For today’s sketch we come to one of my old time favorite’s Frau Holle. I’ve always enjoyed the concept of Frau Holle, (loosely translated as Old Mother Frost) a sort of winter elemental spirit and a diminution of the pagan goddess, Holda.
It was hard to choose what to go with on this one. While obviously for me it’s all about Frau Holle, in the context of the story she’s almost a footnote, functioning as a kind of benevolent ogress. You almost get the feeling that there were several other stories about her floating around that the Grimms didn’t record but assumed that there readers would just take who Frau Holle was for granted, just as a modern children’s story wouldn’t need to explain Santa Claus or the Sandman.
Nevertheless, since I couldn’t think of good ways to show other parts of the story (such as the heroine shedding gold) I went with an image featuring the good Grandmother.
I decided to go with something lighter this week so I went with a few comedies on the theme of Holidays.
The film that had inspired this idea was Monsieur Hulot’ Holiday by Jacques Tati. I was familiar with Tati’s work from the Illusionist, which was based on one of his scripts, and Traffic the last of his Monsieur Hulot film which I only saw a bit of.
Tati plays Monsieur Hulot. Hulot, who has been described as a French Charlie Chaplain, Is a tall, clumsy and all around nice guy who is having a vacation on the beach. Plot white that’s about it with us getting to watch people staying at the resort going about their vacation with Hulot virtually existing in everyone’s peripheral vision going about mostly unnoticed accidentally and unintentionally causing chaos. (To a certain extent he kept reminding me of the Pink Panther)
This was an absolutely beautiful with all comic bits being beautifully composed. While it certainly is slapstick its difficult to call it that. It’s softer more lyrical pantomime.
I had heard that Rowan Atkinson‘s Mr. Bean had been mostly based on Hulo and that the second Bean Movie. Mr. Bean’s Holiday was a remake of Monsieur Hulot’ Holiday. I was just a little worried I’d be watching an English language version of what Id watched the night before.
Happily it was very much it’s own thing.
Mr. Bean wins a vacation in Cannes. Unfortunately he misses his train while in Paris which forces him to make his trek through France by any means necessary. In the mean time he helps a young boy find his parents and interferes with a prima donna of a director, played by Willem Dafoe in a brilliant self parody.
Much as I enjoy Atkinson’s work elsewhere and his physical comedy is magnificent I’m afraid I never really get into Mr. Bean. Still it was nicely done and very fun.
For day five of the sketch challenge we go back to Mr. Andersen with the Princess and The Pea. This one was really easy frankly the only creative struggle you get when pulling this title from the magic Tupperware is choosing what angle you’re going to use for the ridiculously high stack of mattresses.
To be honest though, I don’t think that the Princess and the Pea is one of those stories that survives childhood very well. It’s just too silly. These day’s if I think about it at all it’s from Carol Burnett in Once Upon a Mattress.
Okay for today’s challenge I got one of the more obscure ones, though a classic example of one of the common motif of a magical elixir giving someone the ability to understand animals, with the White Snake.
Though there were plenty of options to go with this one I figured I had to go with something with the White Snake of the title. I think I was mostly cribbing the cover of the season one DVD for Hannibal when I did this.
With the the planned randomness of these challenges I was a little surprised that I got one of the fun ones, Snow White, this early. Not that I’m complaining at all.
I had second choices about the composition choice minutes into doing it. Liking to think myself as a modern guy I have a bit of discomfort that most of the story Snow White is the dwarfs’ domestic. (as far as the “Dwarves” vs “Dwarfs” argument is concerned, I’m using “dwarfs” to make a distinction between the little guys in northern European fairy tales from Tolkien’s badass (albeit short) warriors) But since for me the story is all about the dwarfs it was either that or her dead in the glass casket.
All in all I believe it came out better than I thought it would fifteen minutes in.
Okay for day two of this challenge we have The Goblin and the Huckster. This one threw me off for a bit. The first was because it was one I wasn’t familiar with so I had to look it up. The second reason was because this turned out to be a Hans Christian Andersen story I couldn’t find it in the Grimm Fairytale Index I was using. (you can tell I didn’t have my coffee yet.) Finally I was thrown off by not knowing what a huckster was in the context of the story. (Turns out Andersen meant Grocer but it was mistranslated in the English)
After that the trick was how to include the Goblin (you got to have the goblin he’s in the title) in what is the most important image of the story when he was looking at it through a keyhole. My solution was to make the goblin really small so the keyhole was a window to him… I’m not sure how well it worked but I’m happy with the lighting.
For today’s sketch we come to one of my old time favorite’s Frau Holle. I’ve always enjoyed the concept of Frau Holle, (loosely translated as Old Mother Frost) a sort of winter elemental spirit and a diminution of the pagan goddess, Holda.
