Once Upon A Time the TV Series
A Disney TV fairy tale series flavored with noir stories ! The Evil Queen (aka Maleficent) successfully robs all the characters from fables and fairy tales of their memories and transports them into modern day Maine as ordinary people. She is mayor of the town too. Only Snow White and Prince Charming's child can break the curse because she escaped the curse before the Evil Queen caught up to her. She's spirited away into the human world by her parents so she may one day redeem all of fairytale land. Currently in its fourth season, Disney has even put in Elsa from Frozen as one of the continuing characters.
Lost Girl the TV series
Fairy tale fans might guffaw at this choice. Being a horror TV series. But mind you, the show uses the Fae as its tribal motif, and features the dark world of mythological creatures from all world cultures as its cast of characters. The show's tone is often light and with lots of humor--like fairy tales.
Based on the lore of the Succubus, the story revolves around the realm of faerie clans: the dark fae (the creeps) in conflict with light fae (the good guys) in a Machiavellian plot of control of human co-existence. Lost Girl delivers plenty of interesting adventure and sexy hijinks as befits its theme. A fairy tale with more scary and sexy for grown-up viewers looking for their fix of urban fantasy adventure, As well as those (don't call them delinquent) kids coming-of-age, who want to know what scary and sexy is all about.
The School of Good and Evil YA Novel
Soon to be a major motion picture, this bestselling Harry Potter-like school drama, is a switcheroo fairy tale, where the bad character is assigned to the school for heroes, and the good character is assigned to the school for villains. Both characters attempt to redeem themselves from their circumstances by being part of...you guess it right...a fairy tale. This is 2015's bestseller YA novel hit and may spawn as many sequels as Harry Potter too. The creator is Soman Chainani.
Neil Gaiman: The Sleeper and the SpindleRock star writer for comics and novels for all ages, Neil Gaiman is someone you either love or hate. Because he is one of the best prose stylist authors who has made fairy tale parsing a very popular way to write again. Kids love him for that. His own Vertigo comic book masterpiece from the 80s, Sandman, a dark fairy tale of the King of Dreams, has catapulted his work as one of the best of this generation's pop culture revival of fairy tales. Young female readers are his biggest fans. Neil came out with a series of novels that were unabashed fairy tales in themselves: Stardust and Neverwhere. One of his short stories, Snow, Glass, Apples, is already a modern classic: a retelling of Snow White as a vampire and her mother as the good white witch (waaay before Maleficent was a movie).
Neil's latest modern classic is a fairy tale retelling: The Sleeper and the Spindle. An ageless favorite among girls, Sleeping Beauty works its own amazing as a female-heart-female, happily-ever-lesbian story of true love. Cool? Among the few blessed scribes who know how to work around the norms of spinning yarns, Neil turns a fairy tale favorite into something more endearing, knowing that stories sometimes work even better when you break the norms.
WuXia Modern Classics
The Fairy Tale is not an exclusive trope to western
entertainment culture. Chinese Wuxia (swordplay hero epics) movies
these days are now offered as dedicated, epic fairy tale romances with
fantastic vistas and costumes, heartbreaking romantic moments (a staple
of Chinese epic fairy tale romances is that either the prince or the
princess dies in the end in the arms of their beloved, or both of them
die) and the trademark swordplay action and martial arts magic. WuXia
films are extra-ordinary Asian fairy tales that attract a loyal cult of
fantasy romance film fans, the way kids of all ages love Japanese anime
and giant robot sentai TV series. Here are a few fan favorites:
The Fox Lover
A romantic epic fairy tale, a warrior loses his memory of his betrothed fox demon wife, but he protects her and her fox demon sisters from darker supernatural forces out to usurp their realm. In Chinese lore, fox demons are sly female spirits who can assume human form and beguile travellers into their lair for playtime and for marriage. In darker stories the fox demon devours the waylaid traveller. In this WuXia film, there is plenty of romantic fairy tale moments, and supernatural swordplay fighting sequences. The Fox Lover, a scary fairy tale using Chinese folklore about
manipulative fox demons falling in love with a human, demon
hunter. This is a WuXia film or Swordplay romance too.
Journey to the West
A prequel to the fable of the Monkey King, starring fan-favorite Chinese idol, Shu Qi, this film presents a coming of age, romance epic where a young monk finds his place in the world, discovers love and defeats the evil boss character. Plenty of Chinese fantasy tropes, from changeling monsters, to the Monkey King as the supreme martial arts fighter, and plenty of supernatural swordplay action and fight scenes one expects from the best WuXia films.A prequel to the legend of the Monkey King, one of the staples
of Chinese mythology, Journey to the West tells of Demon hunters
who fall in love and a demon lord (the Monkey King)
who redeems its soul.
Snow Girl and the Dark Crystal
Starring the Chinese superstar idol Bing Bing Fan (Blink from X-Men Days of Future Past movie), this is a romantic tragedy fairy tale, where a man is turned into a demon by subterfuge to allow an older evil god to gain power over heaven and hell. It is a story of seduction, betrayal and love's redemption overcoming the forces in play. The digital imagery might not be up to snuff as western or even video game standards, but all that still works for this Wuxia fairy tale film you will want to watch over and over again.
The biggest WuXia fairy tale epic for 2015, The Snow Girl and the Dark
Crystal tells of a Demon Hunter caught in the web of an ambitious
lower god trying to kill mankind. Chinese mythology is rife with lower
gods and demon hunters.
