Katrine Weber-Hansen
January 20, 2011
Disney’s Beauties: A Study of the Disney Studio’s handing of the
wondertales Sleeping Beauty and Beauty and the Beast in the context
of the Film Industry and Prevailing Socio-Cultural Attitudes.
Introduction
With any adaptation follows a selective process of alterations, by which the original
material is pruned to fit the possibilities and constraints of a new media. In the case of
wondertales, the oral tradition heavily influenced the later printed versions, both in
terms of form and content. As a tale is told over and over again, it is shaped and
acquires much of its shape from the transfer itself, the subjective communication of
ideas, and some from the context in which it is told. When, in a later process, the
wondertales are collected in printed form, they are altered again to conform to
structural patterns, condensing the material into the wondertales known from
Straparola and Giambattista Basile and later from Charles Perrault and the Brothers
Grimm. Furthermore, remediations of printed wondertales to the screen, in particular
by the Walt Disney Company, are in many cases an attempt at re-familiarization with
already well-known tales, in order to create novel storylines, even if based on several
hundred-year-old traditions. Sleeping Beauty and Beauty and the Beast are examples
of fairy tales, which have been altered tremendously from the first printed versions to
the animated features that are part of the cultural Disney canon of classical films.
The appropriation of fairy tales to fit the taste of movie-audiences – whether
young or adult – is modified by the socio-cultural context within the film industry,
adding material to the storyline, such as singing furniture and fairies for comic relief,
but also leads to a departure from the written versions of the tales. To satisfy an
audience, it is important to consider the body of work by contemporary filmmakers,
and the features of popular genres. Disney’s continuous decisions to amplify the
romance and eliminate the more horrific parts of the original tales, including elements
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such a rape and attempted cannibalism, emphasizes the assumption that a big part of
planning a popular feature is the consideration of contemporary trends within the rest
of the film industry.
Adaptations of Sleeping Beauties
Sleeping Beauty is one of the most significant of the Disney Company’s animated
features, both with regard to its visual style, which greatly separates it from earlier
productions, but also due to the choice to let the storyline be inspired as much by
Tchaikovsky’s ballet as by the Dornröschen-tale from the Grimms’ collection of fairy
tales. But before Walt Disney got his hands on Grimms’ version of the tale, the
content had been altered significantly, and the point of departure for the Beauty in
Sleeping Beauty began with a girl called Talia, who suffered greatly beyond a
hundred years of enchanted sleep.
Giambattista Basile’s Il Pentamerone was published in 1634-6, and contains
several stories similar to the later Märchen published by the Brothers Grimm, such as
Cinderella, Rapunzel and Sleeping Beauty. In the Pentamerone, the Sleeping Beauty
tale is called Sole, Luna, e Talia (“The Sun, The Moon and Talia”)1 and it follows the
same structure as the story we know today, with a princess who suffers what Ruth
Bottigheimer calls ‘a temporal expulsion’2, sleeping until awakened by a royal suitor,
who comes by her castle. But unlike the version by the Grimm Brothers, where the
female protagonist marries the prince and lives happily ever after, Basile’s version
includes a further elaboration of the narrative. Basile allows the King who finds Talia
sleeping to ‘gather the first fruits of love’ – in effect raping her and leaving her in her
1
Bottigheimer, Ruth. ‘Fairy-Tale Origin, Fairy-Tale Dissemination, and Folk Narrative
Theory’. Fabula, vol. 47 (2006): p. 212
2
Ibid.
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slumber long enough for her to carry a set of twins to term3. Talia gives birth to ‘Sun’
and ‘Moon’, and rather than the King waking her with a kiss, as the popular retellings
go, Talia is awakened when one of her children mistakenly sucks on her finger, where
a splinter of flax is lodged4. When the king later returns, he does not immediately
bring Talia to his castle to make her his wife, because he is already married, and the
‘narrative add-on’5, as Bottigheimer calls it, begins here, with the queen discovering
her husbands infidelity, and attempting to punish both him and his mistress by having
the twins cooked for him to eat.
Charles Perrault employs the same extension of the story, but in his version, in
Histoires ou contes du temps passé, avec des moralitéz (1697), the suitor is not
married and it is his mother, who wishes to eat the children, partly due to her ogrelike nature. Perrault has quite obviously adopted much of Basile’s narrative in his
own retelling of La Belle au bois dormant (‘The Sleeping beauty in the Woods’), but
by the time his version is published, the tale has undergone several changes. As
mentioned, the king becomes a prince, who, although he does impregnate the beauty
while she sleeps, bears a much greater resemblance to the valiant heroes of the Disney
classics. His mother does not wish to eat the children as an act of mere evil, but
because she is part ogress and, hence, has a ‘natural’ lust for child-meat. But the
greatest change in the storyline is in the onset of the story. The only magical element
of Basile’s version is the flax-induced slumber of Talia, while Perrault employs more
familiar magical elements. He introduces the story with a king and queen who, after
3
Basile, Giambattista. ‘Sun, Moon and Talia’, Tales of Arne Thompson type 410 translated
and/or edited by D.L.Ashliman. http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/type0410.html#basile
4
Noticeably, Talia is not cursed by an evil witch, but rather her father is told by wise men that
a splinter of flax is of great danger to her, and even though he orders all flax and hemp
exported from the country, she sees an old woman spinning, and, as foretold, she runs a piece
of flax under her nail when she is allowed to try the spindle, causing her to fall asleep, like in
more modern retellings of the tale. Source: Basile, Giambattista. ‘Sun, Moon and Talia’, op.
cit.
5
Bottigheimer, op. cit. p. 212
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finally having a child, hold a grand christening party to celebrate; inviting all the
fairies they can find to be the child’s godmothers. The seven fairies they find are
given every luxury and reward the young princess with gifts of virtue and beauty in
return. But at this point in the narrative, Perrault adds the villain, who will become a
very recognizable figure of evil in cultural history, after a Walt Disney treatment. An
old fairy, seemingly forgotten by the king and queen, arrives but is not given the same
luxuries as the other fairies, and in pure spite, she curses the princess to pierce her
hand on a spindle and die from the wound6. Subsequently, the magical slumber the
princess falls in, after pricking her finger some sixteen years later, is prolonged to 100
years by Perrault as a further embellishment of Basile’s tale. According to
Bottigheimer, the ‘mother-in-law’ persecution that Perrault adds to his version, is
derived from Basile’s tale, but is a classic narrative add-on to stories of the same
kind7. Interestingly, there seems to be a shift in the focus of the fairy tale, once the
king/prince enters the story, in both Basile’s and Perrault’s versions. As Christina
Bacchilega argues, in her essay ‘An Introduction to the “Innocent Persecuted
Heroine” Fairy Tale’, the particular metaphor surrounding this type of fairy tale, what
she calls the ‘woman-as-nature’8 metaphor, also dictates a narrative in which the
subject matter is ‘man rather than woman and narrativizes his desire, not hers’9.
In comparison to the Disney version, the Sleeping Beauty tale is not really
familiar to us until the Grimm Brothers’ version from 1812. With their version of the
tale, there is also a redesigned focus of the narrative, bringing the princess back into
focus and softening the tale to the version known to most, when we refer to the fairy
6
Perrault, Charles. ‘Sleeping Beauty in the Woods’. SurLaLune Fairy Tales, ed. Heidi Anne
Heiner. http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/sleepingbeauty/index.html
7
Bottigheimer, op. cit. p. 212
8
Bacchilega, Christina. ‘An Introduction to the “Innocent Persecuted Heroine” Fairy Tale’.
Western Folklore, vol. 52, no. 1 (1993): p. 3
9
Bacchilega, op. cit. p. 4
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tale rather than the animated feature. The Grimm Brothers multiply the number of
fairies to thirteen, including the evil one, and they add a string of suitors, who all
attempt to penetrate the thorny hedge surrounding the castle. But unlike Basile’s and
Perrault’s versions, Brier-Rose, as the Grimms have dubbed their female protagonist,
is not visited by a prince or king with an ensuing pregnancy to follow, but rather,
when the century-long slumber is over, she is awakened with a kiss by a prince, who
has finally been able to enter the castle. And unlike the elaborate aftermath in both of
the other tales, the story end with the prince and Brier-Rose marrying and living
happily until they die10.
The appropriation of the tale from one containing elements of both rape and
cannibalism is completed in the American collection of fairy tales, the Bedtime
Wonder Tales from 1935, which, as Kay Stone reminds us, promises that ‘The tales as
told here are free from the savagery, distressing details, and excessive pathos which
mar many of the tales in the form that they have come down to us from a barbaric
past’11. She goes on to find that the already meek version of Sleeping Beauty, as it
appears in the Grimm collection, is further softened to a point where the already
innocent confrontation between girl and spindle is made even more so by making the
old woman deaf12. Why is it then that the vast majority of children (and probably
adults as well) predominantly relate fairy tales to Disney’s animated versions? Justyna
Deszcz argues that it is, in part, due to the vast amount of paraphernalia made
available to children following the release of an animated feature, but also because
‘the fairy tale has become a cultural institution, which exists within an institutional
10
Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm. ‘Little Brier-Rose’. Tales of Arne Thompson type 410
translated and/or edited by D.L.Ashliman. http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/type0410.html#grimm
11
Stone, Kay. ‘Märchen to Fairy Tale: An Unmagical Transformation’. Western Folklore,
vol. 40, no. 3 (1981): p. 235
12
Ibid.
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Katrine Weber-Hansen
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framework of production, distribution, and reception’13. These three factors are
crucial in understanding the Disney Company’s process of alterations with regard to
Sleeping Beauty.
The introduction of sound and colour to the film industry, meant a great shift
by the 1930s and, as Jack Zipes notes in Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales, Children,
and the Culture industry, filmmakers were able to contemplate and produce elaborate
projects with fairy tales14, and Disney was no exception with his release of Snow
White in 1937. Disney’s Sleeping Beauty was released in theaters in 1959, and it had
been almost a decade in the making before it hit the big screen15. When it was
released to the public, the reworking of the tale meant a significant departure from the
story, as we know it from Basile. For example, the fairies in Disney’s adaptation have
the primary function of comic relief, and are constructed as a threesome of humoristic
personalities; there is the naïve diplomat Flora standing between the supercilious and
self-proclaimed
leader, Fauna,
and the hot-headed
and
equally
stubborn
Merryweather. Just as the dwarfs in Snow White are just as much a part of a structure
designed by Disney to make the story light and funny, the fairies, although they do
appear in the original tale, provide comical situations in the middle of a rather serious
persecution of our innocent heroine. To quote Stone again, ‘The helpful fairies in
"Cinderella" and "Sleeping Beauty" are silly and absent-minded, rather than powerful
13
Deszcz, Justyna. ‘Beyond the Disney Spell, or Escape into Pantoland’. Folklore, vol. 113,
no. 1 (2002): p. 85
14
Zipes, Jack. Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales, Children, and the Culture Industry. New
York: Routledge, 1997. p. 70
15
This was in part due to the decision to shoot and release the film in the new ‘Technorama
70’ format, which required more work from especially the background artists, as well as the
decision to have Eyvind Earle do most of the background personally, rather than have a team
of artists work on them collectively. Source: ‘Once Upon a Dream: The Making of Walt
Disney’s Sleeping Beauty’, Geronimi, Clyde (supervising Director). Sleeping Beauty. DVD,
2002
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old women’16. In this sense, the movie falls into the same category as Zipes places
Disney’s Snow White in, namely an imitation of whichever genre is the most popular
within contemporary Hollywood movies – in the case of Snow White the musicals of
the 1930s, where special attention is paid to ‘catchy lyrics and tunes’17. The music of
Sleeping Beauty is predominantly from Tchaikovsky’s ballet18, but the storyline from
the ballet is much more similar to the literary versions already mentioned, and it
seems feasible that the major changes and alterations made to the plot are relatable to
a trend in popular culture rather than the decision to use the ballet as inspiration.
Because any movie has to make money, it needs to be commercially viable,
and attractive to the audience. Therefore the cultural context is nevertheless a
concluding factor in the way the film will be presented and, hence, the genre to which
it will belong. The dominant genre of the 1950s was the Romantic Comedy, with
female stars like Marilyn Monroe and Audrey Hepburn in the leads. It seems natural
then that one of the most significant changes Disney makes to Sleeping Beauty relates
to the basic structure of Romantic Comedy films like Sabrina (1954) and Roman
Holiday (1953), where boy meets girl, obstacles of some sort occur and separate them
until they reunited in the end of the film. The basic structure of Sleeping Beauty relies
on an unknown male hero to arrive after the obstacles have been set, beat them and
gain a princess in the end19. This conflicts with the structure of the romantic comedy,
and Disney solves this by introducing the prince at the genesis of the story, as a
betrothed to the Princess Aurora. When the evil Maleficent curses the baby, the King
16
Stone. ‘Märchen’. op. cit. p. 237
Zipes, Happily Ever After op. cit. p. 93
18
Walt Disney informs us that ‘Our inspiration for this film was this wonderful score written
more than 75 years ago by Peter Tchaikovsky for his ballet-version of the fairy tale’. source: :
‘Once Upon a Dream: The Making of Walt Disney’s Sleeping Beauty’
19
The prince, or King in Basile’s version, is not introduced to the audience until after the
female protagonist has already pricked her finger and fallen asleep, and it is his status as
‘rescuer’ rather than well-known suitor that wins him the hand of the princess.
17
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January 20, 2011
decides to have the three good fairies take her to the woods and pretend to be her godmothers but not reveal to her that she is in fact a princess. This allows for an
extension of the expulsion period of the fairy tale, formerly consisting only of the
slumber. To enhance the focus on romance, the two meet later in the woods, not
knowing that they are already supposed to be married, and the major obstacle between
the two is neither magical slumber or great thorny hedges (although both occur later
in the film), but rather the supposed social distance between the princess and who she
assumes to be a peasant. When she finally pricks her finger on the spindle, lured to
the highest tower by the villain Maleficent, there is a sense of relief when she falls
into her slumber because it is the simultaneous promise that she will be awoken only
by true love’s kiss and, hence, a resolution of the conflict of status as we know all will
be revealed when the prince arrives at the castle to break the spell.
The decision by Disney to have the princess raised in the woods, not knowing
she is a princess until this information would involve serious implications on her fresh
love life, also adds the communication of a rather conservative world-view, where
good behaviour is rewarded: Brier-Rose is rewarded for respecting her father’s wish
that she be married to a prince she, supposedly, has not met yet. Likewise, it is not
coincidental that the isolation of Brier-Rose in Disney’s version takes place during
her teen years and, as Stone argues:
[…] it is at puberty that Rapunzel is locked in a tower, Snow White is sent out
to be murdered, and Sleeping Beauty put to sleep. Such heroines have their
freedom severely restricted at a time in life when heroes are discovering full
independence and increased power. Restrictions on girls at puberty, in contrast
to the increased freedom their brothers enjoy, possibly explain the intensely
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sympathetic reaction many women have to such passive heroines in fairy
tales.20
Beyond the invoked sympathy of female readers, the observation Stone makes also
emphasizes a more pedagogical agenda of the retelling of these fairy tales.
Considering Sleeping Beauty, it is noticeable that Walt Disney chooses to prolong the
period of expulsion to encompass the entirety of the female protagonist’s youth and
teen years, releasing her only when she is ripe for marriage and only allowing her to
marry someone of whom her father has already approved. Naomi Wood notices the
agenda of Disney, with regard to the conservative appropriation of his material, and
argues that:
Disney's ideology is conservative and anti-intellectual, but that conservatism is
by no means doctrinaire or without its own surprises and contradictions.
Disney's choices about how to present his material grow out of both the
requirements of his medium and his ideological framework and they can
illuminate his relationship both to American cultural work, and also to the
traditions, literary and filmic, that he draws upon.21
Walt Disney could have chosen a more traditional approach to the mediation of fairy
tales, but must conform to the socio-cultural attitudes of contemporary productions in
the film industry. Furthermore, the wondertale provides the ethos and most of
Disney’s movies are quite conservative in terms of class and patriarchy, and, as Zipes
argues, ‘To know your place and do your job dutifully are the categorical imperatives
20
Stone, Kay. ‘Things Walt Disney Never Told Us’. The Journal of American Folklore, vol.
88, no. 347 (1975): p. 46-47
21
Wood, Naomi. ‘Domesticating Dreams in Walt Disney’s Cinderella’. The Lion and the
Unicorn, vol. 20, no. 1 (1996): p. 25-26
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of the film [Snow White]’22, as well as of Sleeping Beauty. Zipes goes on to find that
Disney ‘reduced the wants and dreams of the American people to formulas which
prescribed how to gain a measure of happiness by conforming to the standards of
industry’s work ethos and the constraining ideology of American conservatism’23.
The departure from short films to the animated features was also a departure from
what Zipes calls ‘Disney’s great experimentation and eclectic period’24 and the
beginning of an instrumental phase, which resulted in the identifiable ‘Disneyfication’
of any story to become a part of Disney’s animated canon.
Another noteworthy departure from the original tale is the climactic rescuemission at the end of the film. Zipes notes that one of the main features of
Disneyfication of wondertales is the clear-cut dichotomy between good and evil25.
There is no doubt who is the villain and who is the heroine and, likewise, there is no
possibility of rehabilitation of either to become the opposite – the evil remain evil and
vice versa. But the evil fairy from the literary versions of the Sleeping Beauty fairy
tale is not a prime example of a movie-villain. Rather, a much more suitable
antagonist would perhaps have been the spiteful and cannibalistic mother-in-law from
the add-on narrative in Perrault’s tale. But in the process of ‘infantilisation’26, to use
Zipes terms, and appropriation of the narrative for a movie-audience does not allow
for cannibalism as part of the plot, if a complete ‘Disneyfication’ is to be obtained.
Instead the evil witch Maleficent does not simply cast her spell and relax, knowing
that all will be as she has planned, but is portrayed as an impatient and spiteful
woman, who has had her minions search for the princess ever since the kings
22
Zipes, Jack. Breaking the Magic Spell. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2002.
p. 128
23
Ibid., p. 129
24
Ibid.
25
Zipes. Happily Ever After. p. 93
26
Ibid. p. 96
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January 20, 2011
expulsion of said. To accentuate the inherent evil of the antagonist, and to further
stress Zipes argument that the world of Disney is viewed in Manichaean terms as a
dichotomy of extreme good and evil27, Disney has Maleficent persecute both the
princess and the prince, and finally battle the prince as a dragon. There is no mention
of the evil fairy after the female protagonist is cursed in either literary version of the
tale, and by no means does she turn into a dragon. But remembering that a
remediation of a literary tale to a visual one is just as much about an exploration of
the technical abilities available, it is perhaps natural to explore just how evil it is
possible to make Maleficent by means of animation and, hence, allowing the
wondertale to become even more wonderful. As Stone remarks, ‘Disney also
exaggerated the negative forces of the Märchen, making the stepmothers in "Snow
White and the Seven Dwarfs" and "Cinderella" even more villainous than in the
originals, and creating a villain where none fully exists in Sleeping Beauty’28. The
metamorphosis from woman to dragon is simultaneously a process of induced
equality to the status of the prince as male hero, making it possible for the audience to
be convinced of a momentary superiority of Maleficent over the prince, despite her
inevitable defeat, predictable of any fairy tale, especially one distributed by Disney. In
this connection, it is also interesting that the choice to have the story end with a
climactic battle between good and evil, entails a rejection of the century-long slumber
we know from Perrault’s version, and reduces the Sleeping Beauty to somewhat
drowsy, allowing her to sleep for not even an entire night before the prince wakes her.
Beyond the effects possible from the visual representation of Maleficent as an
almost serpent-like character, Disney utilizes another trick of the film industry in his
attempt to make her as intimidating as possible. Like other directors he recasts
27
28
Ibid. p. 93
Stone. ‘Märchen’. op. cit. p. 237
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popular actresses in roles similar to ones, which have proven popular with the
audience in previous movies. Just like Marilyn Monroe is the quintessential blonde
bombshell of the 1950s and 1960s, Eleanor Audley had proven successful on her role
as Lady Tremaine (the evil stepmother) in Cinderella, and Marc Davis, the leadanimator on Maleficent, drew much inspiration from the actress herself in his
portrayal29. Likewise, the original character design of Brier-Rose by Tom Oreb was
modeled after the thin, elegant features of actress Audrey Hepburn30, already a
popular actress during the production of Sleeping Beauty, especially cast to portray
the meek, slightly naïve and always beautiful female protagonist of Romantic
Comedies.
Disney’s Beauties and Beasts
The quintessential romance in the wondertale genre is perhaps the beast-husband type
tales. Like Walt Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, the narrative is surrounds a female
protagonist, whose beauty becomes the locus motor of the plot: just like Brier-Rose’s
beauty is the catalyst of the story, driving the prince to risk everything to be with her
after having hardly done anything but gaze at her, Belle is the driving force of the
narrative, and the Beast’s only salvation. And just like Sleeping Beauty, Disney made
several changes to a wondertale that had already been reworked and whose origins are
also very different from the tale distributed by the Walt Disney Company. Cynthia
Erb argues that the Disney’s Beauty and the Beast pays homage to the conventional
musical romance: ‘two characters represent disparate, seemingly incompatible worlds;
29
Marc Davis mentions that ‘…there is a lot of the facial look that I put into Maleficent that
really is Eleanor Audley’. Source: ‘Once Upon a Dream: The Making of Walt Disney’s
Sleeping Beauty’
30
Sleeping Beauty, Disney Archives.
http://disney.go.com/vault/archives/characters/sleeping/sleeping.html
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through romance (and music), their worlds are eventually merged and harmonized’31.
But she goes on to state that Beauty and the Beast is actually synonymous with ‘[…] a
long textual tradition that spans literature, drama and the visual arts’32.
The narrative of the beastly husband33 is found in many versions, including the
myth of Cupid and Psyche, which bears great resemblance to the more well
established fairy tale version by Mme de Beaumont from 175734. As Bottigheimer
notes, Mme de Beaumont ‘composed her own highly moralized and still popular story
of female beauty and male hideosity’35 with her literary version. In her version, as
well as earlier models, ‘Beauty’ (the character) is a merchants daughter, whose wish
for a seemingly innocent gift ends with her father having to sacrifice either himself or
his daughter to the Beast, from whom he attempts to steal a rose for said daughter.
Mme de Beaumont adopts the narrative of Mademoiselle de Villeneuve, whose
printed version was published in 1740. Villeneuve’s Beauty is the embodiment of
‘self-denial’ and, Zipes remarks, ‘Beauty always chooses to fulfill her obligations
rather than follow her heart’36. This is one of the most noticeable changes from the
Beauty known from the French writers and Belle as she is projected in Disney’s
version of the fairy tale. Belle is, in direct contrast to her self-denying ‘ancestor’,
driven by the desire to leave the provincial life she is stuck in, and follow her heart to
find adventure elsewhere.
31
Erb, Cynthia. ‘Another World or the World of an Other? The Space of Romance in Recent
Versions of “Beauty and the Beast”’. Cinema Journal, vol. 34, no. 4(1995): p. 52
32
Ibid. p. 53
33
Also marked as AT425A (like the myth of Cupid and Psyche) or AT425C (the established
Beauty and the Beast version by Mme de Beaumont), see The Classic Fairy Tales. Ed. Maria
Tatar. Norton Critical Editions. New York: Norton, 1999. p. 376
34
The version penned by Mme de Beaumont derives mainly from the baroque literary version
by Mademoiselle Gabrielle-Suzanne de Villeneuve from 1740. See The Classic Fairy Tales,
ed. Maria Tatar. op. cit. p. 26
35
Bottigheimer, Ruth. ‘Misperceived Perceptions: Perrault’s Fairy Tales and English
Children’s Literature’. Children’s Literature, vol. 30 (2002): p. 11
36
Zipes, jack. Fairy Tale as Myth/ Myth as Fairy Tale. New York: Routledge, 1991. p. 30
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The most essential change from Mme de Beaumont’s version to the canonical
Disney version of Beauty and the Beast is, according to June Cummins, is the Disney
Studios’ decision to highlight the ‘romantic angle’ of the story, and changing the
focus from Beauty to the Beast37. Disney makes it primarily Beast’s story and an
investigation of his development through his encounter with Belle, rather than the
more traditional focus on the advancement of Beauty through her altruistic behaviour
and eventual acceptance of the Beast as a potential husband. Cummins goes on to
state that ‘Belle's desires, her interest in exploration and education, have no meaning
except in terms of how they can be manipulated into a romance to benefit the Beast
and the bewitched servants’38, and she is a plot device meant to advance the story of
the Beast rather than a distinct narrative of her own.
Like the process of producing Sleeping Beauty involved changing crucial
elements to have the plot fit a socio-culturally popular genre in films, Beauty and the
Beast as Disney tells it also quite different from its literary origin. Erb notices how, in
what seems to be a tribute to the musical classic The Sound of Music (1965), Belle
sings of her desire to leave the provincial life, while the villagers offer the counternarrative in their interpretation of her desires as ‘odd’ or ‘unnatural’39:
WOMAN 5: Now it's no wonder that her name means 'beauty'
Her looks have got no parallel!
MERCHANT: But behind that fair facade
I'm afraid she's rather odd
Very different from the rest of us...
ALL: She's nothing like the rest of us
37
Cummins, June. ‘Romancing the Plot: The Real Beast of Disney’s beauty and the Beast’.
Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 20, no. 1 (1995): p. 23
38
Cummins, op. cit. p. 24
39
Erb. op. cit. p. 62
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Yes different from the rest of us is Belle40
Arguably, the lyricist has chosen to contrast a ‘traditional’ attitude that suggests that a
woman of Belle’s age (and certainly her looks) should be interested in marriage rather
than education and adventure. The interesting point here is that contrary to Wood’s
argument that Disney’s ideology was ‘anti-intellectual’ there seems to be a focus on
beauty as something which is as much a question of personality and education (or at
least interest in educating oneself) as an outer quality. Considering the antagonist of
the movie, Gaston, who is constructed to be a much-desired townsman, is also
extremely unattractive and self-absorbed. It is interesting that Disney chooses to
deploy the suitor as antagonist in his interpretation. In most other versions, including
the Cupid and Psyche myth, the Scandinavian East O’ the Sun, West O’ the Moon and
the French printed version mentioned earlier, the antagonists are Beauty’s sisters, who
become jealous of her. It seems likely that just like decisions to change the plot of
Sleeping Beauty to better fit the Romantic Comedy genre in its narrative structure, the
director of Beauty and the Beast was inspired by a recent remediation of the
wondertale, to be precise Jean Cocteau’s La belle et la bëte from 1946. Mikel Koven
explores the interpretation of Folktales into the visual media, and finds that
Cocteau's La belle et la beet is also noteworthy for blending the genre of
Märchen with the horror film, and […] In many respects, what Cocteau did in
La belle et la beet is return the folktale to its adult audience by appropriating
the visual iconography of the contemporary horror movie41
He goes on to argue that ‘when Disney brought out its version of Beauty and the
40
cited from transcript of the movie. Source: Beauty and the Beast Script,
http://www.angelfire.com/movies/disneybroadway/beautybeastscript.html
41
Ibid. p. 191
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January 20, 2011
Beast, it utilized many of the surreal visual motifs that Cocteau had introduced’42 and
probably the alterations made to the plot as well. Cocteau’s movie is the first instance
of a change in the focus of the narrative, as mentioned earlier, where the Beast is the
main protagonist. When Disney further elaborates on Cocteau’s adaptations of the
wondertale, the director adds elements from other wondertales to enhance the
emphasis on the Beast and his developmental process. The Beast is given a secret
room, like the one found in the classic Bluebeard fairy tale, and Belle is not allowed
entrance to this ‘den’. This allows for the inclusion of the rose as an element of the
plot, just as it is in the literary versions, and also provides an excuse for the expulsion
necessary to drive the plot to the conflict needed to complete a structure similar to
other Romantic Comedies.
Female Beauty in Wondertales
One of the things that follows the adaptation of a text to the visual space of animation
is the need to adapt the elements of the story to visual representations. Unlike the
written variants, where it is possible to describe characters and settings vaguely, thus
allowing for a subjective interpretation by the reader, the audience of a movie must be
presented with clearly defined characters in order for them to remain recognizable
even if they change their costumes or are placed within different contexts. The
animators have to decide what the beast will look like, and how to convey the beauty
of Belle visually. In the oral tradition much of this is nondescript, in text it is possibly
described to some detail, but in a visual medium you need to make a decision on what
the characters should look like, and that will naturally subtract from the mystery of
the wonderful, and in the case of the beast it subtracts from his bestiality. Similarly,
42
Koven, Mikel J. ‘Folklore Studies and Popular Film and Television: A Necessary Critical
Survey’. The Journal of American Folklore, vol. 116, no. 460 (2003): p. 183
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January 20, 2011
the female heroines are given very distinct features to enhance our experience of these
women as beautiful and, in the tradition of the fairy tale, as role models. Lori BakerSperry and Liz Grauerholz’ investigation of feminine beauty in fairy tales leads them
to argue that ‘Discourse analyses reveal several themes in relationship to beauty.
Often there is a clear link between beauty and goodness’43, and in most fairy tales
beauty is often rewarded with social advancement.
Similarly, Disney’s women are, Wood argues, ‘an amalgam of cultural
stereotypes’44. Disney’s Brier-Rose is molded around Audrey Hepburn combined
with the culturally acceptable meek and beautiful heroine of the traditional fairy tales
with the appropriate Victorian bulge, rather than actual bosom, which has survived as
the stylistically acceptable interpretation of the female form since Snow White. Just
like her written counterparts, it is Briar-Rose’s beauty that is the locus motor and,
Marcia Lieberman contends, ‘the prince who penetrates the jungle of thorns and briars
to find the Sleeping Beauty does so be- cause he had heard about her loveliness’45.
Belle, on the other hand, is the first heroine to have a cleavage and is drawn to
emphasize a focus on the female body. As Baker-Sperry and Grauerholz note:
So ingrained is the image of women's beauty in fairy tales that it is difficult to
imagine any that do not highlight and glorify it. Recent Disney films and even
contemporary feminist retellings of popular fairy tales often involve women
who differ from their earlier counterparts in ingenuity, activity, and
43
Baker-Sperry, Lori and Liz Grauerholz. ‘The Pervasiveness and persistence of the
Feminine Beauty Ideal in Children’s Fairy Tales’. Gender and Society, vol. 17, no. 5 (2003):
718
44
Wood. op. cit. p. 29
45
Lieberman, Marcia R. ‘”Someday my Prince Will Come”: Female Acculturation through
the Fairy Tale’. College English, vol. 34, no. 3 (1972): p. 386
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Katrine Weber-Hansen
January 20, 2011
independence but not physical attractiveness46
There is a clear development from the very passive Briar-Rose in Sleeping Beauty to
the idealistic and adventure-driven Belle portrayed thirty years later, but even though
there seems to be a change in the socio-cultural attitude towards the role of women in
society, there is still a strong focus on the ideally beautiful feminine hero. In stylistic
and artistic terms, the style of the two movies differ greatly, just like the narrative
structures of the written wondertales, and with Belle as a woman of the nineties, we
see a reflection of the rise of the women’s liberation and a recognition of the changes
in the attitude of feminism and Disney is slowly recognizing the corporal element of
the visual representation of the female body as part of the representation of any
woman on screen. The theme of female beauty is present in many different
wondertales, not only the ones including passive heroines, and, in their essay on
literary theories, Joanne Golden and Donna Canan find that Snow White consist of
binary oppositions like beauty versus not beauty and that the main conflict in the story
derives from the jealousy of the heroine’s beauty47, which is also considered to be one
of the core qualities possessed by the female heroine, evident from the paradigmatic
description of her hair black as ebony, skin white as snow and lips red as blood as
Dorothy Hurley notes48. Likewise, in the case of Frau Holle the ugly daughter is also
associated with sloth and greed, wanting to do none of the work Mother Holle asks
her to, but wishing to reap the goods awarded to her beautiful sister49. Interestingly,
Baker-Sperry and Grauerholz suggest that ‘[…] attention to attractiveness may have
become increasingly prevalent over the past century. Tales that were reproduced
46
Baker-Sperry, op. cit. p. 722
Golden, Joanne M. and Donna Canan. ‘”Mirror, Mirror on the Wall”_ Readers’ Reflections
on Literature through Literary Theories’. The English Journal, vol. 93, no. 5 (2004): p. 43
48
Hurley, Dorothy L. ‘Seeing White: Children of Color and the Disney Fairy Tale Princess’.
The Journal of Negro Education, vol. 74, no. 3 (2005): p. 223-224
49
Baker-Sperry, op. cit. p. 719
47
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Katrine Weber-Hansen
January 20, 2011
mostly in the latter part of the twentieth century tend to make more mentions of
women's beauty’50, pointing to the many reworkings of Snow White and Cinderella.
Conclusion
With Sleeping Beauty and Beauty and the Beast, Disney has chosen two wellestablished narratives concerning ideals of beauty and conduct. The reproduction of
Sleeping Beauty from Basile’s version including rape and cannibalism through the
mild and non-violent version by the Grimms ending with the significantly altered
version Disney has given us, exemplifies how the narrative is adjusted to fit within the
socio-cultural context of contemporary popular genres. Disney’s version has more in
common with the quintessential romantic comedy than with the printed wondertales
with which it shares its title. Thirty years later, Disney utilizes the same process of
appropriation when they decide to produce a version of Beauty and the Beast.
Inspired more by Jean Cocteau’s interpretation of the plot than any available literary
version, the movie fits neatly within a contemporary context, where the female
protagonist is in focus as more than just a plot device. Yet, with all the stylistic
advances used to bring focus to the female form and the freedom of women to pursue
adventures, the main narrative is nevertheless that of the Beast.
But the remediation of any wondertale from text to animation is also an
advancement that allows for the wondertale to become even more wonderful. In
choosing wondertales, the mediator is using popular material and combining that with
the structure and plot of an already popular brand of feature films, such as romantic
comedies, will establish a very popular film-genre and, in the case of Disney, a canon
of animated classics which in many ways trump the wondertales in recognisability.
50
Ibid. p. 722
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January 20, 2011
Works Cited
Bacchilega, Christina. ‘An Introduction to the “Innocent Persecuted Heroine” Fairy
Tale’. Western Folklore, vol. 52, no. 1 (1993): 1-12
Baker-Sperry, Lori and Liz Grauerholz. ‘The Pervasiveness and Persistence of the
Feminine Beauty Ideal in Children’s Fairy Tales’. Gender and Society, vol.
17, no. 5 (2003): 711-726
Bottigheimer, Ruth. ‘Fairy-Tale Origins, Fairy-Tale Dissemination, and Folk
Narrative Theory’. Fabula, vol. 47 (2006): 211-221
Bottigheimer, Ruth. ‘Misperceived Perceptions: Perrault’s Fairy Tales and English
Children’s Literature’. Children’s Literature, vol. 30 (2002): p. 1-18
Cummins, June. ‘Romancing the Plot: the Real Beast of Disney’s Beauty and the
Beast”. Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 20, no. 1 (1995); 2228
Deszcz, Justyna. ‘Beyond the Disney Spell, or Escape into Pantoland’. Folklore, vol.
113, no. 1 (2002): 83-91
Erb, Cynthia. ‘Another World or the World of an Other? The Space of Romance in
Recent Versions of “Beauty and the Beast”’. Cinema Journal, vol. 34, no. 4
(1995): 50-70
Golden, Joanne M. and Donna Canan. ‘”Mirror, Mirror on the Wall”: Readers’
Reflections on Literature through Literary Theories’. The English Journal,
vol. 93, no. 5 (2004): 42-46
Hurley, Dorothy L. ‘Seeing White: Children of Color and the Disney Fairy Tale
Princess’. The Journal of Negro Education, vol. 74, no. 3 (2005): 221-232
Koven, Mikel J. ‘Folklore Studies and Popular Film and Television: A Necessary
Critical Survey’. The Journal of American Folklore, vol. 116, no. 460 (2003):
176-195
Lieberman, Marcia R. ‘"Some Day My Prince Will Come”: Female Acculturation
through the Fairy Tale’. College English, vol. 34, no. 3 (1972): 383-395
Stone, Kay. ‘Märchen to Fairy Tale: An Unmagical Transformation’. Western
Folklore, vol. 40, no. 3 (1981): 232-244
– – ‘Things Walt Disney Never Told Us’. The Journal of American Folklore, vol.
88, no. 347 (1975): 42-50
Tatar, Maria (Ed.). The Classic Fairy Tales. Norton Critical Editions. New York:
Norton, 1999
Wood, Naomi. ‘Domesticating Dreams in Walt Disney’s Cinderella’. The Lion and
the Unicorn, vol. 20, no. 1 (1996): 25-49
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Zipes, Jack. ‘Breaking the Disney Spell’. Fairy Tale as Myth – Myth as Fairy Tale.
Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1994
– – Breaking the Magic Spell. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2002
– – Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion. New York: Routledge, 1991
– – Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales, Children, and the Culture Industry. New York:
Routledge, 1997
Filmography:
Beauty and the Beast, 1991. Dir. Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise. Walt Disney. DVD,
Sleeping Beauty. 1959. Dir. Clyde Geronimi. Walt Disney. DVD, 2002
– – ‘Once Upon a Dream: The making of Walt Disney’s Sleeping Beauty’.
Other References:
Basile, Giambattista. ‘Sun, Moon and Talia’, Tales of Arne Thompson type 410
translated and/or edited by D.L.Ashliman.
http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/type0410.html#basile
Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm. ‘Little Brier-Rose’. Tales of Arne Thompson type 410
translated and/or edited by D.L.Ashliman.
http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/type0410.html#grimm
Perrault, Charles. ‘Sleeping Beauty in the Woods’. SurLaLune Fairy Tales, ed. Heidi
Anne Heiner. http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/sleepingbeauty/index.html
Disney Archives, Sleeping Beauty,
http://disney.go.com/vault/archives/characters/sleeping/sleeping.html
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