Little Red Riding Hood: an Exercise in Salutary Style

Both ‘Into the Bubbles’ and ‘Night Dreams’ were born out of spontaneity. ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, however, emerged out of an imposed theme, that of Charles Perrault’s famous fairy tale. This story, which has been illustrated so many times, leads an artist to seek a different graphic and/or narrative path, and therefore offer their own completely innovative take on it.

In this case, the initial constraint turned out to be the saving grace in the creation of a new approach. 

The idea was to find coherence, without being restricted to the traditional characteristics of the three main characters (the granddaughter, the grandmother and the wolf), in order to break the story’s traditional structure. For this, a little research into the fairy tale’s genesis was required.

I discovered three different versions:

– the one by Charles Perrault in which the wolf eats Little Red Riding Hood.

– the one by the Grimm brothers where little Red Riding Hood is saved by the venerable hunter.

– and what is referred to as the ‘traditional’ version, where Little Red Riding Hood runs away from her grandmother’s house and escapes the wolf’s voracious appetite.  

In my version, following a few illustrations inspired by the fairy tale’s traditional narrative, the wolf and Little Red Riding Hood take a completely different path. They return from a night of drinking and incur the wrath of a worried grandmother. For the first time, the wolf and Little Red Riding Hood are in cahoots, protecting each other from the irritated grandmother…  

To the ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ project