Mixed Magic. Global-Local Dialogues in Fairy Tales for Young Readers by Anna Katrina Gutierrez

Abstract

Reviewed by: Mixed Magic. Global-Local Dialogues in Fairy Tales for Young Readers by Anna Katrina Gutierrez Katja Wiebe MIXED MAGIC. Global-Local Dialogues in Fairy Tales for Young Readers. By Anna Katrina Gutierrez. John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2017, 230 pages. ISBN: 978-90-272-0162-1 Mixed Magic is a wide-ranging study on the interaction between globally popular fairy tale narratives and local children's media contexts. Anna Katrina Gutierrez develops the theoretical framework of "glocal fusion," in which a globally known narrative pattern is adapted and transformed in a certain ("local") culture, community, nation, or geographical space. She classifies the resulting glocal texts as a hybrid third, a mixed entity in which the global and the local are interrelated and fused. As Gutierrez convincingly shows, the glocal texts open up a new perspective on discourses of identity and power. These discourses, she argues, are connected with a widely held view that children's culture (texts, films, etc.) throughout the world, including that of the Asian context, is predominantly influenced by Western culture. In her analysis, the author therefore examines children's literary texts and animated films from "local" areas of the Eastern hemisphere with regard to global (Western) influences. She demonstrates that influence is not a one-way street that runs from "West" to "East," but that both areas—the global and the local, West and East—have their share in the resulting glocal mixed texts. Local texts (and films), as elements of a worldwide network of children's culture, in turn exert influence on other texts. Hence the relevance of Gutierrez's research: "Children today are increasingly exposed to glocal material, so it has become more important to interpret cultural artifacts from a global-local scale of reference" (xv). With her study, she wants to point out the necessity and meaning of a "glocal literacy" in children and adults. In her text analysis, Gutierrez examines "Western" narrative prototypes and character constellations (Beauty and the Beast, Blue-beard, and The Little Mermaid) and traces how elements of these fairy tales are reflected and changed in Japanese, Korean, Filipino, and Chinese fairy tales and children's and youth books; in the fantasy films of the Japanese animation filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki; and in graphic novels. The texts are analyzed for fairy tale content, since fairy tales have fixed core and plot elements, but can be changed in their form and are (therefore) passed on broadly, that is, globally. Gutierrez also looks at glocal texts dealing with multicultural issues and migration, such as growing up in San Francisco's Chinatown. These texts emerge in a US context but have a Chinese fairy tale background. The close readings are preceded by two methodological sections on the theories of globalization and on Western and Eastern notions of subjectivity, which are reflected in the texts examined. The author also deals with questions of definition, namely the ambiguity and elasticity of the terms East and West, global and local. She also considers concepts and methods from the fields of cognitive narratology, imagology, stereotype research, and (post)colonial studies. While the theoretical chapters are very dense and not always easily accessible to readers, the analytical chapters "Orientalized Retellings of Beauty and the Beast and Bluebeard," "East Imagines West: Conceptualizations of Western Fairy-Tale Space in the Anime Films of Hayao Miyazaki," "Mermaids," and "Beasts (and Beauties)" are clear, eye-opening, and the main achievement of the work. Thanks to the intermedial perspective that Gutierrez applies to her analysis, it becomes clear how text and illustration (or film) complement or contradict [End Page 109] each other in their global and local parts. In various Asian mermaid texts and films, Gutierrez demonstrates how Andersen's Little Mermaid (and Disney's Arielle) renegotiates the alterity-inferior impetus of the mermaid figure in the context of cultural otherness and metamorphosis. Hayao Miyazaki's animated films illustrate that local and global cultural signs are so fused and transformed into fantasy that they are accessible across national and cultural borders. In various adaptations and retellings of Beauty and the Beast, the author deconstructs stereotypical orientalist representations of the "beast" as a threatening (Eastern) being and discusses the relationship between the sexes...