The Utopian Function of Fairy Tales' Adaptations in Hollywood

摘要

From birth to present, Fairy tale adaptations play an important role in Hollywood films. Those adaptation films have been considered as the culture industry because of their pattern adaptations which carrying the same meaning of National Ideology. The Utopian impulse in fairy tales that inspires people's hope, as Ernst Bloch talked, is undermined in Hollywood adaptation films. Hollywood films provided viewers the concreted fantasy, which inspired people's desire and encouraged them to consume fantasy instead of imagine an alternative future. But the utopian function still can be found in Hollywood films, the three aspects may be considered: Firstly, those films named the unnamed things so that we can recognize them; Secondly, lots of cracks between films and the ideology them carried can be found in film texts; Thirdly, viewers of these films are not a monolithic group, the diversity of viewers bring various reading on the films.