When fairy tales like Peter Pan, Sleeping Beauty, and Beauty and the Beast are mentioned, what’s the first thing that comes to mind. Disney, right? Disney Animation Studios has amazingly retold several fairy tales that have originated from The Brothers Grimm, a Hans Christian Anderson novel, or other traditional stories that have emerged from Europe . When fairy tales are brought up, our minds always think of the Disney version.
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| Disney plans to create the "definitive" version of Jack and the Beanstalk. Disney Animation's Gigantic will arrive to theaters in 2018. |
Take The Little Mermaid for instance. When that title is mentioned, people generally think of the 1989 animated film rather than the 1837 book by Hans Christian Anderson. Although there are some who’ve read the book, there more of us who have seen the movie. Why is the Disney version of this fairy tale much more renown? Perhaps it’s because in the Disney version there’s a happy ending, which is practically synonymous with our modern-day perception of a fairy tale. Sure Ariel goes through many obstacles in the movie like the book, but she gets her prince in the end of the film. In the book, it ends with Ariel committing suicide and turning into sea foam.
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| Ariel even contemplated murdering Eric in the book. |
Disney has altered many other fairy tales like The Little Mermaid. In fact, it’s a formula Walt used during his lifetime. The dwarves were goofier compared to the original story from The Brothers Grimm. In the first Cinderella version, the step-sisters cut off their toes to try to fit in the glass slipper, and have their eyes pecked out by pigeons at the end for their evil deeds toward Cinderella. In Walt’s era of films and in the following years, Disney fairy tale interpetations have been generally more jovial than the source materials, and that is probably why their fairy tale renditions are more memorable.
Interesting, but I think the explanation for the Disney versions becoming "definitive" is simpler than that. It's circulation. We've had these movies for almost a hundred years. Most of us watch movies before we know how to read books. These films have been distributed all over the world. They've become ingrained in our culture. The pre-Disney versions aren't remembered very often, simply because we don't revisit them.
ReplyDeleteIt is amazing how they took all these stories written by other people, some of them hundreds of years old, and created retellings that are now treated like the official versions of the stories.