The concept of “adaptation” refers to the process that occurs when folktales and fairy tales are changed into new versions, or variants, in the course of their transmission.
Adaptations can occur when a text or tale type is retold orally or rewritten and when it is transferred into a different generic form (for example, into a novel) or into a different medium (such as, orality to print, print to orality, print to film, and so on). Jack Zipes makes the important distinction between duplication and revision as forms of adaptation (Zipes, 8-11). Duplication is the process of making copies of originals, which tends to perpetuate canonical tales in spite of changes brought about by adaptation. Easily recognizable, they merely mimic a primordial matrix, the “hypotext,” to use G_erard Genette's taxonomy. While adaptations based on duplication may take the major colors of their new cultural environment and reflect specific customs, they still reinforce well-known models and repeat predictable moral lessons. For example, although many new versions and adaptations of tales by Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm continue to appear, they constitute essentially faithful retellings of these canonical tales and leave their core ideologies unchanged.
Revision, on the other hand, is a process of critical adaptation in which the new version implicitly questions, challenges, or subverts the story on which it is based by incorporating new values and perspectives. Perrault and the Brothers Grimm were themselves in many cases adaptors of preexisting tales, and the tales as they published them did not always duplicate their sources. Instead, in rewriting or editing the tales, they revised their meaning and in turn presented their readers with a new set of values. Addressing educated, literate classes, those revisions reflected new concerns and different tastes to accomplish new goals. Many twentieth- and twenty-first-century fairy-tale adaptations are revisionist tales that critically engage the classical fairy-tale tradition established by Perrault, Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, and others. Reflecting the cultural criticism that characterized Anglo-European societies during the 1960s and 1970s, including the critique of fairy tales by feminism, writers such as Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter, Philippe Dumas, Janosch, Tanith Lee, and many others produced fairy-tale adaptations that call into question the values and aesthetic of traditional tales. The challenge posed by such revisionist rewritings is signaled by the title of Dumas's Contes _a l'envers (Upside Down Tales, 1977), a book in which recycled red riding hoods terrorize the wolf and drive him out of town. Folktales and fairy tales have been adapted for a variety of genres and media, including theater, cartoons and comics, illustrations, animation, film and video, poetry, television, the graphic novel, and so on. Adapting tales for each of these genres or media involves different formal or technological considerations, in addition to matters of content and theme.
Walt Disney is certainly the most famous adaptor of classic fairy tales for the cinema. One may say that he appropriated tales such as Pinocchio, Cinderella, and “Snow White” to “freeze” them in a sanitized form. However, media adaptations can also be critical and revisionist, as seen in such films as Neil Jordan's The Company of Wolves (1984) or Shrek and Shrek II (2001 and 2004).
