Is Disney Really So Bad?: Disney and the Evolution of the Traditional American Fairy Tale

As Tartar notes, fairy tales “adap[t] to a culture and [are] shaped by its social practices” (xiv). As American culture began to change, the fairy tales produced by Disney studios began to change and adapt to changing American sensibilities. The main focus of this shift is the role that women play in the fairy tales. While many of Disney’s early fairy tale movies have female characters, they are fairly passive. They achieve their happily-ever-after as a reward for good behavior in the face of adversity. The prevalence of this in the early tales occurs for two reasons. First, the women’s behavior serves as a guide to the American people who, too, are facing the adversity of the Great Depression and then war. Second, the women’s behavior mirrors the expected behavior of women in society at that time. As women fight for and achieve what they want out of life, the female protagonists in the Disney fairy tales mirror that action. As a result, the female protagonists’ behavior serves a different purpose in these later fairy tale films. The behavioral shifts serve to “endow us with the power to reconstruct our lives” (Tartar xii). They are “fictional stories that provide a truth applicable in the real world as a moral” by embracing the growing importance of equality for women found in modern American (Zipes, “The Cultural Evolution of Storytelling 10).
This shift can first be seen in The Little Mermaid. The film was released in 1989, a full thirty years after Sleeping Beauty (Shaw, Bell, and Sperling 13). In this movie, Ariel, the protagonist, is a fairly independent girl who is determined to go after what she wants in life, the love of Prince Eric. She faces the outside world head-on, not letting any fear of the unknown sto...

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...o restructure our lives” (xii). Disney has accomplished this through the American fairy tales it produces. The tales provide hope and reinforce the American Dream. The fairy tale variations produced by Disney prove two things: Disney is both influenced by American culture and is able to influence it. Disney is, indeed, the maker, the translator, and the perpetrator of the values and cultural beliefs of the American society through the medium of the fairy tale. As Walter Burkert notes: “[a] tale becomes traditional not by virtue of being created, but by being retold and accepted” (qtd. in Zipes, “The Cultural Evolution of Storytelling 7). Due to their immense popularity, it is evident that Disney fairy tales will be retold and shared and experienced for a long time to come. The Disney fairy tales have, indeed, become the traditional American fairy tales.