Where Are All the Fairy Tales?

When we opened submissions for the next edition of PLAYLIST International Film Festival, I expected science fiction.

A lot of science fiction.

And that is exactly what arrived.

The future. Dystopias. Robots. Aliens. Cyberpunk. Destroyed worlds, beautiful worlds, strange worlds. Alongside them came experiments, music videos and films that sometimes do not even know which genre they belong to.

Which, by the way, is exactly the kind of filmmaking I like.

But then I look at one particular category and it is strangely quiet.

Fairy tales.

And I keep asking myself: where are all the fairy tales?

Everybody wants to make the future

Artificial intelligence is almost the perfect tool for science fiction. With a few prompts you can build enormous cities, alien planets, robots, spaceships or the end of civilisation.

I understand it. I make sci-fi too.

But AI is incredibly good at something else as well:

imagination.

A forest that has never existed. A strange witch. A city built on the back of a gigantic animal. A talking snail. A dragon afraid of humans. A kingdom hidden inside a teapot.

A fairy tale does not have to mean a princess, a prince and three impossible tasks.

It can be dark.
It can be absurd.
It can be surreal.
It can be made for children or adults.
It can even be completely ridiculous.

It only really needs one thing:

imagination.

A fairy tale was there at the beginning of Playlist

When I organised the first edition of Playlist, one of the films that mattered to me personally was my own fairy tale, Bubola and the Space Journey.

It started in a slightly unusual way. Originally, these were bedtime stories I invented for my daughter. Gradually they became their own universe, with characters, planets and finally a film.

Bubola is not a traditional princess story. She is a little girl travelling through a fairy-tale Solar System and encountering things that probably would not appear in any serious astronomer’s map of space.

And that is exactly what I like about fairy tales.

You do not always have to explain why something exists.

It simply does.

At the first edition of Playlist, Bubola received one of the strongest reactions from the audience and became something of an unofficial winner of the evening.

Maybe it can inspire you. Not visually. Not as a story to copy. But through one simple principle:

invent your own world and allow it to be strange.

So, AI filmmakers: make a fairy tale

There is a reason why Best Animated Fairy Tale is one of the categories at Playlist.

I do not want the entire world of AI filmmaking to become cyberpunk, horror and the destruction of humanity.

I would also like a little magic.

I want to see something that does not look like Blade Runner, Terminator or yet another apocalypse.

Invent a forest.
Invent a creature.
Invent your own mythology.
Or make a fairy tale about something completely ordinary.

And if you already have such a film, send it to us.

Submissions for PLAYLIST International Film Festival are open through FilmFreeway.

We already have plenty of sci-fi.

Now we need a fairy tale.