(2) The prince appears at the very beginning of the film on a white horse and sings a song of love and devotion to Snow White. He plays a negligible role in the Grimms’ version.
(3) The queen is not only jealous that Snow White is more beautiful than she is, but she also sees the prince singing to Snow White and is envious because her stepdaughter has such a handsome suitor.
(4) Though the forest and the animals do not speak, they are anthropomorphized. In particular the animals befriend Snow White and become her protectors.
(5) The dwarfs are hardworking and rich miners. They all have names—Doc, Sleepy, Bashful, Happy, Sneezy, Grumpy, Dopey—representative of certain human characteristics and are fleshed out so that they become the star attractions of the film. Their actions are what counts in defeating evil. In the Grimms’ tale, the dwarfs are anonymous and play a humble role.
(6) The queen only comes one time instead of three as in the Grimms’ version, and she is killed while trying to destroy the dwarfs by rolling a huge stone down a mountain to crush them. The punishment in the Grimms’ tale is more horrifying because she must dance in redhot iron shoes at Snow White’s wedding.
(7) Snow White does not return to life when a dwarf stumbles while carrying the glass coffin as in the Grimms’ tale. She returns to life when the prince, who has searched far and wide for her, arrives and bestows a kiss on her lips. His kiss of love is the only antidote to the queen’s poison.
At first glance, it would seem that the changes that Disney made were not momentous. If we recall Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s stimulating analysis in their book, The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), the film follows the classic “sexist” narrative about the framing of women’s lives through a male discourse. Such male framing drives women to frustration and some women to the point of madness. It also pits women against women in competition for male approval (the mirror) of their beauty that is short-lived. No matter what they may do, women cannot chart their own lives without male manipulation and intervention, and in the Disney film, the prince plays even more of a framing role since he is introduced at the beginning while Snow White is singing, “I’m Wishing for the One I Love To Find Me Today.” He will also appear at the end as the fulfillment of her dreams.
There is no doubt that Disney retained key ideological features of the Grimms’ fairy tale that reinforce nineteenth-century patriarchal notions that Disney shared with the Grimms. In some way, they can even be considered his ancestor, for he preserves and carries on many of their benevolent attitudes toward women. For instance, in the Grimms’ tale, when Snow White arrives at the cabin, she pleads with the dwarfs to allow her to remain and promises that she will wash the dishes, mend their clothes, and clean the house. In Disney’s film, she arrives and notices that the house is dirty. So, she convinces the animals to help her make the cottage tidy so that the dwarfs will perhaps let her stay there. Of course, the house for the Grimms and Disney was the place where good girls remained, and one shared aspect of the fairy tale and the film is about the domestication of women.
However, Disney went much further than the Grimms to make his film more memorable than the tale, for he does not celebrate the domestication of women so much as the triumph of the banished and the underdogs. That is, he celebrates his destiny, and insofar as he had shared marginal status with many Americans, he also celebrates an American myth of Horatio Alger: it is a male myth about perseverance, hard work, dedication, loyalty, and justice.
It may seem strange to argue that Disney perpetuated a male myth through his fairy-tale films when, with the exception of Pinocchio (1940), they all featured young women as “heroines”: Sleeping Beauty (1959), Cinderella (1950), and The Little Mermaid (1989). However, despite their beauty and charm, these figures are pale and pathetic compared to the more active and demonic characters in the film. The witches are not only agents of evil but represent erotic and subversive forces that are more appealing both for the artists who drew them and the audiences.14 The young women are helpless ornaments in need of protection, and when it comes to the action of the film, they are omitted. In Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the film does not really become lively until the dwarfs enter the narrative. They are the mysterious characters who inhabit a cottage, and it is through their hard work and solidarity that they are able to maintain a world of justice and restore harmony to the world. The dwarfs can be interpreted as the humble American workers, who pull together during a depression. They keep their spirits up by singing a song “Hi ho, it’s home from work we go,” or “Hi ho, it’s off to work we go,” and their determination is the determination of every worker, who will succeed just as long as he does his share while women stay at home and keep the house clean. Of course, it is also possible to see the workers as Disney’s own employees, on whom he depended for the glorious outcome of his films. In this regard, the prince can be interpreted as Disney, who directed the love story from the beginning. If we recall, it is the prince who frames the narrative. He announces his great love at the beginning of the film, and Snow White cannot be fulfilled until he arrives to kiss her. During the major action of the film, he, like Disney, is lurking in the background and waiting for the proper time to make himself known. When he does arrive, he takes all the credit as champion of the disenfranchised, and he takes Snow White to his castle while the dwarfs are left as keepers of the forest.
But what has the prince actually done to deserve all the credit? What did Disney actually do to have his name flash on top of the title as “Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” in big letters and later credit his coworkers in small letters? As we know, Disney never liked to give credit to the animators who worked with him, and they had to fight for acknowledgment.15 Disney always made it clear that he was the boss and owned total rights to his products. He had struggled for his independence against his greedy and unjust father and against fierce and ruthless competitors in the film industry. As producer of the fairy-tale films and major owner of the Disney studios, he wanted to figure in the films and sought, as Crafton has noted, to create a more indelible means of self-figuration. In Snow White, he accomplished this by stamping his signature as owner on the title frame of the film and then by having himself embodied in the figure of the prince. It is the prince Disney who made inanimate figures come to life through his animated films, and it is the prince who is to be glorified in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs when he resuscitates Snow White with a magic kiss. Afterward he holds Snow White in his arms, and in the final frame, he leads her off on a white horse to his golden castle on a hill. His golden castle—every woman’s dream—supersedes the dark, sinister castle of the queen. The prince becomes Snow White’s reward, and his power and wealth are glorified in the end.
There are obviously mixed messages or multiple messages in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, but the overriding sign, in my estimation, is the signature of Disney’s self-glorification in the name of justice. Disney wants the world cleaned up, and the pastel colors with their sharply drawn ink lines create images of cleanliness, just as each sequence reflects a clearly conceived and preordained destiny for all the characters in the film. For Disney, the Grimms’ tale is not a vehicle to explore the deeper implications of the narrative and its history.16 Rather, it is a vehicle to display what he can do as an animator with the latest technological and artistic developments in the industry. The story is secondary, and if there is a major change in the plot, it centers on the power of the prince, the only one who can save Snow White, and he becomes the focal point by the end of the story.
In Disney’s early work with fairy tales in Kansas City, he had a wry and irreverent attitude toward the classical narratives. There was a strong suggestion, given the manner in which he and Iwerks rewrote and filmed the tales, that they were “revolutionaries,” the new boys on the block, who were about to introduce innovative methods of animation into the film industry and speak for the outcasts. However, in 1934, Disney was already the kingpin of animation, and h
e used all that he had learned to reinforce his power and command of fairy-tale animation. The manner in which he copied the musical plays and films of his time, and his close adaptation of fairy tales with patriarchal codes, indicate that all the technical experiments would not be used to foster social change in America but to keep power in the hands of individuals like himself, who felt empowered to design and create new worlds. As Richard Schickel has perceptively remarked, Disney
could make something his own, all right, but that process nearly always robbed the work at hand of its uniqueness, of its soul, if you will. In its place he put jokes and songs and fright effects, but he always seemed to diminish what he touched. He came always as a conqueror, never as a servant. It is a trait, as many have observed, that many Americans share when they venture into foreign lands hoping to do good but equipped only with knowhow instead of sympathy and respect for alien traditions.17
Disney always wanted to do something new and unique just as long as he had absolute control. He also knew that novelty would depend on the collective skills of his employees, whom he had to keep happy or indebted to him in some way. Therefore, from 1934 onward, about the time that he conceived his first feature-length fairy-tale film, Disney became the orchestrator of a corporate network that changed the function of the fairy-tale genre in America. The power of Disney’s fairy-tale films does not reside in the uniqueness or novelty of the productions, but in Disney’s great talent for holding antiquated views of society still through animation and his use of the latest technological developments in cinema to his advantage. His adaptation of the literary fairy tale for the screen led to the following changes in the institution of the genre:
(1) Technique takes precedence over the story, and the story is used to celebrate the technician and his means.
(2) The carefully arranged images narrate through seduction and imposition of the animator’s hand and the camera.
(3) The images and sequences engender a sense of wholeness, seamless totality, and harmony that is orchestrated by a savior/technician on and off the screen.
(4) Though the characters are fleshed out to become more realistic, they are also one-dimensional and are to serve functions in the film. There is no character development because the characters are stereotypes, arranged according to a credo of domestication of the imagination.
(5) The domestication is related to colonization insofar as the ideas and types are portrayed as models of behavior to be emulated. Exported through the screen as models, the “American” fairy tale colonizes other national audiences. What is good for Disney is good for the world, and what is good in a Disney fairy tale is good in the rest of the world.
(6) The thematic emphasis on cleanliness, control, and organized industry reinforces the technics of the film itself: the clean frames with attention paid to every detail; the precise drawing and manipulation of the characters as real people; the careful plotting of the events that focus on salvation through the male hero.
(7) Private reading pleasure is replaced by pleasurable viewing in an impersonal cinema. Here one is brought together with other viewers not for the development of community but to be diverted in the French sense of divertissement and American sense of diversion.
(8) The diversion of the Disney fairy tale is geared toward nonreflective viewing. Everything is on the surface, one-dimensional, and we are to delight in one-dimensional portrayal and thinking, for it is adorable, easy, and comforting in its simplicity.
Once Disney realized how successful he was with his formula for feature-length fairy tales, he never abandoned it, and in fact, if one regards the two most recent Disney Studio productions of Beauty and the Beast (1991) and Aladdin (1992), Disney’s contemporary animators have continued in his footsteps. There is nothing but the “eternal return of the same” in Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin that makes for enjoyable viewing and delight in techniques of these films as commodities, but nothing new in the exploration of narration, animation, and signification.
There is something sad in the manner in which Disney “violated” the literary genre of the fairy tale and packaged his versions in his name through the merchandising of books, toys, clothing, and records. Instead of using technology to enhance the communal aspects of narrative and bring about major changes in viewing stories to stir and animate viewers, he employed animators and technology to stop thinking about change, to return to his films, and to long nostalgically for neatly ordered patriarchal realms. Fortunately, the animation of the literary fairy tale did not stop with Disney, but that is another tale to tell, a tale about breaking Disney’s magic spell.
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† Jack Zipes, “Breaking the Disney Spell,” From Mouse to Mermaid: The Politics of Film, Gender, and Culture, ed. Elizabeth Bell, Lynda Haas, and Laura Sells (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995), pp. 21–42. © 1995 by Indiana University Press. Reprinted with permission of Indiana University Press.
1. See Straparola’s Le piacevoli notti (1550–53), translated as The Facetious Nights or The Delectable Nights, and Basile’s Lo Cunto de li Cunti (The Story of Stories, 1634–36), better known as The Pentamerone. The reason that the Italians did not “institutionalize” the genre is that the literary culture in Italy was not prepared to introduce the tales as part of the civilizing process, nor were there groups of writers who made the fairy-tale genre part of their discourse.
2. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, eds., The Violence of Representation: Literature and the History of Violence (New York: Routledge, 1989), 24.
3. Cf. Die domestizierte Phantasie: Studien zur Kinderliteratur, Kinderlektüre und Literaturpädagogik des 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhunderts (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1987).
4. This list would include the Grimms, Wilhelm Hauff, Ludwig Bechstein, Hans Christian Andersen, and Madame De Ségur. In addition, numerous collections of expurgated folk tales from different countries became popular in primers by the end of the nineteenth century. Here one would have to mention the series of color fairy books edited by Andrew Lang in Great Britain.
5. Lewis Jacobs, “George Méliès: Scenes,” in The Emergence of Film Art: The Evolution and Development of the Motion Picture as an Art, from 1900 to the Present, 2d ed., ed. Lewis Jacobs (New York: Norton, 1979).
6. Jacobs, “George Méliès,” 13.
7. Cf. Russell Merrit and J. B. Kaufman, Walt in Wonderland: The Silent Films of Walt Disney, for the most complete coverage of Disney’s early development.
8. Donald Crafton, Before Mickey: The Animated Film 1898–1928 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982), 11.
9. I am purposely using the word designer instead of animator because Disney was always designing things, made designs, and had designs. A designer is someone who indicates with a distinctive mark, and Disney put his mark on everything in his studios. A designing person is often a crafty person who manages to put his schemes into effect by hook or by crook. Once Disney stopped animating, he became a designer.
10. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1968), 223.
11. The gaining of sexual pleasure by looking at erotic images [editor’s note].
12. Leonard Mosley, Disney’s World (New York: Stein and Day, 1985), 85–140.
13. Bob Thomas, Disney’s Art of Animation: From Mickey Mouse to Beauty and the Beast (New York: Hyperion, 1991), 49.
14. Solomon cites the famous quotation by Woody Allen in Annie Hall: “You know, even as a kid I always went for the wrong women. When my mother took me to see ‘Snow White,’ everyone fell in love with Snow White; I immediately fell for the Wicked Queen” [Charles Solomon, “Bad Girls Finish First in Memory of Disney Fans,” Milwaukee Journal 17 August 1980, 28].
15. Bill Peet, for example, an “in-betweener” in the early Disney studio, worked for a year and a half on Pinocchio (1940). Peet relates that, after watc
hing the film in his neighborhood theatre, “I was dumbfounded when the long list of screen credits didn’t include my name” (Bill Peet: An Autobiography [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989], 108).
16. Karen Merritt makes the interesting point that “Disney’s Snow White is an adaptation of a 1912 children’s play (Disney saw it as a silent movie during his adolescence) still much performed today, written by a male Broadway producer under a female pseudonym; this play was an adaptation of a play for immigrant children from the tenements of lower East Side New York; and that play, in turn, was a translation and adaptation of a German play for children by a prolific writer of children’s comedies and fairy-tale drama. Behind these plays was the popularity of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century fairy-tale pantomimes at Christmas in England and fairy-tale plays in Germany and America. The imposition of childish behavior on the dwarfs, Snow White’s resulting mothering, the age ambiguities in both Snow White and the dwarfs, the ‘Cinderella’ elements, and the suppression of any form of sexuality were transmitted by that theatrical tradition, which embodied a thoroughly developed philosophy of moral education in representations for children.… By reading Disney’s Snow White by the light of overt didacticism of his sources, he no longer appears the moral reactionary disdained by contemporary critics. Rather, he is the entertainer who elevates the subtext of play found in his sources and dares once again to frighten children” [Karen Merritt, “The Little Girl/Little Mother Transformation: The American Evolution of ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,’ ” in Storytelling in Animation: The Art of the Animated Image, ed. John Canemaker (Los Angeles: American Film Institute, 1994), 106]. Though it may be true that Disney was more influenced by an American theatrical and film tradition, the source of all these productions, one acknowledged by Disney, was the Grimms’ tale. And, as I have argued, Disney was not particularly interested in experimenting with the narrative to shock children or provide a new perspective on the traditional story. For all intents and purposes his film reinforces the didactic messages of the Grimms’ tale, and it is only in the technical innovations and designs that he did something startlingly new. It is not the object of critique to “disdain” or “condemn” Disney for reappropriating the Grimms’ tradition to glorify the great designer, but to understand those cultural and psychological forces that led him to map out his narrative strategies in fairy-tale animation.
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