Cinderella struts her stuff in Tex Avery's "Swing Shift Cinderella."

 
"Fairy tales, unlike any other form of literature, direct the child to discover his identity and calling, and they also suggest what experiences are needed to develop his character further."

--Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment1

"Children know something they can't tell: they like Red Riding Hood and the wolf in bed!"

--Djuna Barnes, Nightwood2

The origins of the fairy tale have been traced as far back as Egypt in the thirteenth century before Christ³, but modern readers know the genre from Charles Perrault's printed adaptations of popular folktales like "Cinderella" and "Little Red Riding Hood" in 1697 (Mother Goose Tales) and the Grimm Brothers' somewhat sanitized updates in the early 1800s. A few decades later, Hans Christian Andersen brought new readers to the genre by writing new stories. With the advent of movies in the 20th century, fairy tales, which had never really vanished from the literary landscape, resurfaced as an important cultural form in feature films by Disney, but these were less a rethinking of the genre than an elaborate visual recapitulation, in plush and suffocating detail, of Perrault and Grimm. It was in the Hollywood cartoon short, and especially the work of Tex Avery at Warner Bros. and MGM, that a truly modern version of the fairy tale emerged.
 

Not everyone in Hollywood was so enamored of order or happy endings or the sentimental school of mindless, grinning "funny little animals." Perhaps the least enamored was Tex Avery, who during his stint at Warner Bros. and MGM made seven formal, recognizable fairy tales and one blackout film ("A Gander at Mother Goose") between 1937 ("Little Red Walking Hood") and 1949 ("Little Rural Riding Hood"). These cartoons represent an assault on the Bettelheim school that sees fairy tales as the source of moral instruction for youth, and, closer to home, on the Disney aesthetic. Avery's versions of these archetypal stories, made to satisfy both children and adults, attempt to reverse Bettelheim by "bringing chaos out of order." For young audiences, Avery preserves the trappings of the genre -- talking animals, supernatural events -- and adds the cinematic touch of physical law constantly challenged. For adults, he litters his work with sexual innuendo and distancing devices that replace the sense of reassuring archetypes with a modernist construct that merges the story with its audience, puts adult preoccupations (e.g., sex) in place of children's, and imagines characters not as clueless tabula rasas awaiting moral enlightenment but as sophisticated, willful creatures with a bottomless bag of tricks. Avery's fairy tales jettison the whole idea of morality, along with other troublesome concepts like logic, sense, and sexual repression. He brings the "big bad wolves" and "red riding hoods" out of the sanctity of the linear narrative and into the service of the gag, creating in the process a unique world of self-conscious "cartoon actors" who know they're in a cartoon and freely comment on their status as fictional creations, undercutting the story at every turn. Part of this approach was an outgrowth of the collaboration of Avery with fellow renegades Chuck Jones, Bob Clampett, and other denizens of Warner Bros.' "Termite Terrace," but Avery's application of modernist elements in an ancient cultural form is the most complex and extreme of the lot.