407 - Heather Pollington - Rapunzel and the Evil Witch
The Symbolic World
Jonathan Pageau
4.8 • 933 Ratings
🗓️ 29 August 2025
⏱️ 62 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Heather Pollington and I are thrilled to share our brand-new storybook with you, 'Rapunzel and the Evil Witch'! Following 'Snow White and the Widow Queen' and 'Jack and the Fallen Giants', this third fairy tale feels like the culmination of our work so far. With this book you’ll begin to notice the different threads connecting across the series. Heather has created stunning illustrations that weave medieval and Byzantine influences into a style perfectly suited to the fairy tale world.
In this episode, we walk through the process behind the book, the symbolism of Rapunzel’s story, and what's unique about our version of the story. We show many of the book's illustrations. I can't wait to hear what you think!
YouTube version: https://youtu.be/aEWgHif0NS8
Timestamps:
00:00 - Announcement and opening
01:36 - Intro music
02:02 - Introduction
03:41 - Heather's journey to Rapunzel
06:40 - Critiques of fairy tales
07:46 - Tangled
10:12 - Exploring Rapunzel imagery
10:24 - Early sketches
12:14 - Iconography and Palekh fairy tale tradition
15:54 - Frontispiece
17:51 - Green flowers
20:12 - The witch's garden
22:59 - The dark exchange
25:48 - The circle of protection
28:55 - A sense of freedom
30:43 - The moon tower
35:04 - The haunting melody
37:40 - Love in the tower
41:47 - The dream
43:27 - Flax into gold
46:02 - Rain from heaven
53:43 - The wooden throne
56:28 - Order
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Rapunzel and the Evil Witch is officially available right now. It is not in pre-sale. It is not a pre-order. It is in the warehouse. You can just go to rapunzelbook.com and you get the book. We have a new distribution system, which has just been amazing. People are getting their books in a few days. All the pre-sale and pre-order books have already been shipped, people already have them. |
| 0:21.4 | And so this is the third book where a lot of the symbolism is going to come out. |
| 0:24.8 | It's our celebratory tone, the third book in the series of The Tales for Once and Ever, |
| 0:30.1 | illustrated by Heather Paulington. |
| 0:32.4 | This is where the symbolism is going to start to show, where the characters are going to |
| 0:35.9 | repeat. |
| 0:37.0 | So I'm particularly excited about this book and the continuation of this series. |
| 0:42.7 | And so go to Rapunzelbook.com now and you can just get the book, get it in a few days. |
| 0:48.2 | So thanks, everyone. |
| 0:49.8 | Hello, everyone. I'm here with Heather Pollington. |
| 0:52.9 | As many of you know, we are getting ready to put out |
| 0:56.2 | our third fairy tale book. |
| 0:58.5 | We've already sent it to some people in a kind of quick pre-sale. |
| 1:02.8 | And the reactions have been really great. |
| 1:04.9 | We're quite excited because in some ways, it |
| 1:07.3 | feels like this book has been the culmination of the last two in terms of storytelling, but also in terms of the art, Heather is the one who's illustrated it. |
| 1:16.9 | And it feels like Snow White was like practice for this one. It's hard to believe because Snow White was so beautiful, but people are just being amazed. |
| 1:25.3 | I've been just amazed at what has been going on in the art of this book. So we're quite excited to present it to you. And so Heather, thanks for coming to talk about it with me. |
| 1:35.2 | It's good to be here. |
| 2:06.8 | This is Jonathan Peugeot. Welcome to the symbolic world. Yeah, I'm really excited it's coming out because I think I worked on it for about a year on and off. So it's been a long time coming. So it's good to see now that we're here and we can share |
| 2:12.8 | it with everybody. Yeah. And I mean, one of the things we're trying to do and people I think can see in the images is we're really trying to be deliberate about what we're doing about the images. And so that's why obviously it means that we can't just put these out every month or something. We have to put out one or two a month. But it's because we also want them to be absolutely excellent in every way. |
| 2:36.3 | And so we spent a lot of time talking about how to, let's say, one of my dreams from the very |
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