Disney's timeless tales have a mass appeal

Ever wonder why many of the residents of the Magical World of Disney have their origins in folk tales and fairy tales?

Even in the earliest days of the Disney studios, Walt Disney was constantly searching for ways to both improve his product and advance the art of animation. He did this through a series of technical innovations such as the multi plane camera and other mechanical tools largely invented by his longtime associate Ub Iwerks. Simultaneously, Disney also prodded his animators to increase their skills as artists by requiring them to take drawing classes and study the works of great painters. Disney cartoons use color and music in a highly psychological fashion. Their sophistication underscore the two-pronged combination of scientific wizardry and artistic craft that made Disney a formidable force in American cinema. It was the combination of increased technical know-how and artistic proficiency that resulted in the classic Disney films. In fact, Disney was often portrayed in the popular press as both an Edison-like genius and a gifted artist.

This was no small step for animation. The only studio that could boast of similar technological breakthroughs was the Max Fleischer studio, where the live action- animation mixture was experimented with and a special 3-D multi plane camera was utilized in such extended shorts as "Popeye the Sailor Meets Sindbad the Sailor." Fleischer's studio, however, could no longer compete with Disney after the Hollywood Production Code neutered Fleischer's humor and the studio was demoralized by the failure of two animated feature films.

Prior to Disney's requirement of animators to study art, most animators were largely self-taught artists with a minimum of drawing ability - Felix the Cat and the Max Fleischer cartoons were hilarious and well-animated, but the draftsmanship often left much to be desired. Such characters rarely strayed from the simple silent-era formula for designing cartoon stars - just use lots of circles, let limbs be represented by rubbery hoses, and blacken in the silhouette. Disney's motion picture characters, on the other hand, are quite difficult to properly draw.

Perhaps due to the enormous effort made on the visual end of the animated film, Disney's studios took a rather conservative stance on story development. Many of the plots of the later animated shorts, and virtually all of the Disney animated features to this day, were adapted from popular fairy tales. This also included such American tales as the legend of John Henry and the Brer Rabbit stories. In using fairy tales as a jump-off point, Disney had the benefit of a story that was both ready-made and simple enough for everyone in the audience to understand.

Walt Disney as Storyteller

Disney did not invent animation. Cartoons were common entertainment in the silent era; Felix the Cat could be considered the forerunner of Mickey Mouse. Yet by the time Disney made his great feature films, his name was so closely associated with animated films that he may as well have invented the medium. More words were written about Walt Disney than about any other cartoon producer or director. In fact, more was written about Disney than about most live-action producers and directors. In essence, then, there are two types of American animation - Disney and Everybody Else.

Similarly, it is obvious that Walt Disney did not invent the fairy tale. He was not the only filmmaker to adapt fairy tales to the silver screen. Yet the Disney name is almost as synonymous with fairy tales as it is to animation itself.

Disney's work was so closely associated with fairy tales that the use of such tales by other cartoon studios quickly faded. When other directors used fairy tale themes, it was usually done as satire - not only of the fairy tales themselves but also of Disney-esque interpretation of them. Tex Avery's "Red Hot Riding Hood" is one clear example, as the original appearance of the Wolf in the cartoon is nearly identical to the Disney Wolf in "The Three Little Pigs."

Both Warners and MGM refocused their efforts into developing a series of promotable short subject characters - Bugs Bunny, Droopy, Tom and Jerry, Porky Pig - which are still recognized today. In essence then, fairy tales became Disney's exclusive property in American animated film. Other companies could not, or would not, compete with Disney on his turf.

The Benefits of Fairy Tales

Fairy tales were part of a long oral tradition and were complied in books for the first time around the 19th century. The original authors had faded into history (and the tales were probably the end result of generations of retelling and editing) and several different versions of the tales existed, so Disney could feel free to embellish the tales as he wished. Fleshing out supporting characters (such as the Seven Dwarfs or Cinderella's mice) was fair game. Preferring Perrault's softer retellings of fairy tales to the Grimms' often-grisly versions - see their versions of Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella - was also permissible.

Even films such as Bambi, Peter Pan and Pinocchio, are fairy tale-like in the sense that they are stories written on a basic level and feature moral lessons. The latter two films even include fairies. Posthumous films "The Rescuers" and "The Fox and the Hound" similarly contain simple moral lessons and are written on a level basic enough for children to understand. It is important to note that it was a series of fairy tale inspired movies that revived the Disney company in the 1980s and 1990s (The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin).

It should also be remembered that the most controversial Disney films (Alice in Wonderland, Pocohontas, The Hunchback of Notre Dame) are those that stray the furthest from fairy tale territory; Lewis Carroll's novel satirized Victorian culture, Pocohontas was a real woman whose life events were radically recast by the Disney writers, and the Hunchback was a tragic character from a serious Victor Hugo novel.

The use of fairy tales was virtually risk-free. On the one hand, the tales were pure escapism and on the other they reaffirmed society's values. They were basic enough in their appeal to be marketed directly towards children, but the romance in some of the stories (Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella) was also appealing to adults. This broad appeal was essential for maximum profits; had the Disney films been solely "children's entertainment" many parents might have simply dropped the kids off at the theater while they went to see a different production. Disney, however, designed films for the entire family to enjoy. Indeed, for the bulk of Disney's life, animation was not considered to be exclusively for juveniles; the television era of Hanna-Barbera was largely responsible for the dumbing down of cartoons, and that did not fully take hold until the 1960s. Disney's ageless appeal is far different from the entertaining, but almost exclusively child-oriented films done by current Disney competitor Don Bluth (creator of An American Tail).

Due to the relatively unambiguous story lines, the animators and directors had license to play every scene to its maximum emotional potential. The Queen's transformation into an old crone in Snow White and the Monstro sequence from Pinocchio were pure nightmares, while several of the scenes in Bambi and Song of the South were pure whimsy. The Disney heroines were not the preteens of traditional fairy tales but young women who were both beautiful and contained a muted sexuality; this would get the Disney company in trouble in the feminist era, but it also created an idealized version of women that was unlike any depiction in any other type of film. True, this formula also resulted in a string of bland, too-good-to-be-true Princes, but at the same time it was responsible for a series of well-written sentimental songs that continues to this day with "A Whole New World" and "Can You Feel The Love Tonight?"

In retrospect, the reliance on timeless fairy tales as source material prevented the Disney feature films from seeming badly dated. Disney realized this fairly early in his film career, as he returned to the fairy tale milieu time and time again. Indeed, the films of his that received the worst contemporary criticism were those which had virtually nothing to do with fairy tales. Disney promptly dropped these in favor of Cinderella in the 1950s. Disney was able to successfully reissue his films decades after they were originally issued because they remained fresh, in sharp contrast to other animated features (such as Gulliver's Travels or Heavy Metal) which seemed dated a few years after their release.

Disney's career proves that he was motivated not by short-term success but by the long-term goal of building a durable company, a goal shared by his successors. The use of ageless material no doubt was as much a business choice as an aesthetic one.