Donkeyskin

Donkeyskin (in French, "Peau d'Âne") is a popular Fairy Tale transcribed by Charles Perrault in 1697. The Brothers Grimm recorded another variant — "Allerleirauh", translated as "All Kinds Of Fur" — in 1812, and the tale type has been adapted as "Sapsorrow" in The Storyteller, Deerskin by Robin McKinley, and in 1970 adapted as a musical by Jacques Demy, among other adaptations.

A king loses his wife; on her death bed, she demands that he promise not to remarry except to a woman more beautiful than she is. The king finds it impossible to find such a woman, until he realizes that his daughter is the only one who surpasses her mother's beauty.

The king therefore plans to marry his daughter. The princess in despair begs for her Fairy Godmother's help, and the godmother advises her to declare that she will not marry unless she is brought three impossible dresses: one which is of the color of sky, one which shines like the moon, and a third like the sun. When the king succeeds in providing each of these three dresses in turn, the fairy godmother advises the princess to ask for the skin of the king's magic donkey, from the ears of which tumble gold pieces.

Despite the animal's usefulness, the king slaughters it and presents the unfortunate princess with the skin. The princess then decides to run away, and on her fairy godmother's advice clothes herself in the donkey's skin so that no one will recognize her.

She travels to a far-away kingdom, and takes a menial job at a farm, calling herself "Donkeyskin." The kingdom's prince happens to pass by Donkeyskin's hut while she is entertaining herself by dressing up in her sun-gold dress. He is very taken with her, and in an effort to ascertain her identity he requests that she bake him a cake, in which he finds the princess's ring. The prince then announces that he will marry only the girl on whose finger the ring fits, and tries it on every woman in the kingdom. When the ring fits Donkeyskin's finger, her identity is revealed and the two are married.

The Aarne-Thompson Number is type 510B, the "unnatural love" type of the "persecuted heroine". Others of this type include "Catskin", "Cap o' Rushes" and "Tattercoats", which elide the incestous aspects. Compare to Cinderella, a persecuted heroine whose nemesis is female, and so is type 510A. See also The One-Handed Girl for a different tale type with a male persecutor. Florinda is another interesting relative, which begins with the escape from an incestuous father but then shifts into a totally different tale type, 514: "The Shift of Sex".

Full text here.

The Erstwhile site made a webcomic adaptation.

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This fairytale and its variations provide examples of:

• Amulet of Dependency: Some versions have the princess with three items made of gold - a ring, thimble and spinning wheel. Each morning after the ball she hides one in the prince's soup.
• And Now You Must Marry Me: The king is a non-villainous but still painfully misguided example of this towards his own daughter.
• Arranged Marriage: In one bowdlerised version of the story, instead of wanting to marry his daughter himself, the king wants her to marry a suitor he has chosen so that she can become queen and take over the throne, as his wife's death has made him lose any interest in continuing as king himself. However, the princess doesn't want to marry the intended suitor, prompting her to seek her fairy godmother's help.
• Bowdlerise: In the Victorian era, the fact that the donkey could poop gold was changed to the coins tumble from its ears. Also, many Victorian writers portrayed the princess as the adopted daughter of the king, whereas she was his biological daughter in the Perrault version.
• Engagement Challenge: In this case, the challenge is there to be impossible so the marriage can't happen.
• Fairy Godmother: Perhaps the most famous example alongside "Cinderella".
• The Girl Who Fits This Slipper: The prince finds the princess's ring in the cake and he announces that he will marry only the girl on whose finger the ring fits.
• Happily Ever After: The princess marries the prince in the end.
• Heir Club for Men: The king and queen only had a daughter, and were content with this. But the queen fell ill and died without leaving a male heir, but not before saddling him with the additional restriction that his new wife equal her in beauty and other attributes. Which, after many failed considerations, leads him to the conclusion that his new wife should be his own daughter. Because that would be more acceptable than simply letting her inherit the throne.
• Impossibly Cool Clothes: The three dresses, the whole point of which is that they're so impossibly cool that the princess hopes her father will not be able to supply them. The golden dress really does shine like the sun; it's not possible to look directly at it with unshielded eyes. Some versions, such as "Sapsorrow," also describe one of the dresses as "sparkling with stars."
• Incest-ant Admirer: The king appears to have trouble grasping just why his daughter won't agree to marry him, and is desperate enough that he grants her every request in the hopes that she'll eventually yield.
• King Incognito: The princess clothes herself in the donkey's skin so that no one will recognize her, flees her country, travels to a far-away kingdom, and takes a menial job at a farm.
• Last Request: On her death bed, the king's wife demands that he promise not to remarry except to a woman more beautiful than she is.
• The Lost Lenore: The dead wife whose deathbed wish kicks off the plot.
• Love Before First Sight: In some versions the princess has never seen the prince before being asked to bake a cake for him. But she still puts her ring in the cake so he can find her later, ultimately marrying him.
• Love Father, Love Son: The king loves his wife. After she dies, he falls in love with her daughter.
• My God, What Have I Done?: In some versions of the tale, the king turns out to have had an offscreen Heel Realization in the wake of his daughter's disappearance, since it finally registered just what he was about to do. In those versions, he reappears at the end of the story when Donkeyskin extends an invitation to her wedding as an olive branch.
• No Antagonist:
  • Not even the king, in many versions of the story. He's forgiven at the very end, and even finally remarries a beautiful widow queen. Some adaptions choose to stress the fact that he is bound by his wife's death-bed promise.
  • Averted in an early version called Doralice by Giovanni Francesco Straparola, in which the king takes on a more antagonistic role. Deciding If I Can't Have You…, he kills his grandchildren and tries to have his daughter blamed and executed.
• Noble Fugitive: The princess has to flee her father who wants to marry her and go into service as a Scullery Maid.
• Pair the Spares:
  • In some versions, the prince's mother is a widow and she and the princess's father hit it off at the wedding.
  • In others versions he remarries the Fairy Godmother.
• Parental Incest: The king falls in love with his daughter and wants to marry her. Subverted because she resists his advances and finally marries someone else in the end. Some adaptations aim to play it down by having him being bound by the promise he made to his wife rather than actually being attracted to their daughter, or the princess being his adopted daughter.
• Person with the Clothing: The princess is nicknamed Donkeyskin, after the skin she wears.
• Pimped-Out Dress: The princess gets three of them as part of an Engagement Challenge, carries them with her when she runs away, and ends up wearing them to each ball.
• Prince Charming: The prince is a classical example. He falls in love with the princess, he lifts her out of poverty, and he marries her.
• Princess Classic: The princess is royalty by birth. She is innocent and beautiful (she is the only woman who is more beautiful than her mother). She falls in love with the prince and she marries him in the end.
• Protagonist Title: Donkeyskin is the nickname of the princess who is the protagonist of the tale.
• Rags to Royalty: Snow White Style. The heroine is a princess by birth, but she is forced into hiding to escape her father. She takes a menial job at a farm. She ends up marrying a prince.
• Riches to Rags: The princess has to take a menial job at a farm.
• Rule of Three: The three dresses. Sometimes the heroine wears them at three different balls.
• Runaway Fiancée: Donkeyskin flees so that she is not forced to marry her own father.
• Sanity Slippage: Hinted at with the king, since the grief of losing his wife warps his sense of right and wrong, causing him to take her Last Request to an unthinkable extreme.
• She Cleans Up Nicely: Each night the princess cleans her face and puts on her dresses. The usual Cinderella version is played with as the prince initially doesn't recognise her when she makes him the soup (and really you wouldn't expect a supposed noblewoman you were dancing with to be serving you food the next day) but he does by the third time.
• So Beautiful, It's a Curse: The princess is so beautiful that she is the only woman who is more beautiful than her mother. Therefore, her father the king wants to marry her.
• Solid Gold Poop: The king's donkey can poop gold.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Arguably, the late queen, since it was she who made her husband swear to only remarry once he finds a woman that surpasses her in beauty. Though how could she have known that his grief would render him desperate enough to try and marry their daughter?
• What Happened to the Mouse?: In several adaptations, the princess' father completely disappears from the plot once she manages to escape from him.
• Wicked Stepmother: Some retellings try to downplay the incest by making the king Donkeyskin's stepfather (specifically, her adopted father - the most notable example of this is found in Andrew Lang's retelling).
• World's Most Beautiful Woman: The king is looking for a woman more beautiful than his late wife. He does not find any, except her own daughter, so the princess must be the most beautiful woman.

The 1970 musical film by Jacques Demy provides examples of:

• Anachronism Stew: The costuming notably shows several deliberate examples of this.
• Big Fancy Castle: This is a given, since the protagonists are royalty, but the Prince's castle Château de Chambord is markedly more majestic and modern than Donkeyskin's home Château du Plessis-Bourré, which has a more understated and appropriately fairy-tale like quality to it.
• Colour-Coded for Your Convenience: In Donkeyskin's kingdom, the furniture, the clothing, the horses and even the servant's faces are blue. In the Prince's kingdom, all of these things are red. The Lilac Fairy, would you have guessed it, wears lilac, and is conveniently enough the force that brings the red and blue kingdoms together.
• Don't Call Me "Ma'am": The Crone scoffs and says as much to Donkeyskin when she politely calls her "madam".
• The Genie Knows Jack Nicholson: The Lilac Fairy gave the king books by poets of the future. The king reads poems by Jean Cocteau and Guillaume Apollinaire.
• Gorgeous Period Dress: Though a case where several different time periods appear to have been blended together because after all why not. The amount of glitter worn by the blue royals would also put Labyrinth to shame.
• Informed Deformity: Apparently all it takes to make Catherine Deneuve less of an absolute smokeshow is to put a little bit of soot on her face. Yes, she's wearing the pelt of a dead donkey, but even before she puts on the skin, the princess complains that the Lilac Fairy has "disfigured" her with soot.
• The Ingenue: The princess is sheltered and relatively naive, and her love for her father is enough to make her consider agreeing to his proposal if only because she thinks it'll make him happy. Thankfully, the Lilac Fairy is there to knock some sense into her.
• Literal Split Personality: When she prepares the cake, Donkeyskin gets split into two copies of herself. A copy wears the sun-gold dress and represents her as a Princess Classic. The other copy wears the donkey skin and represents her as a slattern.
• Love at First Sight: The Prince falls for Donkeyskin when he gets a glimpse of her wearing her sun-gold gown.
• Masquerade Ball: The Prince's parents throw a cat-and-bird themed masked ball in an effort to get their son out of his lovesick funk. Oddly, despite there being a similar event in some versions of the tale, it doesn't appear to add much to the plot and Donkeyskin is not in attendance.
• The Musical: Demy adapted the fairy tale into a musical film, with music by Michel Legrand.
• Playing Sick: The Prince is very clearly not ill at all but is pining something dreadful, and declares that he will not get out of bed until he can see the girl in the sun-colored dress again.
• Rhymes on a Dime: The Lilac Fairy, to the point where it almost sounds as though she's speaking in riddles.
• Rule of Symbolism: While the film makes liberal use of Anachronism Stew, there seems to be a deliberate contrast between the red and blue kingdoms to the point where it almost looks like the two are separated by both time and reality:
  • The blue castle where our story begins looks almost vaguely medieval, is noticeably overrun with vines, and the inexplicable lighting effects give it a very dream like quality. By contrast the red palace is solidly Renaissance style and look a lot more grounded and clean cut, with none of the surreal imagery so prevalent in the blue kingdom.
  • The blue kingdom being in an apparent stasis reflects the king's grief and inability to move on in the wake of his wife's passing, with his subsequent pursuit of his own daughter a clear attempt at recreating the happiness he lost. Donkeyskin's arrival in the red kingdom is punctuated with time standing still for the background peasants while she runs in slow motion, giving the impression that she may actually have travelled through time.
  • Interestingly, when the princess dons the Donkeyskin and flees her father's castle, she falls asleep in the beautiful carriage sent by the Lilac Fairy to find it has turned into an ordinary wooden cart when she wakes back up again, possibly meaning that she has left her fairy tale world behind and entered a more grounded reality. Tellingly, the Lilac Fairy disappears from the plot when Donkeyskin leaves the castle and isn't seen again until the royal wedding.
• Schizo Tech: The film is chock full of contemporary technology to complement the story. The king and the Lilac Fairy come to the wedding ceremony in an Alouette II helicopter. Sharp-eyed viewers might also have noticed in one scene that the Lilac Fairy appears to own a rotary phone, though she's never seen using it.
• Shout-Out: Donkeyskin's landlady, who merely calls herself the Crone, has an odd habit of spitting up live toads, which hints to her having once been the spoiled sister from Perrault's classic tale Les Fées (also know as "the Fairy at the Spring"). Another one is a certain Marquis de Carabas, who regretfully had to turn down an invitation to the masked ball that the Prince's mother is throwing.
• Stealth Hi/Bye: The Lilac Fairy is quite fond of appearing and disappearing without warning.
• Talking to Plants: Unusually for this trope, the plant talks back: the Prince wanders off into the forest and stops to chat with a rose, which points him to Donkeyskin's shack.
• Time Stands Still: When Donkeyskin arrives at the farm, time freezes for the villagers, but not for Donkeyskin and the Crone.
• Uncanny Family Resemblance: Donkeyskin has an eerie resemblance to her late mother, and is most likely considered more beautiful because of her golden hair. Extra points for the queen being played by the same actress in a ginger wig.

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