Large Fierce Mammal

Picture credit: Jonathan Button

Fairy Tales, as they were originally written, weren’t the saccharine offal children who don’t belong to Mrs. LFM and me, or a few notable Friends, grew up with. They were intended to convey valuable life lessons to the offspring of people who lived a lot closer to reality than most in the so called “first world” do now, and the stories routinely employed animals as representations of very real dangers and foul intentions. One you’ll recognize immediately is the Big Bad Wolf in Red Riding Hood who represented all that was evil at its ravening, grandmother killing, child devouring worst. Today’s Dark Sentiment comes to you by way of an animated short film by British film maker Jonathan Button.

The film was inspired by a very short update to Little Red Riding Hood titled The Little Girl and the Wolf, published in 1940 as part of a collection of pieces written and illustrated by James Thurber called Fables of Our Time. In fact, it’s so short that I’m going to quote it in its entirety here:

The Little Girl and the Wolf
by James Thurber

One afternoon a big wolf waited in a dark forest for a little girl to come along carrying a basket of food to her grandmother. Finally a little girl did come along and she was carrying a basket of food. “Are you carrying that basket to your grandmother?” asked the wolf. The little girl said yes, she was. So the wolf asked her where her grandmother lived and the little girl told him and he disappeared into the wood.

When the little girl opened the door of her grandmother’s house she saw that there was somebody in bed with a nightcap and nightgown on. She had approached no nearer than twenty-five feet from the bed when she saw that it was not her grandmother but the wolf, for even in a nightcap a wolf does not look any more like your grandmother than the Metro-Goldwyn lion looks like Calvin Coolidge. So the little girl took an automatic out of her basket and shot the wolf dead.

Moral: It is not so easy to fool little girls nowadays as it used to be.

Now that was back in 1940 when, as one reviewer wrote it might not be, “… quite as feministic as reflecting a time when America had just gotten through a Depression and was on the verge of war; people were disillusioned and not as naive, as the moral indicates.”

Coming forward to today, much evidence exists that little girls may be backsliding from Thurber’s day, immersed as most are today in events and conversations that are nowhere close to where they’re standing at any given moment. No need to fool them because they’ll never see it coming, and to quote Camille Paglia in her 29 September 2014 Time article, “Young women today do not understand the fragility of civilization and the constant nearness of savage nature.”

Thankfully though, there are still some of us who steadfastly refuse to raise victims, and so, on to the icing atop today’s cake.