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They pose Shrek and co., including Puss-in-Boots, and Donkey—animals, let’s keep that in mind—next to a bunch of models in these suggestive poses, which really feels like a perhaps unintentional overlap with what would come to define the Shrek internet fandom.

In these fin-de-siècle pages, Sleeping Beauty much prefers dreaming to real life; little Liette, retelling the gospel account of the Nativity, includes Bluebeard’s wife and Puss-in-Boots’s Marquis of Carabas among the adoring angels, Wise Men and shepherds; and in the collection’s title story, “Fairy Tales for the Disillusioned,” Willy — the great writer Colette’s first husband — reveals that Red Riding Hood actually incited the starving wolf to gobble up her grandmother and then turned the poor fellow into the police.

A similar magic has been wrought with the divertissement for Puss-in-Boots and the White Cat.

Mr. Ratmansky was animated in recent rehearsals, quick to jump up and demonstrate steps himself, showing how to make Puss-in-Boots and the White Cat a little friskier or Aurora a little more graceful or the Mazurka a little snappier.

Spread out on a small rug, Viktor's own pitiful wares consist of an old gas mask, tatty Soviet science fiction novels, a portrait of Puss-in-Boots and a Walt Disney Christmas Annual.