#Fairytales Childhood Cinderella CriticalLiteracy

[elanaespagblog-blog]

Walt Disney’s Civilizing Mission: From Revolution to Restoration

When we look at childhood fairy tales, we first focus on the magic - the happy endings… But are these tales a realistic depiction of what real life looks like? Do happy endings exist? Or is it just an unrealistic, unachievable picture that has been painted at a young age, setting unrealistic standards?

In Jack Zipes’ book, Fairy Tales of Subversion, Zipes (2007) argues that Walt Disney has created this fairy tale world that tells the perfect love story, where the beautiful and noble runs off and live happily ever after, but Zipes does not see this as a positive thing. In fact, he has quite a few issues with Disney’s approach to his work.

The first issue Zipes points out, is that Disney took a lot of the older fairytales, many of them written by The Brothers Grimm, and robbed them from their originality, ultimately leaving the reader/viewer with a tale that that reinforces the patriarchal symbolical order based on rigid notions of sexuality and gender. (Zipes, 2007: 194)

The second thing he points out is that although Walt Disney was a masterful coordinator, who could pull on the strengths of others to bring his tales to life through amazing illustration, animation and artistry, he always took the credit for all the work. This can also be seen in the way he depicts the male leads in his films. They always show up once the work has been done, and whisks the princess off to the castle where they live happily ever after.

Zipes (2007:196) also points out that the male leads in Disney’s fairytales are mostly timid, pathetic, and is in no way a match against the villains in the tales, such as the witches for example, who are often played by females.

In Zipes’ opinion, Disney’s pictures deprive the audience now of visualising their own characters, roles, and desires. Instead of celebrating the characters for their differences through the lens of the child in us, he began insisting on tam-ing if not instrumentalising the imagination to serve the forces of law and order. (Zipes, 2007: 200)

Let’s look at Snow White for example. In the original tale, the evil queen appears only once, where she hands Snow White the poisonous apple. In Disney’s version, right from the beginning, the queen is jealous of Snow White’s beauty, leading to her wanting to kill Snow White. Not only does he introduce the theme jealousy, but he also pits women against each other, enforcing this idea that you should always be prettier than someone else (mirror mirror on the wall).

It is only in more recent years where the animation industry were able to step up and do something to flip the narrative. Look at Shrek (2001) by Dreamworks for example. The two Shrek films make obvious reference to the Disney Corporation and ideological world to critique and question it. (Zipes 2007: 211) It is enlightening that the ogre and the princess fall in love, and live happily ever after in their “uglier” states.

I believe that we need more films like Shrek, celebrating the outcasts for who and what they are, where we can see them as beautiful instead of different.

Through Disney’s attempt to “cleanse the world”, we have lost so much of what makes it real, special and unique, leaving young children with unachievable standards of what life should be.

Morel of the story - we need more ogres!

References:

Zipes, Jack. (2007) Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion, Taylor & Francis Group. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/herts/detail.action?docID=1024460.