Narrative within a Narrative: The Journey of “Into the Woods” through Fairy Tale Narratives

Abstract

Myths, epics, and tales have survived for centuries in the oral expression tradition and have been permanently transcribed from oral tradition into written form. They are the most frequently recreated narratives in the cinema with their fantastic narrative structures. Hollywood cinema has been using tales as visual narratives for years. Tales, which have been turned into a structure open to the interpretation in accordance with the changing world, on the one hand is being reediting continuously. On the other hand, they gain new appearances along with intertwined narrative structures. In Into the Woods (Rob Marshall, 2014), four different fairy tales were used together. In this study, it is aimed to determine what kind of changes has been carried out in the film in terms of the different stages of the fairy tales. For this purpose, while collecting the data by examining the narrative structure of the fairy tales, the action areas are identified in terms of the “five components” in the Greimas’ ‘canonical narrative’. Briefly, the main object in this paper is to explicate the status of the film within the types of the cinematic narratives.