Like the Japanese art of kintsugi — taking broken pottery and mending it with gold-dusted glue, giving new context to its breakage and component parts — a creative duo at UVM has taken familiar, traditional fairy tales and broken them down, only to retell them in a new and unconventional way through a short stop-motion animated film. 

Chris Caswell, an office program/support generalist for the College of Education and Social Services, created the visuals while Patricia Julien, a professor of music theory and jazz composition in the College of Arts and Sciences, composed original music. The short films, “& Gretel Hansel” and “KinRumpelStilts” were shown recently at the Middlebury New Filmmakers Festival at Middlebury College, with Julien’s accompaniment played live. 

Caswell began making films during the COVID-19 pandemic, redirecting her creative energy after theaters closed.  

“I’m normally an actor. Once COVID hit, I had just gotten a new phone, I was already going a little mad because there was no audience. There was no theater. I had to direct this creative energy somewhere else,” Caswell said. “I said, ‘I'm going to learn iMovie on my phone.’ So I did a whole other project and that got me really into editing and making short films.” 

A theater company with which Caswell had worked in the past reached out to plan a cabaret of short films with the theme, “fractured fairy tales.” 

“I thought I would just draw some images and tell a story, but the phrase ‘fractured fairy tales’ kept resonating in my head,” Caswell said. “What is it about fairy tales that are so memorable? It's the imagery, not necessarily the story. It's certainly not the moral. And there's so much horrible stuff in fairy tales. But there are so many specific images that we remember and some we forget and I wanted to play around with that.” 

While most may remember the overarching morals of family-friendly Disney films based on fairy tales like Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, and Snow White, many fairy tales – like those collected by the Brothers Grimm in the 19th century – featured darker imagery like the devil cutting off a young girl’s arms or Cinderella’s evil stepmother ordering the eldest of her two daughters to cut off her toe so the glass slipper would fit.  

Under the “fractured fairy tale” theme, Caswell produced “& Gretel Hansel,” a stop-motion animated retelling of the classic fairy tale “Hansel and Gretel” for a virtual cabaret organized by the Bald Mountain Theater in Rochester, Vermont. For the Middlebury New Filmmakers Festival, Caswell produced a new work, “KinRumpelStilts,” a retelling of Rumpelstiltskin with the same stop-motion animation style. 

Caswell’s animations feature a rustic, homemade quality, each frame carefully constructed from household materials like construction paper and sticky notes.

“Because Rumpelstiltskin is about spinning straw into gold, I knew I wanted a golden color but I also wanted it to be recognizably low-fi,” Caswell said. “It’s going to be brown paper bags, manilla folders, and Post-it notes. That palette worked well and it was materials I had on hand.” 

Beyond the stop-motion animation, though, the imagery of both films is shown in a random, non-chronological order from the original fairy tales. Even the titles are jumbled to form new ones, each keeping their respective original components. Both short films were accompanied by original music, written by Julien. 

“My music writing process varies depending on the project. I gravitate a lot toward lyrical melodies and dissonance,” Julien said. “But I get really energized when I work with rhythms. Sometimes I have harmony ideas first and sometimes it’s all at once.”  

While writing music can be a lonesome experience, Julien felt driven by the collaboration. 

"Composing can be really lonely, really isolating, just because it's a solitary endeavor for the most part,” Julien said. “I really appreciate having collaborators during the creative process.”

Throughout the writing process, Julien drew inspiration from the musical philosophy of John Cage, an American composer who pioneered the concept of musical indeterminacy, the concept of allowing “things to be themselves,” leaving elements of the composing process up to chance. 

“I'd written numbers on cards for the images and shuffled them so it would be random, not influenced by my thoughts of what order might suggest certain things,” Julien said. "Chris and I were both interested in how we respond to that emotionally and how we shape a story for ourselves.” 

But finding order and harmony within the randomness was paramount for Julien.  

"Something that John Cage found was the idea that something can be really meaningful and beautiful and it doesn't require our personal manipulations,” Julien said. “Maybe there are things that don't require your decision-making in order for it to be meaningful.” 

The film was shown at the Middlebury New Filmmakers Festival along with six other short documentaries and animated films. Each film had live accompaniment from the Vermont Symphony Orchestra, which Matt Larocca, a lecturer in the College of Arts and Sciences’ program in music, conducted.