Many folktales throughout different cultures feature a heroine being given the impossible task of sorting through grains/seeds-- whether that be picking them from the ashes, from between each other, or from their rotting counterparts.
In this task, she often does as much as she can before submitting to a higher power, whether that power recognizes her virtue or she directly asks for help varies based on the culture and tale.
Featured are eight such tales, most of which can be categorized into “Snake Bride” (ATU 425) type tales or “Cinderella” (Both often ATU 510 in the folklore index-- Cinderellas are specifically ATU 510A)
The circle puts them in no particular order, as “origins” and lineages are muddied, and many of the current incarnations have been influenced by each other, though Ye Xian is the oldest known “complete” version of Cinderella.
Snake Brides:
Psyche, Eros and Psyche (Greco-Roman)
Sukkia, The Snake’s Bride (India)
Donan Sampakang Tale about Gansaļangi and Donan Sampakang (Indonesian)
Cinderellas:
Aschenputtel (German)
Tam, Tấm and Cám (Vietnam)
Unnamed Heroine The Wonderful Birch (Finish & Slavic)
Ye Xian (Chinese)
Neither (ATU 480B-- Stepmother and Stepdaughter)
Vasilisa, Vasilisa the Wise (or Beautiful) (Slavic)
Not my usual kind of work but for one of my finals I got to work with some vintage animation methods/optical toys so I decided to have a go at making my very own phenakistiscope! It’s pretty much just a disk that when spun will give the illusion of movement so I took some visual inspiration from a tarot card I made based on A Midsummer Night’s Dream! I would love to make a whole series of these eventually it was actually a really fun technique to work with! ✨💖🌙
And ill share the still image and some of the individual elements if anyone is interested eventually, this has some real goofy in-betweens (also well see how the quality on this is cause its been giving me and impossible time)
The Fox Fairy/Spirit has a lot of variations throughout East Asia. I chose to base mine off the Huli Jing, and Tang dynasty dress. The shapeshifting, predominately female nine tailed fox also takes the form of a Kistune in Japan and Kumiho in Korea.
One of my favourite interpretations of this being is Good Hunting, the short story by Ken Liu (though not the Love, Death, and Robots inspired short animation! :( )
Original art by me! More phenakistoscopes on my page.