FairyTale: A True Story (1997)

People are voting emotionally.

Did you people see the same film I saw?

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

When I watched this movie I was so tired that I slept through a part of it and didn't take in much of the other but from what I saw and from listening to others I picked up enough to comment on it. From what I heard this movie is based on some photographs taken in 1915 of some fairies. The photos could not be proved that they were faked and baffled a lot of people. What this movie has done is made the fairies real so as to create a child's movie.The plot is very thin but it is about people believing in fairies. The end comes with everybody seeing the evidence of the existence of fairies and believing in them. The thing is that the fairies play very little part in this movie and it is more focused on the children. The fairies never speak and interact with the children very rarely.This also seems to be an excuse to parade famous identities in the movie. We have Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini as major characters in the movie and even show Houdini performing some of his escapes. Doyle is said to have written a book on fairies which my friend wanted to look for. He also said that the soundtrack was relaxing. They liked it but I slept and really had little interest in this movie. These fairies were the beautiful children fairies which I do not like, when it comes to fairies I like Faeries. What is the difference? Faeries are the more adult versions and appear in Mid-summer Night's Dream and Faerie Tale. These are much more vicious and hostile, especially Titania and Oberon in Midsummer Night's Dream. Those I love, Fairy Tale I don't. Oh well, each to his own.

I LOVE this movie. I first learned of this story while studying the history of photography in college. The story is true, except... well- watch the movie. :) While by today's standards we would not be fooled by the photos, still the healing impact this news event had on society back then after the horrors of WWI and the peoples' willingness to believe it are certainly understandable and wonderful. The film is perfectly cast and perfectly acted and expertly edited. The girls are delightful. All characters are well expressed, including the parents, and the stories within the story are so very real, and touching. The is a lovely looking movie, with special effects that look convincingly real and made me wish they were. :-D Gather your loved ones around you and ENJOY this movie together!

Everyone who's deeply interested in folklore, as I dare to say I am, knows the story of the Fairies of Cottingley, it's one nearly-epic story of the two girls who inadvertently made a half of the world actually believe in magical creatures (I don't count children, for they did, they do and they will believe, and that's wondrous), and the best part of the epic is that they had never straightforwardly confessed that they've forged it just not to ruin people's glimpse of faith in magical.If that's what this movie should have been telling about then it certainly does not the job. Despite the wonderful and believable acting of Florence Hoath and Elizabeth Earl, the incoherent screenplay and direction ruin everything and only a shadow of the childhood magic remains in the dark corner pushed away by the social-drama clichés (they even managed to insert there a villain and the goddammit comic relief!). And the top-notch CGI doesn't help out. There's more magic even in ghost-story movies, such as 'Lady in White' or 'The Changeling'. Worth watching, but only once. I deeply hope that some day someone will make a movie worthy of this story's spiritual background, so you'd understand why some perfectly sane people believe in fairies, even without the photographs.One of my favorite books is the collection of narrative tales, recorded in the middle of the 20th century among the Siberian villagers, mostly in the Chita region, by V.P. Zinovyev, and the thing I really love and adore in those stories is that those people actually believe all the folklore things they're speaking about! It's grievous that there are less and less such people live in this world, of that kind who believe because of the purity of the heart, not because of fear or passion. Some call those people dark and unenlightened, some laugh at them, but the thing they actually have is the faith, whilst everyone else have only a ghost of it. That who knows cannot believe.

In Gilstead Crags, England it is said that there is an opening in the rocks known as "Fairies Hole" in which tiny creatures dance in the moonlight and can be heard miles away clanging musical tongs. When we were young, many of us loved stories about elves, goblins, fairies, and sprites in which children braved the unknown. When we got older, however, many became preoccupied with school, job, marriage, or children and never again dipped into the "deeper, darker landscapes". Of course when no one is looking, we may secretly revisit tales from our childhood such as Rip Van Winkle or films like The Wizard of Oz or Darby O'Gill and the Little People. One of the most enchanting of this genre is Charles Sturridge's delightful adventure fantasy Fairy Tale: A True Story.Fairy Tale/] is a film about nature spirits known as devas, elementals, or fairies and is based on actual events that took place in Yorkshire, England in 1917 in which two young girls claimed to have seen and photographed fairies in the woods near their home in Cottingley Beck. The ensuing debate about the authenticity of the photos sparked a national controversy that pit spiritualists against skeptics and involved such people as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, and famed magician Harry Houdini.The story begins when Frances Griffiths (Elizabeth Earl) comes to England from South Africa to live with her uncle Arthur Wright (Paul McGann), her aunt Polly (Phobe Nicholls), and their daughter Elsie (Florence Hoath). Frances' father is missing in action in the war and Elsie has just lost her eleven-year old brother Joseph from pneumonia. Apparently, Elsie and her brother shared a belief in fairies and Joseph's room is filled with drawings of the barely five inch high winged creatures and an unfinished house for the little people. Frances and Elsie borrow Uncle Arthur's camera and take a photograph of the fairies they see in the woods and the photograph eventually ends up in the hands of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Peter O'Toole) who persuades the girls to take four more shots.Sir Arthur, a Spiritualist, believes the photos are real as does Polly, a member of the Theosophist Society, and enlists photographic expert Harold Snelling to test them. Snelling concludes that the dancing figures are not made of paper or any fabric, are not painted on a photographic background, and that all the figures appear to be blurred as if the exposure had caught them moving in their dance. Doyle even involves the famous magician Harry Houdini (Harvey Keitel) who is basically a disbeliever in things supernatural. Both men visit the girls and publish the photos in a magazine called The Strand which brings hundreds of curiosity seekers and journalists to the area in which the fairies were seen. A journalist is convinced that the photographs are faked and sneaks into Joseph's bedroom to try and prove it but is met by a curious visitor.Whether you believe in fairies or not, Fairy Tale: A True Story rekindles a sense of wonder at the infinite mystery of life and the joy evident on the faces of the girls in the film's luminous ending seeps quietly into our hearts. Unfortunately, the film fails to inform us that the girls, interviewed in 1982 for an article in The Unexplained, confessed that the photos were hoaxes, cardboard cutouts pinned to the ground with a hatpin. Francis maintained, however, that one of the five pictures was real and stated in her last interview in 1986 that both she and Elsie saw the fairies and believed very strongly in them.She said that, "The first time I ever saw anything was when a willow leaf started shaking violently, even though there was no wind, I saw a small man standing on a branch, with the stem of the leaf in his hand, which he seemed to be shaking at something. He was dressed all in green." Whatever the truth may be, there is even to this day still a strong belief in fairies around the Cottingley area and, after seeing Fairy Tale: A True Story, some of us may believe in the possibility as well.