Big Fish is notable for its integration of classic fairy tale tropes within a distinctly American story. Edward's tales borrow many elements from Grimms' fairy tales, but then the action of the film takes place in the mid-century South. Giants, witches, and werewolves roam free in Alabama, and Edward takes many mundane elements of Southern coming of age and transforms them into magical fantasies that are far more ancient than the states in which they take place.
Indeed, the United States has its own tradition of storytelling that often veers into the fantastical and supernatural. American folklore runs the gamut from monsters and supernatural creatures to the mythologizing of actual historical figures. Writers like Washington Irving wrote distinctly American tales. Figures like Paul Bunyan, a fabled giant lumberjack, were pure symbolic fiction, while Johnny Appleseed was based on a real man who brought apple trees to a number of American states. American folklore, in contrast to medieval European fairy tales, was often meant to illustrate something about particularly American identities and ideals, representing something about the notion of American freedom and of American society and economy. Additionally, native populations in the Americas have a far older tradition of fairy tale and storytelling, and black Americans have their own cultural fables, but these stories are often overlooked in favor of white American narratives.
A great deal of the differences between American folklore and European and other countries' traditions of storytelling has to do with the relative age of the countries. Compared to the rest of the world, the American nation, as it was defined by colonists is quite young. Thus, there are relatively fewer stories that can be attributed to American folklore than in other nations. In his article about the distinctiveness of American folklore, Simon J. Bronner writes, "In the United States, however, emerging scholars often searched for ideas in the vernacular experience of the everyman and woman on the move. They brought various traditions with them from the Old World and hybridized them with other sources to create a distinctive New World mix." In many ways, this is what Big Fish seeks to do, integrating elements of other cultural mythologies into an American tall tale.
