Post by Erin Martin from ,,The Nasty Stepmother''

Breaking the Disney Spell

In his essay "Breaking the Disney Spell," Jack Zipes articulates a feeling likely experienced in part by anyone who has grown up watching Disney films and then grown up to give more thought to what they were all about, exactly. However, it was hard to read this essay and definitively take one side or another--and perhaps ill-advised to do so. Jack Zipes in a renowned scholar of literary fairy tales, whose work is informed by extensive research into the storytelling tradition behind the stories we have all heard as children. Walt Disney built a media empire on a very specific interpretation of these well-known stories. Both have a vested interest in maintaining one extreme or the other, but as a reader, it's hard not to consider your own history and relationship to these stories that are uniquely personal.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that while I agree with Zipes on a lot of the points he makes, at other times I wanted to tell the man to take several deep breaths and think about dolphins or something equally calming.

It isn't that I don't agree with Zipes that the Disney version of Snow White takes a number of artistic liberties with the original tale--but so did the 1916 version that we watched, and Zipes does not seem to have a problem with that, perhaps because that version was not part of a cultural phenomenon on the level that Disney's films were. I do agree that the Disney version of Snow White is vastly different, in tone especially, from the Grimm original. And I also agree that Snow White, and a number of Disney's other fairy tale films, perpetuate an idea of a patriarchal, male-driven structure (I really wish this most recent Disney Princess craze would end and soon, for all our sakes.) I find all of those points to be relevant, it's just that I don't think one interpretation of a story with such a rich history behind it is going to ruin or change that story forever. The very nature of fairy tales is to be passed from person to person and reinterpreted, so how, in essence, is a movie any different from that idea?

That being said, it doesn't mean that I particularly like Disney's interpretation of the Snow White character. I actually caught myself rooting for the Evil Queen a couple of times, because Snow White was just so annoying.

Posted by Erin at 8:54 PM