Who’s Afraid of the Deep Dark Woods: Challenging traditional fictional representations of woods and the wild

Fairy tales have long positioned the woods and the wild as a place where beasts and strange creatures lurk, where strange happenings and the unknown abound. A scene of unimagined horror. And as the centuries have passed, humans have increasingly dislocated and disassociated from the forest, evolving from, as Appleton suggests, ‘forest-dwellers to ‘apartment-house-dwellers’ (1996: 29). Enduring tales like ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ revolve around human-wildlife encounters in the woods where the wolf is anthropomorphised and portrayed as a bad man in animal clothing. However, it can also be interpreted as a story of multispecies entanglement. In examining how modern adaptations of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ use various visual strategies to foreground different species’ voices and worldviews embedded in the tale, fairy-tale enchantment can serve as a means of critical anthropomorphism, inviting both children and adults to imagine the needs, pleasures and pains of more-than-human species without erasing their differences, and to reconfigure human-more-than-human relations in the real world.