Wolf, Man, and Wolf-Man in Adaptations of “Little Red Riding Hood”

“Little Red Riding Hood” is one of the most renowned and popular children’s stories, possibly due to the simplicity of the narrative and the clarity and didacticity of its main moral message. At the same time, it is exactly the absoluteness of certain narrative elements that might have allowed contemporary and modern revisions to question, play around with, and even straightforwardly swap the main characters’ roles, turning the well-known tale topsy-turvy. In the present paper, I identify and inspect the ambivalence of the villain of the story, the wolf, by overviewing his physical appearance as well as his shifting personality in the tale’s first literary versions ‒ published by Charles Perrault (1697) and the Grimm Brothers (1812) ‒ and its first animated film adaptations ‒ Little Red Riding Hood by Walt Disney (1922), Dizzy Red Riding Hood by Max Fleischer (1931) and the van Beuren Corporation’s Red Riding Hood (1931).

Keywords: wolf, werewolf, humanimal, fairy tale studies, animal symbolism