I had never read or heard of the version of the Three Little Pigs by Roald Dahl before reading it for this class. Since I had never read it, I was really engaged throughout the short tale. There are many different versions of the Three Little Pigs, and in the versions that I read in the past the pigs all lived. So, this was a different take on the tale that I already knew. Personally, I looked at the three pigs with sympathy. They were trying to build their, two of them were eaten by the big bad wolf and the last pig was killed by Little Red Riding Hood houses with not much explanation. It was a shock at first to see her show up in this tale, I laughed when the pig called her up to save him. It was really shocking that she pulled a “pistol from her knickers” and then killed the wolf and the pig. In her own tale, she doesn’t have much agency at all, but in this story, she has more agency than the pigs, which I think is interesting for Dahl to do. It’s a story about three pigs, but they really don’t have much agency at all.

One of my favorite authors in my youth was Roald Dahl. The wit, humor, and emotional potency of literature like The BFG and Matilda left a strong impression. To this day I think of his description of the meat pie from Danny, the Champion of the World. With all that in mind, it is needless to say that I was excited to read Roald Dahl’s adaptation of Little Red Riding Hood when it was assigned for this class. Red in this adaptation is a completely different character than in most other variations of the story, being beyond capable. Her pulling out a gun and shooting the wolf was a magnificent ending that only Dahl could’ve done justice.

The Disney adaptation of The Little Mermaid lacks one thing… women. This is not a good thing (when would it be?). Ariel, the film’s semi-protagonist and the main character lives “under the sea” with her other sisters and father. She hopes to fulfill her dreams of marrying a prince on shore, but in doing so must strip herself of her voice. There could be an entire two-thousand-word blog post about the symbolism of the threshold of the water and the land being a woman’s subconscious mind and the threshold of being a good and “tame” wife, but this blog post is 200 words maximum, and I will save that for an essay (it is not a bad point). I think that the isolation of Ariel as the only woman (with screen time, if this makes sense) makes viewers feel a sense of sadness towards her plight. We feel prepared to be in her corner in her fight to achieve her goals, whatever they might be. I believe that the reason we feel so strongly for her is that she is isolated in a world of men, even if they are only her goofy sidekicks.