It has become fashionable in many quarters to burnish one's intellectual or aesthetic bona fides by sneering at Disney and all his works. But I think that as time passes and we see him in perspective, we can see him as one in a line of chroniclers of the ever-shifting nature of the old folk tales.
The term "Disneyification" is often thrown about on the presumption that Disney corrupted the pure folk intention of the sometimes gruesome older tales by making them sentimental and happily-ever-afterish.
But what is sometimes called "Disneyfication," what might more neutrally just be called sentimentalization, is actually a process that set in long before 1901, and of which Disney was only one avatar. Charles Perrault published a collection of folk tales in 1695, most of them already quite old by then, under the title: "Histories or Tales of Times Past, With Morals." But Perrault's collection had a still more intriguing subtitle, by which it is better known: "Tales of my Mother Goose."
Between the 1695 French-language collection and the German-language collection of the Brothers Grimm in 1812 there is some overlap. Both collections contain a Cinderella story. Disney's version entered the motion picture theatres in 1950. The distance between the first and second of those dates is almost as great as the distance between the second and third. We can think, I submit, of sentimentalization as a process underway changing this story consistently throughout the centuries involved, and we can think properly of each of these three dates as representing a different snapshot of that process.
Don't blame the photographer.
Here is the Perrault version of Cinderella.
www.Pitt.edu/~dash/Perrault06.html
Notice just a couple of points. In Perrault's version, in the third paragraph, the protagonist's first nickname is the harsher "Cinderwench," though we're told that the youngest of her stepsisters was nicer to her than the older one, and softened that to "Cinderella." Noblesse oblige? Also, Cindy chooses to sit among the cinders, when her household duties are done. She is not forced into that corner by her wicked step-mother. Indeed, the stepmother is more "haughty" than wicked.
Another point from near the end of the story: the Prince never sees her in rags. Perrault's story is, if you will, too class conscious for that. The Prince sends servants about the countryside to test out the glass slipper on maidens, he doesn't engage in such tedious work himself, and so doesn't put himself in the position of kneeling before a servant girl in order to try to get a shoe on her foot.
By the time of the Brothers Grimm, the story has changed. I don't say that they changed it, just that the story as they knew it more than a century later was different, and they recorded that fact for us. There is no use of "Cinderwench," for example. To the Grimms, she is "Ashputtle," which translates well into "Ash-maiden." Or Cinderella. On the other hand, there is no element of choice in her consignment to the cinder-clogged corners of the house. The "haughtiness" of the step-mother has turned to wickedness; the class conflict is sharper, and the disappearance of the harsher nickname confirms our sympathy for the oppressed. Also, the King's son himself gives her the wonderful slipper to try on, and then puts her on his horse and rides away with her.
Here is my point. Suppose the Grimms' version had been the same as Perrault's. Suppose in particular that the Grimms had had the servants of the Prince show up at the home of Cindy's step-mother and ask to try the shoe on all the young women of the house. Suppose then that Disney's version had changed this so the Prince himself comes by and rides off with the protagonist on a horse. Wouldn't that have been denounced as a "Disneyification" of the story by the people who like to denounce such things? It was in fact sentimentalization, but Disney is not guilty of it.
Leave Disney be. And, by the way, Happy birthday, Walt.
2 comments:
I will not leave Disney be. He helped to perpetuate the myth that lemmings commit suicide by throwing themselves over cliffs. He did so by having them "chased over cliffs when they, understandably enough, would not perform their mythic role for his cameras." I quote a book review by Richard Dawkins in TLS on March 7, 1984.
Is this more horrible because he killed inocent lemmings or because he perpetuated a myth? What if you believed that he had helped convey an important truth thereby?
For example, what if you regarded expressions such as "don't be a lemming" as a valuable rhetorical device for encouraging independence of judgment, or diversity of lifestyle, or something else good. Then the lemming/cliff incident would reflect a literal rendition of an important metaphorical insight. How many innocent lemming lives, if any, would the conveyance of that insight among humans be worth?
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