Mirror Mirror on the Wall, Who’s the Fairest of Them All?
Any study of this film’s current premise and promotion, the pitch and proposition—
critical notes from the social community—might be up for a overload of remarkably acidic commentary.
People, apparently, are not liking the marketing play—or making notes to that effect.
It might be that people like the earlier renderings?
It made me wonder about the allegory of Snow White—her story.
In the US, that tale’s revelation would be in 1937, with Disney’s rendering, summarized in this Disney synopsis, as many recall:
“The Grimm fairy tale gets a Technicolor treatment in Disney’s first animated feature. Jealous of Snow White’s beauty, the wicked queen orders the murder of her innocent stepdaughter, but later discovers that Snow White is still alive and hiding in a cottage with seven friendly little miners. Disguising herself as a hag, the queen brings a poisoned apple to Snow White, who falls into a death-like sleep that can be broken only by a kiss from the prince.”
Watch the original 1937 trailer here.
And the current trailer?
The present-day rendering of this tale as a live-action version of a story that, according to scholars, found its origination in a set of archetypal narratives from storytelling archives of 18th century Russia—or ancient Rome. In fact, this storytelling has its own variations in a number of cultural renderings. As in many folklore stories, there are patterns.
A scholarly overview in Wikipedia offers:
“The Brothers Grimm published it in 1812 in the first edition of their collection Grimms’ Fairy Tales,
numbered as Tale 53. The original German title was Sneewittchen; the modern spelling is Schneewittchen.
The Grimms completed their final revision of the story in 1854, which can be found in the
1857 version of Grimms’ Fairy Tales.
The fairy tale features elements such as the magic mirror, the poisoned apple, the glass coffin, and the characters of the Evil Queen—here hovering over Snow White in this 1872 rendering by Hans Markart.
and the Seven Dwarfs expressed Franz Jüttner’s Sneewittchen, 1905.”
And the story—which everyone would likely recall–summarized in an educational tractate here.
It’s been theorized that there is an archetypal threading in the story, even dating to the Roman legend of Chione, or Snow, transcribed in Ovid’s collection, Metamorphoses | Bk XI:266-345. An overview in the Harvard Gazette explores the patterning of other tellings, ranging from Africa and the American Southeastern folktales to Eastern European heritages in narrative originations.
Earlier, I had a reach-out from a Disney Art Director for the development of a logo for—then—an emerging new expression of Snow White. It was among my first theatrical branding assignments.
The challenge, then, was speaking to what could be a story of unrelenting— and, as we’ve seen, global—captivation, yet imbued with the terrorism of a self-obsessed witch queen who would go to murderous lengths to maintain her “fairest of them all.” As she asks—“who…” in her own wicked query from a reply an all-seeing mirror that surveils the kingdom for the most beautiful maiden in the land.
Also, for me, as a logo, it had to align with
the animation drawings from Disney’s character archives.
So, in my interpretation—GIRVIN’s logo design for the 1983 calligraphic movie title design for Walt Disney’s Snow White—it had to be beautiful, yet tinged with a kind of terror that wouldn’t over-illustrate, or intimate how truly scary this storytelling was, as a vehicle for family-oriented entertainment.
I submitted a string of solutions—and honed in on this approach, a sinuous italic with some wicked innuendo—spikes at the feet of the stems, a scratched tenor and sharpened points in some ascending strokes, a crafted sigillic link between the w of Snow, and the W of White. Subtle, but slightly scarier than a more family-friendly logo, perhaps like the current filmic portrayal.
We employed this type of scripted, contrastive interpretation in our work, for example—on Tim Burton’s “Sleepy Hollow,” or Ray Bradbury’s “Something Wicked This Way Comes,” treatments that, in the one, recount classic tales, and two—illustrate a darker side.
This is the art of calligraphy—the delicate lustration of the visual story of speech, and the inner trade, which is the ancient meaning of “interpretation.”
The critical emotionality of any brand-related program is considering the ignition of the story, and the point of its conclusion—where, and how, it begins, the arc of its plot, the curve of its characters—and where it, and they, go—start to finish.
We ask the question—in any type of branding work—whether it’s theatrical marketing or a corporate evolution:
“What’s the story, who’s telling it, what’s it sound like, who’s it for—what’s it look like? And most crucially, who cares?”
We can help.
wishing well >
Tim
GIRVIN | Strategic Brands
Digital | Built environments by Osean
GIRVIN manages projects in strategy | story | naming | messaging | print
identity | built environments | packaging
social media | websites | interactive
Meanwhile, we make our own stories
