#kvitebjørn

[twinklecupcake]

East of the Sun West of the Moon animated adaptation let's GOOOOOO

[fairytalemovies]

Trailer to the upcoming Norwegian animated feature Kvitebjørn - Østenfor sol og vestenfor måne (2024).

[into-september]

WE HAVE A TRAILER

...

It seems my earlier bitching about the language decisions might've been... somewhat unwarranted by the possibility that the good bear named himself, since he speaks like a Northerner and only the weirder corners of Finnmark would say "hvit". I'm being very generous here since this trailer has the heroine utter the line "I can call you Kvitebjørn", but you know. At least it's how he would say it.

We might be dealing with the Norwegian equal to colour-blond casting, which is dialect-blind dubbing. Which you know, works in film set in most contemporary settings but is just weird in anything claiming depict some historical setting.

I never saw "Wish" but this song has both the MC change her sound patterns for a rhyme and relies on her Northern phonology for a different one (the only thing that would've made that better was if Mimmi Tamba IRL was the kind of northerner who says "nu"). It is a profoundly weird listening experience, and while I unfortunately can't find out if Dear Grandpa and Mum are also linguistic northerners from what's up on YT, I do note that the local flora, fauna and every other character except one with lines in the songs I've heard speak Standard Eastern. Why does MC have a different dialect? She's a third generation immigrant at earliest and those normally do not adapt their grandparents' variety of the language rather than the majority one.

Both films, from what little I've heard, also display the sad, sad tendency of writing a script in Bokmål, telling the actors to perform it in dialect, and then either not correcting them or not letting them use their natural syntax which creates an unfortunate uncanny valley effect because all of us know that no northerner would ever utter the sentence "mitt egentlige navn".

The other Maja Lunde filmatisation this Christmas allegedly struggles with the same, albeit the variety "child speaking like a nineteen fifties novel". (and its anonymous setting being very obviously filmed in very emblematically northern Tromsø while its inhabitants sound like this is somewhere generically around Oslo)

And while I am absolute 120% NOT complaining about Odd Nordstoga getting to write his BGM songs in Nynorsk, it contributes all the more to the linguistic anarchy since the trailer at least has a narrator speaking what I expect is Bokmål.

Anyway: I heard one of the songs on the radio and while I sadly realised what I heard only towards the end it was RAD and yes I will forgive this film anything for the music alone

[pensola]

They looked at Frozen and really said "fine, we'll make an animated musical about Scandinavian fairy tale and culture ourselves, then."

Kvitebjørn: Østenfor sol og vestenfor måne (White Bear: East of the Sun and West of the Moon) will be released Christmas 2024.

In the epic fairy tale The White Bear, we meet the fearless and daunting Liv, who longs to leave the valley she lives in. By the mountains she meets the polar bear White Bear, and she becomes both curious about and fascinated by this beautiful creature. In White Bears ice palace, a warm friendship blossoms between the two, because White Bear is not just a bear, he is also the prince Valemon, cursed by a witch who threatens to ruin the entire world. However, can the curse be broken so that they can save the world, and find happiness...? Based on Asbjørnsen and Moe's classic fairytale.

Unofficial translation of the song in the video:

Who is he? Who are you? White Bear, tell me now. You're my friend, of that I believe.

The bear that comes in the day is my friend, I know that now, But what about Valemon? Who is he?

I know nothing about you, While you know all about me. White Bear, Valemon, White Bear, Valemon, Who is he? Yes, who are you?

Yes, who is he? Who are you? You are in the night and the ice, But in a weird way it's like warmth and light oozes from you, like a breeze So what, Valemon? Who are you?

I know nothing about you, While you know all about me White Bear, Valemon, White Bear, Valemon, Who is he? Yes, who are you?

Yes, who are you? Who is he? Yes, who are you? Ugly or beautiful? Kind or cruel? Boring, loving, wise or stupid?

No, I know nothing about you while you know all about me White Bear, Valemon, White Bear, Valemon, Who is he? Yes, who are you?

White Bear, Valemon, White Bear, Valemon, Who is he? Yes, who are you? Who are you…?

Who are you, really?

[mysterious-secret-garden]

Jenny Nyström - Kvitebjørn King Valemon, ca. 1890.

[cedence]

I need a word with the person who allowed this to go into print

[ratzinajar]

Norwegian Miku in Haugesund bunad : ) left drawing is a parody of Theodor Kittelsen's painting Kvitebjørn kong Valemon

[eventyrforalle]

NYTT: “Kvitebjørn kong Valemon ” fra Asbjørnsen & Moe

https://eventyrforalle.no/asbjornsen-moe/am125

Det er faktisk helt sant! Nå kan du lese det nydelige eventyret om Kvitebjørn kong Valemon på EventyrForAlle, med de nydelige illustrasjonene til Theodor Kittelsen.

Om du også mener alle skal kunne lese og høre eventyr gratis på norsk, støtt EventyrForAlle på Patreon. https://patreon.com/eventyrforalle

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[fairytalemovies]

Zwerg Nase (2021) has this, sort of. It's been a while since I last saw it, but I remember thinking that in some places it felt like a Disney movie.

I think even some Norwegian and Swedish critics at the time thought that Kvitebjørn Kong Valemon (1991) had a "Disney aesthetic".

Somebody recently said that the Peau d'Âne of Jacques Demy, aka the 1970 Donkey Skin, was their favorite fairytale movie outside of the Disney ones, and that Disney would never adapt Donkey-skin. It is funny because the whole purpose of this movie was to BE a Disney movie.

I posted several times about this movie before, and one of the big things with Demy's creation is that he purposefully embraced and imitated the codes and visuals of the Disney fairytale movies of the time (Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, etc...). He wanted to create a live-action Disney movie, he wanted to make the "Disney movie Disney would never make". Of course there were other influences (the hippie and psychedelic aesthetic of 60s America, the Gustave Doré illustrations of Perrault, the surrealist movement) but Disney was one of the core ones (alongside Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast).

And this made me wonder something... Are there other live-action fairytale movies that purposefully tried to embrace a Disney aesthetic? We know about Disney homages or imitators or rip-offs in the animated world, but in the live-action world? I am pretty sure Demy's Donkey Skin is the only movie I heard of that purposefully tried to embrace a Disney aesthetic. But it can't have been the only one right?

Weren't there other "Disney live-action fairytale" movies before Disney actually made live-action fairytale movies? Probably in other European countries cinema history...

[weepingwidar]

Theodor Severin Kittelsen (Norwegian, 1857-1914) - Kvitebjørn Kong Valemon (White-Bear-King Valemon) (1912)

[fairytalemovies]

Kristine Kujath Thorp - Flaske, duk og saks

[into-september]

It annoys me that we get the director, producers, script writer and composer, yet THE ANIMATION STUDIO is apparently completely irrelevant information

fwiw I got the comic version last year mostly because it was pretty. It's... blandly politically correct with a clumsy-but-gutsy heroine always doing the good for her peers, the obligatory lessons about Don't Use More Than Nature Can Give (that script writer is after all Maja Lunde) and thinking about it, I now have thoughts about this lesson when part of the original moral after all is about how things go to hell when the girl takes the one thing forbidden to her (looking at his nightly unfurried face)

(folk tale type ATU 425 in case you hadn't guessed)

one thing I really liked about the comic, though, was the romantic tension of the heroine knowing all his good sides and that he was human at night. That relationship just worked really well??? and this number captures SO MUCH of that because what I missed the first time listening and only got the third was that she's drawing the line between the bear she meets at day and the man she knows at night and how they are not the same to her

it's the Love Square vibes

I'm willing to forgive a lot for Odd Nordstoga's music

Not sure I'm willing to forgive the weird, weird reality of the bear's name being given as "kvitebjørn" ever since the day the fairy tale was first published in print while the people narrating undeniably (then) wrote a language and (now) speak a dialect where that should have been spelled as "hvit". DO IT IN NYNORSK YOU COWARDS.

ETA: I could overlook Disney and Dreamworks gratuitously throwing in northern lights into stories clearly set at latitudes where northern lights are very rarely seen. But from a Nordic director? Unforgivable.

[fairytalemovies]

Alright, here comes some suggestions…

Based on the fairy tale:

La belle et la bête (live action; 1946) Belle to Kaijuu Ouji (puppet animation; 1976) Beauty and the Beast (live action; 1976) Die Schöne und das Tier (puppet animation; 1976) Panna a netvor (live action; 1978) Skønheden og dyret (puppet animation; 1989) Die Schöne und das Biest (live action; 2012) La belle et la bête (live action; 2014)

Based on fairy tales similar to Beauty and the Beast:

Der Prinz hinter den sieben Meeren (live action; 1982) Kvitebjørn kong Valemon (live action; 1991)

Inspired by the fairy tale:

Meridian: Kiss of the Beast (live action; 1990) - Be aware, though… It's not a good movie!

So like, does anyone have any good Beauty and the Beast type movies to recommend? I've seen all four Disney movies (the original, the two DVD sequels, and the live-action remake), Belle (the anime), Blood of Beasts (a low budget Viking movie), Beauty and the Beast (the series starring Ron Perlman and Linda Hamilton), I am Dragon (a Russian movie about a dragon), The Shape of Water (the Del Toro movie that everyone needs to watch at least once in their life), Penelope (Christina Ricci movie where the girl is actually the 'beast'), Corpse Bride (the stop motion musical about a dead woman trying to marry a living man), Warm Bodies (Zombie!Romeo x Survivor!Juliet), Edward Scissorhands (needs no introduction), Bram Stoker's Dracula (the sexy one with Gary Oldman), the Shrek quadrilogy (even if only the first one really fits the mold), and I'm going to include TAU on this list (a movie about a kidnapped girl, a sadistic scientist, and a tortured AI) because you can't convince me that it wasn't a love story.

I love Beauty and the Beast and stories that are similar, so any recommendations are appreciated.

(Also, if you want to count Phantom of the Opera as a Beauty and the Beast story, I've seen the 1943 version, the Robert Englund version, half of the Julian Sands version (it was really bad), and the Gerard Butler musical version.)

[naariel]

Brunebjørn Druid Halsin

-

Based on Kvitebjørn Kong Valemon by Theodor Kittelsen. As a kid I always really enjoyed that painting, and the norwegian folktale it depicts. So naturally I had to recreate it with Halsin and Gaia.

[sassafrasmoonshine]

Theodor Kittelsen (Norwegian, 1857–1914) • White Bear King Valemon (Kvitebjørn kong Valemon) • Illustration • Published in Norske folkeeventyr, by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe • 1871

[berrywinkle]

People often cite beauty and the beast for being the OG of monster romance, but the premise of a fairy tale protagonist falling in love with a monstrous or inhuman creature is not that uncommon.

Psyche thought Eros was a monster before she saw him sleeping, and she still married the "monster" willingly.

In "kvitebjørn kong Valemon" the prince Valemon is a white bear for the majority of the time the girl protagonist knows him, and though she knew he turned into a human at night, she and her mother still suspected him of being a troll.

There’s a russian fairytale where a soldier falls in love with a princess who was cursed to be a bear. (Yay monster girl representation)

In "kong lindorm" the lindworm demands a bride before his human twin brother can marry, and the protagonists marries him after she successfully gets him to shed enough skins to reveal his human form underneath.

"The animal as bridegroom" is literally its own genre of folktales. Not all of them are like beauty and the beast, and comparing all monster romance to one fairy tale is pretty reductive