ONCE UPON A BLOG

The Jewish Bones of Tim Burton's 'The Corpse Bride'

2023-07-28T16:37:00.002-07:00

The Corpse Bride/ Credit: Warner Bros.Entertainment Inc.

Did you know that Tim Burton's, stop-motion animated movie "The Corpse Bride" has Jewish bones?

The Finger - A Russian-Jewish Folktale

It's based on the Russian-Jewish folktale "The Finger" from the “Shivhei ha-Ari” ("Praises of the Ari", written in the 17th century), which collected tales about the alleged supernatural and magical feats of the (real-life) Rabbi Luria, 'proving' his mastery.

The stories are hagiographic legends — tales about a master that show his great powers. In the corpse-bride narrative, Rabbi Luria confronts the cadaver, who accepts his authority. (Jewish Journal)

Howard Schwartz included his own retelling of this tale in his book Lilith's Cave, and is the first printed version to have a corpse bride instead of a demon who traps the foolish bridegroom.

Lilith's Cave: Jewish Tales of the Supernatural
selected & retold by Howard Schwartz

Here's an evocative excerpt from a retelling by ProjectShalom2:

... as his friends looked on in amusement, Reuven took off his ring and slipped it on that finger, pronouncing as he did the words Harai at m’kudeshes li-“You are betrothed to me”-three times, as the law requires. But no sooner did he finish speaking than the finger began to twitch, much to the horror of the young men, who jumped back at the sight.

Suddenly the whole hand reached out from the earth, twitching and grasping. And as they stared at it in horror, frozen in place, the ground began to rumble, as if the earth were about to open. Suddenly the body of a woman, wearing a tattered shroud, rose out of the earth, her dead eyes staring directly into those of Reuven, her arms open as she cried out, “My husband!” in a terrible and terrifying voice.
Image via ProjectShalom2 - artist unknown

In this tale, the bridegroom gets lucky as a Rabbi rules the marriage to be invalid. The animated corpse and almost-bride emits one last shriek collapsing into bone dust for good.

The Corpse Bride/ Credit: Warner Bros.Entertainment Inc.

Tim Burton's The Corpse Bride

It was excerpts of this tale, told to Tim Burton by the late executive producer Joe Ranft (also screenwriter, animator, director, storyboard artist, and voice actor) that had Burton decide he wanted to make a family-friendly, fairy tale fantasy. Rather than wallow in the darkness of the tale -which this one has plenty of! - Burton chose to take a gothic-romantic approach and combine it with some enchanting Halloween-like fun, all via the medium of stop-motion animation, which is very well suited to animating the dead.

The effect is hauntingly magical (in the best sense of the word 'haunt') and is even more fairy-tale-like than the original folktale, or the fairy tale ballet legend Giselle, (which I will get to shortly).

“Bride” revolves around a shy, bumbling groom, Victor, who is practicing the wedding ceremony when he impulsively slides his ring on what he assumes is a stick. The corpse who emerges is not a hideously disintegrating cadaver, but a lovely, if unearthly heroine. “When she gently takes off her veil and we see her for the first time, it becomes a glamour-girl shot,” cinematographer Pete Kozachik said. The cadaver claims her husband, but does not emit bloodcurdling shrieks or insist upon the consummation of the marriage, like her folk-tale counterpart. Her mild flaws include a tendency toward petulance and an understandable proclivity for dropping a limb or having her eyeball pop out. (summary from Jewish Journal)

She does, however, take Victor down to the Land of the Dead, leaving the naturally confused and bereft fiancee behind. Just like the strongly related Jewish folktale (The Demon in the Tree*), which, from production anecdotes, appears to be part of the inspiration (see notes at end of article), it is the "true bride" - Victor's fiancee - that enables the wronged bride^ to release Victor and eventually find her own release, in an unforgettably lovely scene.

There is also a strong emphasis put on words and vows in the film, or The Power of the Word. In Jewish tales, Jewish magic is created with words. (See Further Reading at the end of the article for more on this.) Victor's words in practicing his vows, though stumbling and not said as a promise to the "root" - actually a finger bone - have the power to animated the dead bride, while in "The Finger", the words reciting the groom's vow - despite being uttered in jest - also have the power to bring a corpse to life. It's an unconscious, but important connection with the roots of the story.

Annemarie Heinrich (1912-2005), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The Giselle Connection

It's not difficult to see that these themes are reflected in another mediums, specifically ballet. One of the great classics, Giselle is considered to be a "fairy tale ballet". In the ballet, Giselle, a young naive girl, who loves to dance but has a weak heart, falls in love with a man who betrays her - he's a nobleman in disguise and already promised in marriage, an agreement he has no intention of breaking. Giselle, on finding out, goes mad with grief and becomes heartbroken - literally. Her heart gives out and she dies. In the second act, she is raised from her grave by the Wilis, a 'sisterhood' of vengeful supernatural women, still wearing their unused white wedding dresses (and gifted with 'flight' and little fairy wings). These ghost brides (there is a whole TV Trope on this type of ghost) looking very ethereal and chillingly inhuman, aim to take revenge on the men who betrayed them on or before their wedding day, leading them to an early grave of their own. Giselle, rather than take her revenge, resists the spell of the Wilis and protects the man she still loves by shielding him and helping him survive until morning when the Wilis' power fades. Her love also stops her from becoming a "full Wilis" (and, essentially, a demon). In the end, she passes 'over' to her afterlife, rather than joining the ranks of the Wilis. Love conquers death.

While there has never been any mention (that I can find) to connect The Corpse Bride with Giselle, there are a lot of shared ideas, as is the atmosphere.

The Corpse Bride/ Credit: Warner Bros.Entertainment Inc.

How To Get Out Of Marrying A Demon

You can find a retelling of the Jewish folktale "The Finger" in the book Lilith’s Cave: Jewish Tales of The Supernatural, selected and retold by Howard Schwartz (Oxford University Press, 1988), but it is worth noting here, that Schwartz, has assured scholars he is the first translator and writer to use a bride for the story, rather than a demon. It should also be noted that this book includes a second tale, very much like 'The Finger', titled 'The Demon in the Tree'. (A summary* of this fascinating story is included in the notes below this article.)

In his text, Schwartz traces the roots of the story back to a Hebrew-biblical commentary about Adam's "insubordinate wife", Lilith, who eventually became a seductive demon. Later variations on this Adam-Lilith tale have the man seeking to escape a marriage (of accident or force) to a demon:

“the forced or accidental marriage of a man to a demon; an attempt to be free of unwanted vows and a decision reached by a rabbinical court,” Schwartz wrote in “Lilith’s Cave.” The unearthly characters “perhaps represent the fear of marriage to gentiles and hybrid offspring,” he said. Like the supernatural fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm... the corpse bride of folk tradition also serves as a cautionary tale, warning about the consequences of bad behavior... (and of being careful to not take vows lightly.) (Jewish Journal)

The Corpse Bride/ Credit: Warner Bros.Entertainment Inc.

A Bloody Connection With History (& Why We Remember This Tale)

But this tale - "The Demon in the Tree" - also has a bloody connection to history. The point of the tale appears to be, to remember the anti-Semetic pogroms, carried out in the 1880's-1900's, and the brides that were uniquely targeted during these hideous raids.

A pogrom is an organized massacre of an ethnic or religious group. In this case, it was Jews who were slaughtered in the thousands, by Russians who followed the Czar, Alexander III. It was said that during this massacre, wedding carriages and wedding parties were specifically targeted and attacked. Why? Their agenda was to murder the bride, so she could not produce any more Jewish children. Truly horrifying.

In this tale, there is also the very real question of how to deal with grief.

Considering the Corpse Bride in the Jewish folktale "The Finger", is in pain due to her life being lost before she was able to live it, here's a reflective summary, that considers the aspect of grief, from Cherie Dawn Carr aka Pixie Lighthorse:

In... The Corpse Bride, a wrongfully murdered woman comes forth from the grave, wearing a tattered gown on a decaying body, wanting the wedding day she never got to have - she died before she got a chance to. The living bridegroom she desires (who stirred her from her slumber in the unmarked resting place by repeating the wedding vows three times and placing the ring on her protruding finger) is spoken for, but she pursues him anyway. This is because unfulfilled dreams and ungrieved pain can be very powerful motivators. In the end, it is the (living) bride who soothes her restless soul. She is the only one who can. She promises to lay her to rest respectably, shows her compassion and empathy for the wedding day she did not get to have, the children she did not get to birth, the partnership she did not get to enjoy. The bride promises to live a full and robust marriage with all that is in her today, and when the corpse feels heard and seen, honored, the spell is released.

The Corpse Bride/ Credit: Warner Bros.Entertainment Inc.

Shroud vs Wedding Dress

There is an English tradition of burying a bride in her wedding dress, if she died very close to the wedding day, and among Ukrainian Orthodox Christians, (which, as we are now well aware are geographically close to Russia, with some overlap between Ukrainian and Russian traditions) young women who died unmarried were, and sometimes still are, also buried in wedding dresses. I am not able to find a similar Jewish custom, especially as traditional Jewish burial rituals are very specific in having everyone be 'equal' at death and must be buried only in a shroud - no special clothing.

That this Jewish tradition of equality at death is not represented in Burton's The Corpse Bride, is due to Burton's "artistic license" since the folktale, The Finger, specifically mentions a tattered shroud the almost-bride is wearing as she rises out of the ground. (You can read a detailed note** at the end of the article on Burton's awareness of the cultural origin of this story.)

The image of a corpse in a wedding dress is more easily recognizable as a bride to American and Western audiences than if she wore a culturally correct shroud, and while it probably was not intentional of Burton to actively erase any Jewish connection at the time, it was still his conscious choice to move away from Jewish references. He was, as he said in an interview, trying to make "a universal fairy tale quality", but the result clearly shows a white and Western bias to an idea of a fairy tale, and does indeed result in having an erasing effect.

Tim Burton on The Corpse Bride, from an interview on the press tour

The racial whiteness of the image of a corpse in a wedding dress is further underscored by being placed in a clearly-Victorian setting, and while I understand that this was in order to juxtapose the very gray, living-death-like, stifling world of Victorian control against the ironically free and lively Land of the Dead (which, interesting, Burton specifically mentions he used to reflect cultures which honor the dead, rather than fear of it, such as with the Mexican Day of the Dead festival, though even this design is dominated by Olde World English Pub-type styles, despite the addition of Moroccan motifs!), from a cultural context, this doesn't sit well. In fact, it undermines the very "universal fairy tale quality" Burton says he was aiming for. Burton's idea of "Fairy Tale" appears to be deeply white and Western. My hope is if Burton were creating the film now, he would find a way to better honor this tale's Jewish roots (or someone would insist he did!). While a wedding dress on a corpse is a haunting image, and Burton did a stellar job of making it look "fairy tale" and recognizable, I think he could easily rise to the challenge of depicting a shrouded, Jewish not-quite bride, and not lost an iota of "universal fairy tale quality". It's the cultural blindness of white preference here that unfortunately ages and unsavorily skews this otherwise fabulous - and somewhat feminist - film.

Returning to a Jewish Horror Tale

There is one last connection worth mentioning for anyone looking to really study this and that is the Polish horror movie Demon, released in 2015 (rated R).

Here is a summary from the New York Times:

“Demon” is based on “Adherence,” by the Polish playwright Piotr Rowicki, but also shares much with “The Dybbuk: Between Two Worlds,” by the Russian ethnographer and revolutionary Shloyme Zaynvl Rapoport (a.k.a. S. An-ski). Set in an Eastern Europe town, “The Dybbuk” tells of a yeshiva student who uses kabbalistic means to win the woman he loves. Instead, he dies, and his spirit enters her body as a dybbuk — the evil soul of a dead person. (“I’ve returned to my beloved, and I’ll never leave her!”) The realms of the dead and the living are inseparable in this story, where wedding parties dance around a “holy grave” to “cheer and comfort” a couple murdered in a pogrom.

Wikipedia describes the plot, and intention, of the movie this way (below), and I'm including it because it's enlightening in its reflection of the themes and, specifically, the erasure of Jewish culture, which I find to be a satisfying return of motif:

Piotr (Itay Tiran), who has been living and working in England for many years, and Zaneta (Agnieszka Zulewska), a Polish lady, are to be married; they had met only over the Internet, but he knew her brother. Piotr speaks Polish awkwardly, remembering more from his ancestors than from personal experience. He moves into a run-down large rural estate previously owned by Zaneta's grandfather.

While digging in the yard with a backhoe right before the wedding, Piotr finds a skeleton, which at first he keeps quiet about. He is increasingly haunted by the vision of a woman in a wedding dress – Hana. During the wedding reception, this vision draws closer and closer to him, and he has apparent seizures. He is eventually possessed by Hana, the woman in the dress. Zaneta's family is well-to-do, and they want to keep his breakdown quiet from the rest of the wedding guests, so they distract their guests with vodka and loud music while locking Piotr in the basement, first with a doctor, then a priest. Finally, the "teacher" (Wlodzimierz Press, who appears to be the only surviving Jewish resident of the town pre-war), realizes that Piotr is speaking Yiddish and that he is possessed by the spirit of Hana, a lovely Jewish girl he knew before the war who suddenly disappeared.

The film is a re-telling of a classic dybbuk story and also an allegory for Polish-Jewish relations before and after the war. It is implied that Zaneta's grandfather may have gotten rich in part by "possessing" this property once its former Jewish residents were gone.

You can read an interesting review discussing, in particular, the themes of societal erasure, on the Roger Ebert website HERE.

The Corpse Bride/ Credit: Warner Bros.Entertainment Inc.

For Contrast, Here's a Jewish Tale of a Corpse Groom

Since I've been discussing imbalances and the importance of cultural context, I thought I would add the bonus of another Jewish folktale called "The Maiden and the Corpse". It has less in common with the 'Grateful Dead' types of tales (ATU505) and more in common with the 'Search for the Lost Husband' tales (ATU 425), as well as a few others in the mix. I am unable to find this tale in any Jewish collection or world tale collections available to me, other than Amy Friedman's Tell Me A Story series, popularized on CD and audiobook. The tale is (supposed to be) on Volume 3 - Women of Wonder. Unfortunately, I do not have either the book or the audio to verify this for myself, at the time of writing this article.

Unlike many other tales of extensive deeds and tasks undertaken while searching for the groom, or contracts involving the dead, there has been no misdeed or mistake made by this girl. She is the good sister who keeps her word and a positive perspective during her trials.

This is how it begins:

Credit: Times Herald-Record
Once upon a time, a poor peasant woman had three daughters. One day the eldest daughter, Raisa, said, "Mother, I'm off to seek my fortune." Her mother baked a cake and cooked a chicken, and handed them to her daughter. "Take half with my blessing," she said, "or the whole with my curse."

Raisa frowned. "The whole is little enough," she said, and off she went. Her mother did not curse her, after all, but she did not give her a blessing either.

Raisa walked until she was hungry, and she sat down to eat. A poor beggar woman came by and asked if she could have a bite or two.

"It's too little even for me," Raisa said, and she ate it all up.

She walked on until she reached an inn where she stopped for the night.

"I'll give you a spade full of gold and a shovel full of silver if you'll watch my son's corpse," said the innkeeper's wife. "He's in the next room."
You can read the tale in full at recordonline.com, HERE.

The Corpse Bride/ Credit: Warner Bros.Entertainment Inc.

Is Tim Burton's The Corpse Bride Worth Seeing Then?

Unequivocally yes! It's a beautiful fairy tale film, and, while imperfect, raises a lot of important questions and has a satisfying ending that, on first viewing, isn't apparent you're going to reach.

If watched with an awareness of Jewish origins and history, and what has resulted in the subtext due to adapting for a Western audience via a white bias, this has an important place in the history of fairy tale films. Highly recommended.

Further Reading & References:

Burton's 'Corpse' has Jewish Bones by Naomi Pfefferman for Jewish Journal
The Power of Language in the Jewish Kabbalah and magic: and how to do (and undo) things with words by Agata Paluch for British Library
The Shroud by Anita Diamant for My Jewish Learning
Honoring November, The Corpse Brides in the US by Pixie Lighthorse
Review: In ‘Demon,’ Wedding Jitters From the Uninvited Dead by Manohla Dargis or The New York Times
The Corpse Bride is Actually Jewish for Jewitches.com - highly recommended for a discussion on the aspect of Jewish erasure
La Morte Amoureuse (The Dead Woman in Love) by Theophile Gautier - Wikipedia entry re this related tale of tragic love in which a beautiful woman dies before the man who loves can reach her, but she returns (she's a vampire) and promises bliss. Also known as 'Clarimonde' and 'The Vampire'.
There is also a Theatrical Version of The Corpse Bride, developed during the same period of time Tim Burton's The Corpse Bride was in production. You can read about it, in an interview with Niki Landua, the writer of the play, HERE.
Shivhei ha-Ari and the Decline of the Generations - from the Izgad blog (Aramaic for Messenger), which discusses the intersection of secularism and religious fundamentalism. This post looks at the Shivhei ha-Ari in which the tale, "The Finger", with a demon instead of a reanimated corpse, was first found.
Women and Death in Film, Television, and News: Dead But Not Gone by Joanne Clarke Dillman (searchable Google Books link HERE)

Notes

*"The Demon in the Tree" summary via Jewitches:

(A) young boy who places a ring around the finger of a demon, accidentally. He forces it from his mind, hoping his actions will have no consequences. When he grows up and gets married, his first bride is murdered by the demon as she walks past the tree to their home. The second bride meets this same fate. The third bride, however, is too quick and ducks as
Rusalka - Ivan Bilibin/public domain via Wikimedia Commons
the demon attempts to kill her. A very smart woman, the third wife confronts the husband and he confesses to having married the demon in his youth. The wife decides to make peace with the demoness, bringing her plates of jam and leaving them outside of the tree where the demon resides. The demon returns the plate with a gold coin upon it. They live in peace for some time, but when the wife falls pregnant, she knows the demon wife will not be pleased. She decides to meet with the demoness and they come to the understanding that they will share the husband, with the agreement that the demoness will have the husband for one hour at sunset every night, so long as she leaves the wife and her family alone. Seven years after the agreement is struck, the wife goes to replace the plate of jam and finds on it the wedding ring that her husband had given the demon so many years before, indicating the demon had finally gone.

^ The Wronged Bride

When discussing adaptations of folk and fairy tales it's important to note differences between the originating inspiration (that is, the tale variation used as a source for the adaptation), and the retold version. In this case, not only is it important that the source was Jewish and the adaptation intentionally not reflective of that, but the fact that Burton's

The Corpse Bride/ Credit: Warner Bros.Entertainment Inc.

Corpse Bride is a murdered bride where the source female corpse was not murdered but died before she could have the experience of being a bride and wife, is also important. Two aspects (at least) are at work here: one is that Burton took pains to make sure the audience felt sympathy for the monster, which is Emily, a reanimated dead woman, so increased the tragedy of her backstory, and, as a result, wove in a tale of justice for her murderer, and freedom from trauma that continued beyond the grave. Although it seems to make good story sense in trying to humanize what essentially is monstrous, an astute audience should be asking why this Westernized tale needed the woman (Emily) to be murdered to engender sympathy, rather than just the pain of missing out on her dreams of being a wife and a married life. Logic suggests the filmmaker/s believed audiences would have dismissed, possibly even disdained, this sort of pain for a woman. Instead, she had to be murdered and wronged for the audience to equate her desires as important and worthy of consideration. A woman's intense grief at missing out on the life she aimed to have is too easily dismissed. What does that say about our society?

The second aspect is the metaphor of the murdered bride seeking her right to be married and revenge for her betrayal. In Burton's tale, it's clear Victor is struggling with the idea of "with marriage comes death and loss of personal freedom", a common Western male perspective - so common it's joked about in Western pre-wedding rituals. The audience is made to sympathize with Victor's sense of feeling trapped and that any possibilities and dreams for his own life are ending, even more than the tragedy of Emily's murder. Ironically, Victor's fear of the "death of his dreams" is just like the source tale's corpse, and becomes the focus, gaining the audience's sympathy, whereas if Emily had been portrayed as having died more naturally - that is, not murdered - in the circumstance of her dreams being unfulfilled, her rising and insistence on her bride rights per Victor's vow, would seem more akin to her being a Bridezilla than a tragic figure. Again, women's pain, both in unfulfilled dreams and in becoming literal victims, is put secondary to a man's rather than seen as equal and as valid. Even Victoria, whose own situation holds the triple tragedy of her dreams being crushed, a seeming betrayal by Victor, and being pursued as an intended victim of Lord Barkis (a killer a la Bluebeard in the making), does not win the sympathy of audiences until she shows agency and rebelliousness, with no allies and her own murder looming. (Here Atwood's quote 'Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.', is directly reflective of the discriminatory sympathy at work here.) As in fairy tales across time, however, it is in learning the story of the woman gone before her - the cautionary fairy tale - that aids Victoria at the crucial moment. The murdered bride is avenged and finally dissolves into freedom from her pain and curse.

** On director Tim Burton's awareness of the Jewish origins of the tale.

For this note I am referencing two books: Tim Burton's Corpse Bride - An Invitation to the Wedding (which is the beautifully assembled official "making of" book for the movie), and Fairy Tale Films - Visions of Ambiguity, edited by Pauline Greenhill and Sidney Eve Matrix, Chapter 10, "Tim Burton and the Idea of Fairy Tales" by Brian Ray.

Tim Burton's The Corpse Bride: An Invitation to the Wedding

In the official "making of" book the origin story of this movie is told like this (excerpts are from pages 17-19):

The genesis was a 19th-century East European folktale told to Burton by his friend Joe Ranft... "Joe gave me the idea around the time of Nightmare," recalls Burton who had been looking for another project to do in stop-motion, "and it was minimal. There were no characters in it from what I recall, except for the Corpse Bride. It was like a little short story. And even though it was only a couple of paragraphs long, it captured my attention...." The tale concerned a young man traveling home in order to wed his fiancee, When his wedding ring winds up on a rotted finger of a murdered girl, who then returns from the grave and insists she is the man's lawfully wedded wife, he's then forced to journey to the underworld to set things right, while his fiancee remains among the living, pining for his return.

[Ed - Are you getting inverted Persephone vibes here? I sure am!]

While the original folktale had been of Russian origin, Burton didn't want to set Corpse Bride in any particular country. "It was very clear to me that I wanted to keep that fairy-tale aspect," he says. "Even though it's got Victorian elements and a largely British cast, I didn't necessarily want to set it in a specific place."

[Ed - Except that adding the double layer of Victorian elements and British voices did precisely that.]

Then there is the additional information from producer Allison Abbate, who it appears came across a little more research, again via Ranft. The tale she's referencing though, is not The Finger, in which the live bride is pretty much terrified and absent, but The Demon in the Tree, in which the live bride has character and agency. On page 21, she writes:

"I found out later that the original fable really stresses Victoria's point of view and the Corpse Bride is more of a monstrous, villainous character... "I didn't know that until Joe Ranft came to visit us and happened to mention it," she continues. We naturally gravitated to fleshing out Victoria's storyline because she gets the guy in the end. She is, in so many ways, the heroine of the piece... not just the "other woman."

Fairy Tale Films: Visions of Ambiguity
edited by Pauline Greenhill
& Sidney Eve Matrix

In Fairy Tale Films - Visions of Ambiguity, (scholarly essays and research), chapter 10's essay by Brian Ray includes a detailed section on Burton's The Corpse Bride. In it he includes this note: "Many sources on the Web and in print... have misattributed the source of Burton's film to a vague nineteenth-century retelling of the original version. Jewish folktale expert Howard Schwartz assured me in an email on May 12, 2008, that his short story, "The Finger," in his collection entitled Lilith's Cave, is the first adaptation of the Venus-ring motif [Ed - accidental marriage to a statue] to make the bride a corpse, rather than a demon. He did so "to make it more a tale of terror".

Furthermore, Schwartz's story is the only version that Burton and Warner Bros. officially acknowledge as inspiration." (p213)

On Joe Ranft's Folktale Knowledge and Possible Text or Oral Sources

Clearly, the key source here is Joe Ranft, a gifted and knowledgable animator, and "story guy", widely loved and respected, who passed away in a tragic car accident in 2005. Many have talked about how knowledgeable he was regarding tales and storytelling, though I have never read anything about his personal studies in literature or folklore, apart from a deep appreciation of Robert Bly's book Iron John: A Book About Men (source: Two Guys Named Joe by John Canemaker), which draws on the fairy tale of Iron John and other tales and myths. A colleague of Ranft's, attempting to learn more about this man after hearing so many amazing anecdotes at his funeral, interviewed Su, Ranft's surviving wife, and asked about his faith. I am including it here in case it becomes apparent that his faith, and interest in other cultures and faiths, shed any light on where he learned the tale he told to Burton. Here are her words: “He was raised a pretty strict Catholic in an Irish-German-Czech-Catholic family,” Su said. “And even though he was not a practicing Catholic when we were married, he never had a harsh word to say about it because it made him who he was.
“He did read the Bible, and there were so many things in there that became part of his moral ethic and his interior compass. He was interested in reincarnation and karma, all the different religions; he didn’t just confine himself to Christianity.

The Corpse Bride/ Credit: Warner Bros.Entertainment Inc.

*********************************************************************

Gypsy Thornton (she/her) is the Guardian of a chicken-legged coffee cup with a mind of its own. A night owl forced to get up with larks, she often describes herself as liminal and is forever trying to do impossible things before breakfast. She can only be seen in her true form after midnight.

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Creator & Editor: The Wondering

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"Mr. Dough and the Egg Princess" - A Magical Miyazaki Fairy Tale

2023-07-11T20:49:00.001-07:00

"Mr. Dough and the Egg Princess" Credit: Studio Ghibli & the Ghibli Museum

Did you know Miyazaki loves the tale of The Gingerbread Man?

Japan has its own well-known version of this type* of tale - "Omusubi Kororin (Riceball rolls away)" - in which a rice ball rolls away**, and Miyazaki discovered similar tales across the world. They weren't variants - exactly - but he found many stories in different countries, in which, whatever the staple food of that country used to be, managed to get away. Either it got up after being baked or cooked and ran to have an adventure all by itself, or rolled comically far out of reach inciting adventure for its pursuers.

The Gingerbread Man is the American version (first published in St. Nicholas Magazine in May 1875), and it's one of the variants of the "Fleeing Pancake" stories, (ATU 2025).***

Credit: Studio Ghibli/Ghibli Museum

[*This "type" of tale is a loose description. When using the word "type" discussing fairy tales, we're usually talking about the ATU classification. Omusubi Kororin and the tale mentioned below apparently haven't been classified - at all - but Miyazaki saw the connection between these Japanese tales and "fleeing pancake" tales, so we're running with it. So to speak. ;)
[**Some versions include magic but not all. The Lafcadio Hearn version includes a magic paddle, though the dumpling the old woman initially loses isn't magical itself.

[***A neat bit of trivia re The Gingerbread Man from SurLaLune: This is one tale where the literary American versions have strongly influenced the literary versions that later appeared in Europe.]

Miyazaki's ~~Ginger~~ Bread Man

Credit: Studio Ghibli/Ghibli Museum

In 2010, Miyazaki made his own version of this fairy tale in which he explored the question of life inside of bread (and other food staples) - both in how the raw ingredients are made (magically and with hard labor) so that they can be transformed to "give life" to a hungry society, and also regarding what being "given life" can do (how an injection of hope and creativity can transform your circumstances).

I think this is the reason Miyazaki's protagonist is the little egg girl instead of his bread man. (Eggs are a common symbol of life and new beginnings around the world.)

Miyazaki's film is titled Mr. Dough and the Egg Princess (パン種とタマゴ姫 , Pandane to Tamago Hime) and is clearly his version of the familiar Gingerbread Man tale, while also being uniquely his own creation - exactly what new variants of tales should be!

In this Miyazaki short, Baba Yaga - the familiar fairy tale figure complete with her mortar and pestle - brings an unbreakable egg to life and puts her to work in her watermill, a place where she grinds wheat into flour. There's magic, of course, and the Egg Princess ends up escaping with a friend made from dough, except he's not cooked yet.

Egg Princess Credit: Studio Ghibli/Ghibli Museum

There are a number of short films - exclusive to the Ghibli Museum in Japan - that most people haven't seen though - even Ghibli super-fans. Mr. Dough and the Egg Princess is one of those. Unless you're lucky enough to visit the Ghibli Museum and see one of these magical short films, you're generally out of luck. They aren't available to buy, or see, outside of the Museum. Even when you visit the Museum in Japan the films are shown in random sort of rotation, so you never know quite which film you'll see when you arrive.

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Fortunately, the Ghibli Museum has produced some gorgeous, little "Art Of" books", which are like pamphlets, with final artwork, concept art, the story, some notes from Miyazaki, and more goodies, that people have been able to buy as souvenirs. It accompanies the film, and an exhibit, and some kind folk have shared the contents of these online for folks who aren't able to make it to Japan.

Before I share, though, here's a lovely summary I found on a Ghibli fan blog:

Mr. Dough and the Egg Princess asks the question, "How is bread made?" The idea is examined through the wild, imaginitive eyes of a small child. Cooking becomes magic. Ingredients become alchemy. Leavened bread becomes alive. The miracle of creation is on display, weaving through waking eyes and the imagination. Miyazaki has a way of making the natural world seem magical that is wholly unique. (Source)

"Mr. Dough and the Egg Princess" Credit: Studio Ghibli & the Ghibli Museum

The Story

Here is a video that steps through the pamphlet - including the story - with most of the Japanese translated to English as subtitles. I have included a transcription of those subtitles below in case you're unable to view the video and/or read the text. Even not running as a film, this is still quite a delightful fairy tale telling. Enjoy!

I have also found an online archive that has an incomplete upload of the pamphlet so you can zoom in and go back and forth to enjoy the artwork to your heart's content. You can see that HERE.

Transcription of subtitles from the video showing the Ghibli Museum pamphlet for Mr. Dough and the Egg Princess:

In a deep, deep hole in a forest of thorns lies Baba Yaga's small house with a watermill.
Baba Yaga is a hard worker. She grinds wheat, mixes it, eats well, and sleeps well. But the kitchen is a mess!
One day she found an egg that doesn't crack and she decided to take it in as a servant. Baba Yaga gave the egg a blow, and lo and behold, it now had hands and feet. The egg became a girl. The Egg Princess was born.
Original Work-Script-Supervision Hayao Miyazaki
Music Joe Hisaishi
Production Studio Ghibli
Film length 11min 37sec

"Mr. Dough and the Egg Princess" Credit: Studio Ghibli & the Ghibli Museum

Baba Yaga is in high spirits after eating a lot of eggs! Now, what to do with this egg?
With a quick puff, Baba Yaga's ribbon became a skirt. The Egg Princess quickly goes to work.
The moonlight shone on the wooden boat the dough rested in...
The dough started to move. The Egg Princess used the grapes to make eyes. Both escaped together from the house.
It's the middle of harvest season at the wheat field. Run! Run!
The harvested wheat is taken to the village. I will not let them escape! Baba Yaga follows after the trail of wagons.
Mr. Dough and the Egg Princess take refuge in the village square. The square is busy with villagers threshing wheat.

"Mr. Dough and the Egg Princess" Credit: Studio Ghibli & the Ghibli Museum

Within the hustle and bustle, there are two characters hiding. Baba Yaga's keen eye sees through their disguise. "Found you!"
"You belong to me!" Baba Yaga shouts maniacally.
She tears the dough apart and rounds them into form. "Let's hope you become delicious boules," Baba Yaga says.
The Egg Princess pulls the dough and binds them and says, "Become a breadman." Out of the hearth appeared...
Baba: "Hmph! The only consolation prize I get is a simple decoration from your chest!?" All the villagers were overjoyed.
Baba Yaga again searches for that egg that doesn't crack.

"Mr. Dough and the Egg Princess" Credit: Studio Ghibli & the Ghibli Museum

Hayao Miyazaki:

"I love Bruegel's paintings. But, it was the first time I learned that the wheat being harvested was actually rye. Since it was rye bread that they were harvesting, the people would eat black bread. Although we all eat bread, noodles, and pasta, we don't have much of a clue as to how that wheat is grown and manufactured.

Credit: Studio Ghibli/Ghibli Museum

I wanted to make a film set in a place like in Bruegel's paintings. Just how Japan has children's stories of rice balls running away like "Omusubi Kororin (Riceball rolls away)," in the countries where bread is a staple, I have come to find out that there are similar stories of bread "running away" as well. The bread in these stories are round pancakes, long-shaped, or flimsy. All different types of bread come from the land, but they all run away.

I figure that a bread out of an oven would roll away, but I do wonder about how a bread still in dough form would escape... As I was thinking about this very thing, the conception of this movie was aspired."

END TRANSCRIPTION

Credit: Ghibli Museum

There is no translation for the following pamphlet pages. There is Japanese text describing the panels about how bread is made, and the parts of Baba Yaga's watermill. There is an interview included in the pamphlet, which sadly also has not been translated. Maybe one day I'll be lucky enough to get a copy and a kind Japanese friend will translate it for me!

In the meantime, this wonderful film has been known to pop up in its entirety - in bootleg fashion - on the internet but it tends to appear, then get taken down until it pops up later on a completely different site. I won't link you because of this, but if you're super keen you can do your own search to see if you're lucky enough to find this golden egg of a film.

Spotting Other Fairy Tales & Ghibli Easter Eggs

Did you notice the other fairy tale references in the images shown?

There is a suspicious-looking two-toned apple being offered to the Egg Princess by Baba Yaga, her witch-like hand holding the stem. Unlike the apple bringing poisonous sleep, though, this rotten apple (it does have a worm, after all) brings life to the resting dough - "resting" is the correct term for when you're making dough and have to leave it to "rise" too!

"Mr. Dough and the Egg Princess" Credit: Studio Ghibli & the Ghibli Museum

And, of course, the Egg Princess slaves away like many fairy tale heroines before she escapes, though it's a little more difficult to discuss without a copy of the short on hand to show what she does. In true "Miyazaki empowering girls" form, though, she essentially fashions her own escape, just like the many clever heroines in tales around the globe.

"Mr. Dough and the Egg Princess" Credit: Studio Ghibli & the Ghibli Museum

There is also the watermill that crushes and grinds the grain, transforming it into flour. I would not be surprised to find Miyazaki intentionally referenced Rumpelstiltskin turning straw into gold, as any food staple is very much like edible gold! I haven't found any proof that this was intentional though.

There are several Studio Ghibli Easter eggs in this film too. Of special note are:

- Baba Yaga looking very much like Yubaba and her sister Zeniba. There is lore, popularized since Spirited Away, that Baba Yaga is one of three sisters. Fans speculate this is the Baba Yaga we know from Ukrainian and Russian tales, while Yubaba and Zeniba are her sisters.

- when the dough-turned-bread man crawls out of the oven, the shot references Castle in the Sky
- Miyazaki as a pig-man, like the parents were turned into in Spirited Away
- Miyazaki's Heidi, from the series he animated when he was much younger (based on the novel), is seated at the table eating bread on one of the last pages of the pamphlet

My wish for all the fairy tale aficionados here is that one day, they're able to see this delightful film.

"Mr. Dough and the Egg Princess" Credit: Studio Ghibli & the Ghibli Museum

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https://medium.com/@inkgypsy

Creator & Editor: The Wondering

[a transformation of Once Upon A Blog: Fairy Tale News]

https://medium.com/the-wondering

fairytalenewsblog.blogspot.com/

From 2009 to 2023: "Once Upon A Blog: Fairy Tale News" is Transforming into "The Wondering"!

2023-04-29T15:04:00.000-07:00

I see you reading the headline and thinking: "Oh no. What is going to happen to Once Upon A Blog? It's barely been functioning the last few years and now it's going to change?!"

Don't worry. Unlike most social media "rebranding", I'm doing this the fairy tale way, and transforming the blog to be more of what I intended when I began it.

That means I'm staying "on mission" with the Once Upon A Blog content you've followed me for, for years, while allowing myself a little more flexibility to explore other avenues of Wonder.

You might be wondering, isn't Gypsy Thornton all about fairy tales? That's still true, but it's always been more accurate to say I am Wonder-tale-focused. I see Wonder in many places and the influence of fairy tales everywhere. If I can then share that insight and connection, and bring that Wonder into peoples' lives, it feels like I'm making a positive difference in the world. And I've found a way to have both a fairy tale hub and a way to reach out beyond that hub from time to time to spread a little Wonder wherever I go. It's the reason I've renamed the blog The Wondering.

Here is the new description:

The Wondering
Gathering the curious uses and influence of fairy tales and folklore, from pop culture, current events, and the woods beyond to bring Wonder to your doorstep.

It's been 14 years since I created Once Upon A Blog: fairy tale news and it's high time it transforms into something I had always hoped to create, as well as be a little more reflective of this post-pandemic and AI-emergent era.

It also needs to be in a form in which I, with all that I have been through the last few years, can manage and keep active. After a good year of researching options I think I have finally found a way to do this.

The biggest differences are:

Title:

Once Upon A Blog: Fairy Tale News is now called The Wondering

The header will include a reminder that this is an updated version of Once Upon A Blog: Fairy Tale News.

Online location for new posts:

The main new content will be published at https://medium.com/the-wondering

While this blog, here, will remain live and available as long as technology allows, the above is the new main address. There will be occasional posts published here too, but they will most likely be quick updates, letting you know what you might have missed on the main platform.

Blog to publication:

The blog is now officially a publication and I will be welcoming submissions from writers to be published in The Wondering, free of charge.

This also means it will function in many ways as a magazine, with the main page for The Wondering laid out as such. Each article is kept very clean, ad-free, and easy to read by Medium's uniform standards, which should make for a better reading experience, both for desktop reading and on your mobile device.

Being a publication also means other folks, who join and write on Medium - which you can do for FREE - can submit articles, reviews, and even art, short fiction, or reflective pieces to The Wondering, if they are interested. Current fairy tale news, events, and influences will be remain the priority. I remain Editor and will review all submissions (there will be guidelines to follow under the header in the coming weeks).

I would love to build a stable of fairy tale writers and voices, to have a diverse, and regularly publishing fairy tale newsroom!

Writers will also have the opportunity, should they sign up for the Medium Partner Program, keep any benefits ($) that they may earn as a result.

Subscribe to be sent just the free fairy tale news, or more - your choice:

Your choices are just fairy tale news, articles and stories from The Wondering, by me and other writers whose work I publish, or to be sent everything I personally publish in any publication on Medium, as I aim to spread a little Wonder and magic around in different places, by "following my little chicken-legged mug" and subscribing to me, or subscribe to both!

Subscribing to either or both is completely free.

**Some articles in The Wondering will have a paywall but not all:**

I am still working on seeing how many pieces I can publish each week across Medium, but there will be free content every couple of weeks on The Wondering. You are welcome to just read the free stuff, or upgrade to being a Medium member for everything.

The $5 Medium membership gives readers 100% access to ALL STORIES ACROSS THE PLATFORM - not just what you're joining for and to read the workd of whomever you join through. Medium reader memberships support every writer you read. Put very simply, if you have a membership, every writer whose articles or stories you read, benefits by you just reading through their stories. Your membership fee is distributed between the people you read.

There is a LOT of free content across Medium by individual writers and via publications of all types. From science, to film, to history, to AI, education and more, the focus of different publications range widely, and include many professional journalists. The Wondering is the only publication I am aware of that has fairy tales and fairy tale news as its focus, but there are a lot of facsinating articles and publications. Like all other publications, The Wondering will have a mix of free and subscription-access content.

What's Available To Read Right Now?

The Wondering already has four "stories" available, with more added all the time:

- Cravings - a short story based on Rapunzel

- What If Your Dad Is the Animal "Bride".. and More Beastly Than The Beast? - a spoiler-free book review of "The Crane Husband" by Kelly Barnhill

- The Black Folklorist Who Accurately Predicted the Science in Voodoo & Unearthed Tales We All Need To Hear - an expanded and updated profile and tribute to Zora Neale Hurston

- Fairy Tales vs fAIry Tales (I) - the first installment of a multi-part article and experiment using AI and fairy tales. (I asked ChatGPT to write me an original fairy tale, analyze it, then adapt it per the Great Fairy Tale Tradition... oof!)

And that's the news!

I hope you follow my wandering, chicken-legged coffee mug to the new site.
We'd love to see you there.

All fairy tale readers and writers are welcome.

Small disclaimer: I am getting this up and running as quickly as possible so expect some refining of the site over the first few months to make it clearer and easier to navigate, to subscribe to the newsletter, and for potential writers to submit to, but the publication is live and active!