The message I thought Jack Zipes was trying to get across in his essay “Breaking the Disney Spell,” was that Walt Disney is given far too much positive credit and fame for being a disgrace to fairy tales. The entire time I was reading the essay, I couldn’t help but to be a little frustrated. For the past twenty years, I guess I have just accepted Disney’s version of these stories. However, now that I know the original versions, I understand the deeper meaning within these fairy tales, and am convinced that Disney was just making a visually pleasing movie. As Zipes states, “Disney was a radical filmmaker who changed our way of viewing fairy tales, and…his revolutionary technical means capitalized on American innocence and utopianism to reinforce the social and political status quo.” Clearly, Disney was a smart businessman but he took away so much from these firy tales. First, all possible interpretation and imagination of these fairy tales were taken away. He achieved this by putting faces, outfits, and voices to characters. Now, even when I read the Grimms version of Snow White, the only image that pops into my head is what is in the movie. In addition, he sneakily alters the story to focus on prince charming, a character who’s experiences mirror his own. By doing this, Disney shows himself as a hero by utilizing “self-figuration.”
Although I agree with Zipes for the most part, I think it is important to remember a few things. Walt Disney is not the only one responsible for the transformation of fairy tales from oral stories, to animated movies. The fairy tale revolution was jump started in the fifteenth century with the printing press, and have only continued to transform with different media types. As bad as it may seem, there is good that has come out of the Disney Spell. Without Disney movies, by now, I don’t think that the average child would know much about Snow White or Beauty and the Beast, and these fairy tales would eventually be lost.
I think your point about taking away imagination from the fairy tales is interesting. I agree that the Disney images are the dominant perception of fairy tales these days, but is "putting faces, outfits and voices to characters" really a fault of Disney? Perhaps the film genre itself is to blame for altering the fairy tale tradtion, just as the printing press was responsible for an earlier shift in its history.
ReplyDeleteI am not too sure the stories would be lost. I think that the knowledge of the stories and original tales would still be around however if anything everyone might know different versions of the tales compared to the carbon copy Disney version that everyone knows today.
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