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Paper short abstract

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.