Fairy tales films can be black and white
"The Juniper Tree" is a very important movie because it shows how not all fairy tale films are like Disney’s were everything is colorful and have a happy ending. "The Juniper Tree" movie follows very well the flatness and abstraction that the original story brings. Obviously, the movie has discrepancies from the “original” tale, but the author did a great job keeping many tropes and fairy tale characteristics in the story while shooting the film.
The tale "Juniper Tree" by the brothers Grimm tells the story of a mother who prays for a child under the Juniper Tree and after the kid is finally born, she dies from happiness. Her husband buries her under the Juniper Tree and marries another woman. With his second wife, he has a daughter who was very loved by the woman, but on the other hand, she hated the little boy. One day, the mother has the idea to end with the little boy’s life, so she offers him an apple and tells him that he needed to pick it out of the box. When he bents down to take one, she slams the lid down so hard that the little boy’s head flies away and falls into the chest with the apples. After that, she decides to put the boy’s head back on his neck so that no one could see that something was wrong. The mother tells the little girl Marlene to slap her brother, and when she does so, his head flies away, making the girl responsible for the death. The mother decided to cook the little boy’s body in a stew and gives it to the father for dinner, who loves it. Little Marlene takes his bones from underneath the table and places them underneath the Juniper tree, which “creates” a beautiful bird out of the bones. The bird flies to three different houses singing about what has happened to him, and he was being rewarded from his singing, accumulating a golden chain, red shoes and a millstone. He flies back home with those items, gives the chain to his father, the shoes to little Marlene and kills the stepmother with the millstone. The bird transforms back into the little boy and the father, little Marlene and little boy go back inside the house.
"The juniper Tree" (1990) was directed by Nietzchka Keene and has some similarities and some differences from the original tale. The film tells the story of a woman, Katla, who meets a man, Johann and they live together. The woman has a little sister, Margit, who goes with her and the man has a son, Jonas, from his dead ex-wife. Margit and the Johann get along really well and become good friends. The little boy does not like his new step-mother and calls her a witch after watching her do a spell. The little girl has a special gift where see can see people who have passed away, and see keeps seeing her mother throughout the movie, and one time the dead mother shows her daughter that she had a big black hole in her chest. Margit and Jonas were walking on the field and a bird drops a charm on top of the dead mother's coffin. Margit tells Jonas that his mom left that charm for him and that if he carries it with him, his mother will always protect him. One day, Katla and Jonas go out into the field and the boy says that his mother gave him the charm that prohibits anything from hurting him. She asks him to prove it by jumping off the cliff, to see if she would protect him, and he says that his mother will turn him into a bird. The little boy falls off the cliff and dies, then the stepmother cuts his fingers off, takes on with her and puts the other one inside his mouth, followed by sewing his mouth closed. She goes home and puts his little finger in the stew and serves it for dinner for Johann. Margit finds Jonas’ finger in the stew and takes it to bury with his mother's body. The little girl told the father about what Katla did and the step-mother ran away. After some time, a tree grows where Jonas’ finger was planted.
Fairy tales are known for being abstract, and the film “The Juniper Tree” did a great job keeping the abstraction from the original story, unlike most fairy tales, the movie is all in black and white. Another characteristic of fairy tales is flatness, and even thought this characteristic is present in the movie, it is not as flat as the Grimm’s version of the story. For example, in the movie, it is presented to us the little boy’s name, Jonas, while in the original story, we never find his name out. Even though the movie doesn’t have as much normalized magic as the Grimm’s version of the story, we still see magical occurrences happening, such as the tree growing out of the little boy’s finger. A very important trope that is present in the “Juniper Tree” is an evil stepmother, which we can clearly see in this story. The stepmother disliked her stepson so much to a point that she killed him, in the Grimm’s version by slamming his head off, and in the movie by making him jump off a cliff.
Even thought the movie is a retelling of the Grimm's tale, we see many differences between the stories. One difference is that in the movie, Jonas accuses his stepmother of being a witch, claiming that he saw her doing a spell, but in the Grimm's version it is never mentioned that the stepmother is one. Another main difference is that in the movie, the little girl is the step-mother's sister, while in the written tale she is her daughter. In the movie, the stepmother runs away once she realizes the father knows about what she did, but in the original tale, the mother is killed by the little boy. Besides that, as i have mentioned before, the Grimm's version has more normalized magic than the film, and that is seen when the boy comes back to life after being a singing bird, but in the movie once the boy is dead, he never comes back in human form.
