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| Review by Lily Fierro |
In honor of the Christmas season, which always feels somewhat magical, I wanted to review the the whimsical series, Jim Henson’s The Storyteller: Witches. The four tales will make a beautiful gift for any reader this coming holiday.
Inspired by Henson’s The Storyteller, a minor television series aired in 1988, Jim Henson’s The Storyteller: Witches is a short series of four tales that carry on the fairy tale and folklore tradition that the television series tried to capture. A product of a collaboration between Archaia and the Jim Henson company, the series expands on different types of witches and their interactions with people.
Each tale contains stunning artwork and lettering that prepare enchanting settings for the narratives reminiscent of the folktales, fairy tales, and myths that stimulated our imaginations when we were children.
Tale One: The Magic Swan Goose and the Lord of the Forest
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| Issue #1 by S.M. Vidaurri |
For the first of the series, The Magic Swan Goose and the Lord of the Forest contains the most traditional structure, motifs, and archetypes of a fairy tale.
When the King of a kingdom near a majestic forest decides to cut down the largest tree to make a glorious crown for his son, the Prince, misfortune meets the royal family, with nature seeming to have its revenge on them for taking down the majestic tree.
When a giant swan captures the Prince in the middle of the night, the only person left to save the kingdom is the Princess, the one family member who respects the forest. On the mission to find and rescue her young brother, she faces many strange and nearly impossible challenges along the way.
While the odds seem very much against the Princess, every time a major obstacle comes her way, be it a giant oven filled with rye rolls that she must eat in order to continue or a spinning wheel that appears and will only let her pass if she spins gold, creatures of nature emerge and help the Princess along the way to get to her brother.
By conveying nature’s powers to both punish and nurture, The Magic Swan Goose and the Lord of the Forest reminds us of how we should respect all living beings.
The Magic Swan Goose and the Lord of the Forest is not the most innovative tale in its message and in its narrative techniques, but it certainly does immerse you in its fantasy world and allows you to marvel at the strength of nature.
Tale Two: The Snow Witch
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| Issue #2 by Kyla Vanderklugt |
The second tale in the series, The Snow Witch, follows the tradition of Japanese folklore. When Minokichi accompanies his mentor up into the mountains and a snowstorm forces them into a makeshift shelter for the night, he meets the mysterious and mythical Snow Witch, the subject of a tale of misfortune told throughout his village.
The Snow Witch, a distant and beautiful creature, consumes the souls of people who malign her, and in order to be spared, Minokichi makes a promise to the Snow Witch to never speak of her. A year after the encounter, another snow storm falls on the village, and a beautiful stranger named Oyuki meets Minokichi as she looks for a place to stay for the night.
The two fall in love and begin a family but in despair because Minokichi’s health continuously fails as his son flourishes and as a never-ending winter descends on the village, eliminating the healing warmth of spring and summer. When his son asks about a curse set on the village by the Snow Witch, Minokichi, now nearly on his deathbed, tells his son about the mercy shown to him by the witch, breaking his promise made many years ago.
By weaving in the fantasy of the Snow Witch folklore, this tale combines the power of nature with the humility of man in order to create a narrative to teach children (and adults too!) the significance of kindness and compassion to live a fruitful and happy life.
Tale Three: The Phantom Isle
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| Issue #3 by Matthew Dow Smith |
This tale is by far my favorite of the series.
The Phantom Isle has a somewhat simple and traditional folktale structure; however, rather than using fantasy elements to deliver a moral message, it uses the folktale structure to explain how any general good story emerges and how a person can become a captivating and enchanting storyteller.
In The Phantom Isle, an unnamed sailor by day and storyteller by night must tell stories on a desolate island.
Once a place abundant with witches who built a thriving, beautiful city with their stories and imaginations, the island decayed as the witches became more and more insular and distant from the world in their seemingly utopian city.
As their imaginations faded, their powers and the city degraded, forcing many of the witches to leave.
After the fall, only four witches remained, and they are the ones our sailor-storyteller meets when he washes ashore on the island.
As the only person with fresh imagination, the sailor-storyteller is awarded with immortality if he can tell stories to re-invigorate the island.
The years pass, and the island re-populates, but slowly, the storyteller drains his collection of stories. Consequently, in order to stimulate his imagination, which has been fading because of his lack of new adventures and absence from the regular world, the storyteller must leave the island, jeopardizing his immortality if he steps foot in the regular world again but leaving him story-less if he does not experience life outside of the island.
With its perspective of storytelling through a storyteller’s eyes, tale three is a perfect folktale for the creative process, serving as a reminder to all of us that imagination cannot survive in a fantasy world alone: It must live side by side with reality.
Tale Four: Vasilissa the Beautiful
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| Issue #4 by Jeff Stokely |
With the significance of the role of the storyteller established by The Phantom Isle, Vasilissa the Beautiful perfectly combines the comforting presence of a great storyteller by an idyllic fire with a traditional fairy tale narrative.
Opening with the description of a bleak, forgotten town, the storyteller creates the world of Vasilissa as she recounts the story of the young girl to her dog.
As Vasilissa’s mother lies on her deathbed, she hands her daughter a small doll to feed when in need of help. The doll is an odd one, faceless and coarsely made of straw and fabric, and Vasilissa believes her mother simply leaves it for her as an emotional crutch.
Unfortunately, after her mother’s passing, the doll fades out of the spotlight of Vasilissa’s life, replaced by her repugnant stepmother and stepsisters who all treat her like a slave.
At this point, the narrative seems like it is on its way to a Cinderella story, but one day, Vasilissa’s course and the trajectory of the story take a sharp turn in a more frightening and dreadful direction when her stepsisters convince her to enter the woods to look for the Light in the world but actually trick her into getting trapped by the heinous demon-witch, Baba Yaga. Vasilissa becomes the witch’s slave and must accomplish Baba’s unreasonable, inhuman demands in order to escape and return to her father.
When all hope has faded, Vasilissa has one last effort to get her out of Baba Yaga’s hands: the doll. And with the help of this doll that carries power to help her succeed, Vasilissa eventually returns home when Baby Yaga gets bored of her ability to complete all of the outrageous requests and gives her the Light, a skull which can pierce through superficial facades to eliminate the evil and to allow the good to thrive.
Vasilissa the Beautiful is the perfect tale to end Jim Henson’s The Storyteller: Witches. By the end of the tale, Vasilissa has emerged as a young woman from the forest now able to cope and able to confront difficult situations on her own.
As a didactic coming of age tale, Vasilissa the Beautiful rounds out the collection of stories to recall not only the general morals derived from the adventures we heard of in fairy tales and folktales but also how these simple stories and lessons should influence our conduct to arrive at and remain in adulthood, years after we originally heard them.
Together, the four tales in Jim Henson’s The Storyteller: Witches convey the many forms that folktales and fairy tales can take and how they still remain effective even if they are not set in a contemporary world. The Magic Swan Goose and the Lord of the Forest and The Snow Witch do not attempt to redefine the genre in anyway; they both tightly abide by formal definitions of Western and Eastern fairy tales and folklore, and their success stems from their ability to place you in their fantastical settings to evoke memories of the stories many of us heard as children that intended to guide us in proper conduct with other people and the world around us.
In contrast, The Phantom Isle, focuses on most important part of a story: the storyteller, a key component rarely discussed directly in a folktale or a fairy tale’s narrative.
And, lastly, Vasalissa the Beautiful combines the traditional structure of The Magic Swan Goose and the Lord of the Forest and The Snow Witch with the storyteller focus of The Phantom Isle to pull all of the tales together to present of a set of universal principles for children, adolescents, and all adults to live by.
Jim Henson’s The Storyteller: Witches makes you imagine you are sitting in the presence of a great storyteller and listening to everything he or she has heard and experienced.
As a collection, the tales transcend the pages and place you in a tranquil, calming space with a humble, endearing storyteller, allowing the jadedness and cynicism gathered through the process of adulthood to fade away and encouraging the fantasy and imagination of the stories to return lost spontaneity, wonder, and goodness back into our realities.
That is magic in itself.
