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A reflection on the multiple natures of wonder based on folklore and fairy-tale discussions of how human/non-human entanglements in fairy tales overlap and differ from those in other wonder genres across cultures and media.

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Human/non-human conversations, romances, transformations, hybrids, conflicts, and kinships are core elements of fairy-tale wonder. Investigating human/non-human interactions in fairy tales, Lewis Seifert focuses on metamorphosis and hybridity, Daniela Kato points to the relationships of plants and women, and Mayako Murai calls for reclassifying tales based on their multispecies relationality. How do these fairy-tale human/non-human entanglements compare to those in other wonder genres across cultures and media? This question invites a consideration of wonder in the plural, whereby we acknowledge how some wondrous storyworlds are made possible by the affordances of multimodal media, how wonder genres across the planet challenge the western fictional/nonfictional divide, and how Indigenous wonderworks reassert histories and lived realities that colonialism had dismissed as fictional or primitive. Whereas fairy tales participate in the otherwise logic of other wonder genres—from zhiguai (strange/wonder/ghost story) in Chinese traditions to khurāfa (fictional fantastic tales) in The Thousand and One Nights and moʻolelo kamahaʻo in Hawaiʻi—their sense of wonder is not one and the same in part because their perceptions of natural/supernatural/preternatural relations differ. Pauline Greenhill and I have discussed wonder media where a human/nonhuman hybrid is the central character and where a First Nations youth’s communication with birds and drones has decolonial effects. kuʻualoha hoʻomanawanui discusses how moʻolelo ʻāhiwahiwa affirm “multispecies kinship and care” and make humans accountable to animals, land, and elements in Oceania; and Margaret Lyngdoh’s fieldwork teaches us about human/non-human animal transformations in Northeast Indian Khasi traditional tales within an understanding of water as knowledge resource.

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This paper reads T. Kingfisher’s Nettle & Bone (2022) as a reworking of fairy-tale wonder that entangles humans and nonhumans. It critiques social norms while imagining alternative forms of survival and interspecies kinship beyond anthropocentric paradigms.

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T. Kingfisher (Ursula Vernon)’s Nettle & Bone (2022) has been described as a dark fairy tale. Drawing from fairy-tale tropes, plots and motifs, particularly “Bluebeard,” this fairy-tale novel utilizes a fantastic setting to thematize domestic violence, abuse and trauma. In doing so, it both cites, subverts, and expands fairy-tale structures. The goal of this paper is twofold: first, to explore how Nettle & Bone plays with the characteristics of the fairy tale to advance a critique of anthropocentric hierarchies. The novel shows an entanglement of multiple entities—human, nonhuman, inanimate—that foregrounds an ideal of multispecies kinship. The principle behind this type of kinship lies in a conception of wonder as a relational force.

The second goal of this paper is to contextualize Nettle & Bone within the larger production of fairy tales in the twenty-first century. I will argue that the themes explored in this novel participate in a general trend towards using fairy-tale magic and wonder as tools to describe and criticize society. The result is an alignment between fairy-tale retellings and fairy-tale scholarship, particularly regarding contemporary theories around environmentalism and posthumanism. If the assumption is true, then the interpretation of Nettle & Bone is a key indicator of both scholarly as well as societal interests; following this conclusion, it then means that Nettle & Bone is ultimately a novel about our entangled futures.

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An exploration of the tensions between consensus reality and the varied mythic sources that inform the fantastic and mythopoeic constructions in the works of Charles de Lint, including the "Jack of Kinrowan" books, "Moonheart", "Spiritwalk", and "Spirits in the Wires".

Paper long abstract

Where other writers have postulated mythopoeic constructions on the North American continent that demand a hierarchy and succession pattern that reflects different levels of invasion where the spiritual world and beliefs of Indigenous peoples are superseded by those of colonizing peoples and then contemporary technologies, Charles de Lint’s works instead attempt to imagine inclusive borderlands of wonder woven into the urban contemporary. By looking at the overlay of Kinrowan/1980s Ottowa in the Jack of Kinrowan books, Tamson House in Moonheart and Spiritwalk, and The Wordwood in Spirits in the Wires, I trace how de Lint’s mythopoeic constructions depend on a tension between the idea of consensus reality and the simultaneous idea that all the mythic sources he draws from exist as equally valid, multivocal pluralities of the mythic spirituality that underlies his fantastic constructions, rather than competing forces that necessitate overwriting each other. By focusing on the ‘real’, the everyday lives and experiences of his characters as they encounter borderlands and otherworlds, question their beliefs, and take their own journeys through what he terms ‘Mystery,’ de Lint builds urban spaces in dialogue with the varied mythic traditions he taps into, which become liminal spaces where characters, and therefore readers, are able to discover new pathways into wonder in the world they thought they knew, to discover more of ‘the world as it is.’ As such, the idea of consensus reality becomes less what everyone agrees exists, and more, what everyone believes might yet be.

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This paper explores the complex entanglements of human, non-human, and inhumane natures in Indian fairy tales, folktales, and wonder media.

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Indian folklore and wonder narratives have long grappled with the porous boundaries between the human, the non-human, and the inhumane. From ancient Sanskrit compendia such as the Panchatantra and Jataka Tales to regional oral traditions and contemporary digital animations, these stories consistently foreground non-human beings—animals, spirits, landscapes, and divine forces—as central actors rather than peripheral figures.

This paper investigates how Indian tales and wonder media conceptualize “natures” that move beyond the human. Talking animals in the Panchatantra are not simply anthropomorphic but serve as moral philosophers, teaching kings and commoners strategies for survival, diplomacy, and justice. In tribal folktales from central and northeastern India, rivers, forests, and sacred groves are narrated as sentient, imbued with protective or punitive powers that regulate human conduct. Meanwhile, figures such as the yakshi or churel embody the “inhumane” by merging human suffering with spectral vengeance, dramatizing gendered violence within ecological and supernatural settings.

By examining these narrative layers, I argue that Indian fairy tales and wonder media present a pluralistic ecological imagination where humans are only one among many agents negotiating survival and morality. Ultimately, the paper suggests that Indian folklore and wonder media stage an interspecies dialogue that destabilizes anthropocentric hierarchies. These narratives offer alternative cosmologies where ecological and supernatural interdependence is central, and where non-human voices articulate ethical claims. In the context of global ecological crises, revisiting such Indian perspectives provides a fertile ground for reimagining human-nature relationships in more-than-human terms.

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This presentation explores Indigenous Pacific wonder tales depicting human and non-human interactions in traditional concepts of kinship relationships between them. Such retellings decolonize and disrupt mainstream concepts of hierarchical relationships often gendered through a patriarchal lens.

Paper long abstract

Digital media provides new opportunities for Indigenous peoples to share traditional knowledge, including wonder tales, as well as to create and reimagine wonder tales in new ways for both local and lobal audiences. Thus, it has been a resource for Indigenous communities to connect with younger generations, and to support and encourage each other. This presentation explores the powerful ways in which digital media is reaching new audiences in reimagining and retelling Indigenous wonder tales that depict human and non-human interactions that present traditional concepts of kinship relationships between humans and non-humans. Such reassertions and re-presentations work to decolonize and disrupt mainstream concepts of hierarchical relationships (placing humans above all other living and non-living entities), often gendered through a patriarchal lens. I will explore select new examples of such, including the Rotuman etiological tale Sina ma Tinirau (Sina and the Eel) (2021), a Māori retelling of a Maui the demigod legend, and the Hawaiian animated film, Kapō Maʻi Lele (And Her Flying Lady Parts) (2025).

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This paper interprets Gints Zilbalodis’s award-winning animated film Flow (2024) as a wordless fairy-tale film built around ecological collapse, nonhuman kinship and the ethics of survival in a fluid story-world.

Paper long abstract

This paper offers an ecocritical interpretation of Flow (2024), Gints Zilbalodis’s award-winning animated film, reading it as a wordless fairy-tale film built around ecological collapse, nonhuman kinship and the ethics of survival in a fluid story-world. Set in a flooded landscape, Flow displaces human centrality by foregrounding the journey of a solitary cat who traverses a deluged terrain in uneasy alliance with other animals. The film’s absence of human language, reliance on visual storytelling and emphasis on fluid motion align it with affective ecologies: every ripple in the water, every pause in the cat’s movement and every shift in the soundscape activate a sense of wonder. The film centres water as a narrative force and medium of ethical reorientation, evoking ecological themes of fluid entanglement, vulnerability and relational ethics. This aesthetic and affective dimension echoes the logic of fairy tales, where nature and nonhuman characters become agents of reciprocal transformation. In Flow, familiar fairy-tale motifs – the reluctant hero, the quest for survival, the unexpected helper, the enchanted landscape – are entangled within a world altered by climate catastrophe. This ecocritical fairy-tale film challenges essentialist visions of nature by presenting fluid ecologies in which beings and elements are co-constitutive and interdependent. This paper situates Flow within an emerging lineage of wonder media that reimagine contemporary ecological anxieties through fairy-tale frameworks.

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This paper explores how contemporary fairy tales and wonder media shift from anthropocentric narratives to sympoietic ecologies, where humans and nonhumans co-create worlds through affective, ethical, and imaginative entanglements.

Paper long abstract

This paper investigates how "contemporary fairy tales" and wonder media can be reimagined as sympoietic spaces, where humans and nonhumans co-create shared worlds and narratives. Moving beyond anthropocentric regimes, these tales stage encounters with animals, spirits, and environments that transform the very conditions of storytelling. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s concept of sympoiesis—making-with—and Isabelle Stengers’ cosmopolitical approach, I argue that the fairy tale is not only a cultural artifact directed at humans but also a medium of co-fabulation with nonhuman others.

Three works illustrate this argument across different media and contexts. In Flow (2024), an animated film of survival after a flood, the story displaces human centrality and foregrounds the agency of animals navigating disaster together, turning catastrophe into an allegory of interspecies kinship. Princess Mononoke (1997) dramatizes the entanglement of humans, animals, and landscapes in a fragile ecology of reciprocity and conflict, offering a powerful narrative of co-existence beyond domination. Finally, Undone (2019–), a hybrid rotoscoped series, reframes fairy-tale wonder through time travel, trauma, and Indigenous cosmologies, staging a sympoietic entanglement of human psyche, ancestral spirits, and nonhuman temporalities.

Taken together, these examples demonstrate that fairy tales and wonder media provide imaginative laboratories for rethinking ecological entanglements. Recasting the fairy tale as a sympoietic medium allows us to recognize wonder as both an affective and ethical resource for living-with nonhumans in times of ecological crisis.

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The paper focuses on the entanglements between humans, non-humans, and natural locations in the 2015 film "Tale of Tales." As an adaptation of baroque fairy tales from the seventeenth century, the film arguably reinforces human-nature relations while playing with our sense of place and belonging.

Paper long abstract

Matteo Garrone’s 2015 film "Tale of Tales" investigates the darkest imperfections of human nature while staging Giambattista Basile’s baroque fairy tales in ethereal-yet-real locations in Italy. Garrone’s source material are hyperbolic stories about corporeal metamorphoses, human vices, and social struggles, which Basile wrote in the Neapolitan language and assembled in his literary collection of fifty tales, "Lo cunto de li cunti" ("The Tale of Tales," 1634-1636). Besides being a linguistically adventurous and satirical book, "Lo cunto de li cunti" also established the literary fairy-tale genre in Europe. Yet, "Tale of Tales" is only its second film adaptation to date. The paper focuses on how, while adapting to the screen in an Anglophone international production three of Basile’s stories, the film produces unique cinematic entanglements between humans, non-humans, and the environment. "Tale of Tales" is not only rich in crossovers between human and non-human beings already narrated by Basile—examples are a woman turning into a bat; a flea being raised as offspring by a king; and the battle between a man and a sea dragon, whose heart will be eaten by the man’s wife—but the unbreakable continuum between characters and natural surroundings is also made evident in the film through several production choices such as costumes, coloring, material special effects, and computer-generated images. As an adaptation of seventeenth-century fairy tales, how does a twenty-first-century film reimagine our humanity? The paper argues that "Tale of Tales" reinforces human-nature relations while playing with our sense of place and belonging.

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Racism, misogyny, and misogynoir operate through seemingly innocent debates about the nature of fairy tales and film; online discussions manifest as inhumane toxic speech. Our example is the backlash on YouTube against Rachel Zegler playing Snow White in Disney’s recent live action remake.

Paper long abstract

Feminist scholar Allison Craven recently coined the term “fairy-tale public sphere” to explore how characters, images, and concepts from traditional culture, popular children’s literature, and wonder narratives play roles in civil discourse as referent, sign, trope, and/or invocation. When such representations enter mediated discourse, the fairy-tale public sphere transforms into a location for debates around race, gender, ability, and other matters of serious import and acrimonious disagreement. It also becomes an arena where fairy-tale motifs and ideas form the grounds for types of speech that are damaging and harmful to minorities and to a democratic social fabric. In our case study, dealing with Disney’s recent live action adaptation, Snow White, online discussions manifest as toxic speech with serious consequences. We focus on YouTube discussions and comments on Snow White’s teaser trailer published in August 2024, with nearly one million dislikes but just over 82,000 likes within three weeks of its debut. We also look at the comments sections of two of the many YouTube videos about Snow White created to incite, channel, and mobilize hate against the film. We focus on two dominant discourses in this fairy-tale public sphere: one related to fairy tales, fairy-tale film, Snow White, and the roles of the Brothers Grimm and Disney, to disguise racist and misogynoir sentiments; the other linking to women, including princesses both fictional and factual, as misogynist, anti-feminist ways of attaching to Zegler the label of difficult woman, unfit to play the innocent, pure and sweet character of Snow White.