19th August, 2025 in Folklore

‘Un-Disneyfying’ our folk tales

By Tom Phillips

Since the 1930s, Walt Disney and the Disney corporation have brought us some of the most magical and spell binding cinema experiences of all time, with the vast majority of their films retelling traditional folk and fairy tales. As children, we all remember watching with wide-eyed wonder as the colourful characters over-come adversity, often with the help of some kind of magical friend. They then proceed to live, as with all great stories, or so we are told, happily ever after. Tom Phillips author of Unhappily Ever After discusses that folk tales don’t always have a happy ending like those in Disney films.

The stories we are told as children shape our world view. They help us prepare for the big, wide world and what we can expect from humanity. These Disney films teach us that there is evil out there but, if we have courage and are true of heart, we will win the day and find our happily ever after. We then grow up and life hits us like a run-away mine cart filled with seven vertically challenged miners. We begin to realise that life is hard, but, unlike those Disney stories, we can’t always get over our troubles. Sometimes life sucks and there is nothing we can do about it. Sure, there are times of enormous happiness, such as marriages and births, but these are very much balanced out with those times of great sadness, such as the certainties of life which are death and taxes. Life is not a simple happily ever after. The House of Mouse hid us from the truth and maybe we aren’t quite as prepared for adult life as we thought.

So, let’s start and the beginning as that’s always a good place to start. In 1938 Walt Disney released the groundbreaking animated feature film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. Whilst revolutionary for the time and for animation in general, it didn’t really break any new ground in storytelling, choosing simply to retell the story of the titular character, as recounted by the brothers Grimm in the seminal collection of European folk tales in the early 19th century. However, Walt found these stories a bit too gruesome for family audiences, as did the general public upon the publication of the first book, Children’s and Household Tales in 1812. The Grimms changed certain aspects of the tales for their second edition, such as making the evil mothers into step-mothers, but this was not far enough for Disney. In the original version of the folk tale, the wicked queen wanted to eat the heart of her rival in beauty, Snow white. The huntsman is sent to carve Snow’s heart from her chest which, upon seeing the young woman’s beauty and innocence, the huntsman fails to do, feeding, instead, the heart of a pig to the queen. This causes the huntsman to meet a sticky end. She then attempts to kill her two other times. Of course, the version we got in celluloid was, although still terrifying (that scene in the dark forest still haunts my dreams even to this day), somewhat less gruesome.

Fast forwarding to the 1990s, during Disney’s renaissance, after a decade of darker storytelling with now cult classics such as Basil, The Great Mouse Detective, The Rescuers, and The Black Cauldron which was based on Celtic mythology and actually really good, we get a return to more family friendly storytelling. One of the seminal films that kicked this all off was the 1989 Disney version of The Little Mermaid. This colourful, song filled retelling of the Hans Christian Anderson classic tale was an instant hit and continues to be so, however, once again, the story has been tinkered with. In the film, the sea witch is defeated and Ariel finds her happy ever after with Prince Eric upon the land, showing us all that if we are brave enough to make sacrifices in life, we can find our one true love and happiness. Of course, Anderson did not write it like that. In his version, when the mermaid gets her legs, she feels a pain like needles stabbing her legs when she walks upon them. Her sisters give her a dagger which she needs to stab Eric with and cause his blood to drip onto her legs giving her back her tail. Ariel cannot go through with this and, instead, flings herself and the dagger into the sea, becoming sea foam. Definitely not a happily ever after!

My final example for this article comes, once more, during this 90s revival period, with the classic retelling of the Greek myth, Hercules (don’t you mean hunk-ules!) In this Disney version, Hercules finds true love and becomes a god after overcoming many trials. He loves happily ever after with his loving father, Zeus, and mother, Hera. But of course, anyone who knows their Greek mythology knows, Hera was not his mother, but his step-mother. But Disney didn’t really want to depict Zeus’s true nature in a family film. Zeus often wondered among the mortals, having his wicked way with the women, and, well, Hercules came from one of these unions. Hera, understandably, was not happy with her husband, but took it out on Hercules instead. Among many terrible things she did to the constant reminder of her husband’s infidelity, by far the worst was to make him temporarily mad, causing him to murder his wife and child in cold blood. Funnily enough, this plot point never made it into the Disney film.

Life is hard and the stories we have told for centuries, our folk tales, fairy tales, myths, and legends, reflect that. Yes, many end on happy notes with the hero winning the day, but that isn’t the point of them. They are a vital way of passing on knowledge of our world and of the lives we live, helping others understand what hurdles they may encounter on their journey through life. And whilst they are told in metaphor, we can still relate to them and the main characters struggles but, sometimes, we need the stories we hear or read to not have that happily ever after. Life is messy and so our stories need to reflect that and they do. Sometimes the best stories are the ones in which the main character doesn’t get what they want but what they deserve. Sometimes the bad guy gets everything whilst the good guy fails. Sometimes, they deserve it, sometimes they don’t, but hey, that’s life, and our traditional tales reflect that. We still need to hear and read these stories, the stories that don’t end so well, that hang around with us for years after hearing them, acting as a warning for life, and what not to do.