Classifying fairy tales

After talking about the Aarne and Thompson Classification System and seeing it in Tartar's book, I am not convinced that is the way to go about studying fairy tales. I feel that there are way too may categories to search through to find all the motifs of one particular fairy tale. I think it is a great idea to find motifs and compare them with other fairy tales, but I feel as if Aarne and Thompson took it too far. I'm sorry, but 40,000 standard motifs is not normal. Not every fairy tale has mice turning into horses. What about the different versions of fairy tales? Do they all count as an individual fairy tale, or can we classify them all together as essentially the same thing? Although that does get complicated when fairy tales begin to combine. However, I feel that if you take every single version of "Cinderella" for instance, you will of course get a lot of motifs that are the same. They're supposed to be the same. I just think that Aarne and Thompson took this classification system way too far.

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.