That being said, I like what Vladimir Propp says. He narrows it down to 31 functions. I like the idea of narrowing it down to actions, but sometimes I feel as if there are some important motifs that are not necessarily actions. For example: the evil stepmother. She is in quite a few types of fairy tales, but no specific action is necessarily a motif for all of them. Yet, I like his 31 functions. As I read them, they sounded very familiar and I was able to think of a few fairy tales that we have already read that would apply to each function. Quite a few functions seem redundant, but for the most part they all work for me. I can see why it was narrowed down even further, though. Yet, I do think this is a good start to examining fairy tales. Like I mentioned in my previous blog, I believe that it is best if we compare fairy tales and find similarities and differences to understand them better. This is a good step toward comparing fairy tales.
On another note, one thing that I wonder is: since Propp looked more at the literary structure of these fairy tales, what would he think about the movies about them nowadays? I wonder how he would analyze the way a fairy tale film is made: what shots were used, what was shown and what was not, whose perspective we watch certain actions from, etc. I'm just curious.
I agree with you completely about Aarne and Thompson taking the fairy tales too far. I wrote similarly about this. If does not seem that having 40,000 motifs would narrow anything down. I agree also with your preference for Propp. I think that the simplified version of his functions is even more helpful and easier to keep in mind with reading the fairy tales.
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