semiotic codes: verbal, audio and visual. All these codes create one gestalt narrative multimodal space, in which each constituent element conveys certain information.

Cinematic narratives suggest various cinematic versions of well-known fairy narratives: gender reinterpretations (“Mirror, mirror”, “Cinderfella”), “upside down” narratives with twisted plot (“Melificent”), close-up to the plot narratives (“Mary Poppins”), make audio code dominant in narrating a story (musical “Beauty and the Beast”), create 3D reality and make well-known book characters be fresh and dynamic (“The Jungle Book”).