Case 3: Disney vs. Grimm vs. Perrault

On the Internet, works of fiction attract two separate but equally horrible groups: pedants who insist that the work is either a ripoff of a more obscure work (that is more to their own taste) or that it’s terrible because it has achieved a modicum of popularity; and mindless idiots who enjoy a work solely because it is popular, making it look bad by association.  The dedicated blogger who puts these people in their place is an elite connoisseur of film and literature known as the Pop-Culture Attorney.  These are his stories.

DUN-DUN

            “I, Tony Maravilla, solemnly affirm that I will support the integrity of film and literature, and any other outlying forms of genre-fiction, and that I will faithfully discharge the duties of fan and counselor at popular culture to the best of my knowledge and ability.”  These words I swore to myself with my hand on the Silmarillion after looking up the California State Attorney’s oath, after I randomly decided to start calling my articles “Case notes of the Pop-Culture Attorney”.

            Having just made a mockery of the American Legal system, I turned to my client.  He was a short, mousy type, covered in black hair that stood out against his papery white skin.  Even his huge jug-ears were covered in the stuff.  He was wearing only bright red shorts, white gloves, and oversized yellow shoes.  Make no mistake though; he was one of those eccentric millionaire types.  Mickey could buy and sell you three hundred times without batting an oversized eyelash.

            But what did he want with me?  A guy like him could have anyone who badmouthed him filled full of lead and dropped to the bottom of the north sea, or “transferred” to one of those schools in the GREA, and made to fight to the death in gladiatorial games.  But Mickey told me that handling things that way just got him a reputation for being vicious, which is the last thing he needed right now.  For years, people have said that he’s been filling kids’ heads with mush, making little girls into lazy broads who were just waiting for a prince to come rescue them instead of being pretty little feminists (as if kids need labels with “ist” at the end applied to them), and of butchering classic stories from the “original” versions into cheap, marketable—

 “You had me at ‘original’, Mickey,” I said, pouring him a scotch.

            Right, so if you haven’t guessed from my shitty meandering attempt at noir, I’m going to defend the Disney animated canon.  In this article, I’ll be comparing it to the two most well known sources of fairy tales; The Grimms’ Kinder-und Housmarchen, and Charles Perrault’s Tales of Mother Goose.  But first, I must once again remind you readers in how exactly you have been naughty.

            How many times have you been talking about fairy tales when some pedant sauntered up and said “actually, in the original version—” you may not have known this, but at that point you are legally allowed to punch him in the dick.  See, fairy tales are an oral tradition, that’s why parent read them aloud to their children at night.  Some of these stories have been around for thousands of years.  Scholars say that Beauty and the Beast actually evolved from the legend of Cupid and Psyche!  In the time that story has existed, the premise has been inverted entirely from falling in love with a god to falling in love with a monster, and this jackass is trying to pass off the Grimms as the authors of the story!  Unless he has access to a time machine he has no right to talk about the “original story”.  Furthermore, these guys always bring up the Grimms even though Perraul’s collection predates them, because Perrault was more Disney than Walt, while the Grimms had a love for the macabre.

            Another thing that annoys me about people who don’t know what they’re talking about is when women complain about fairy tales being too patriarchal and teaching their daughters to be passive and all that bullshit.  First of all, fairy tales weren’t intended for children to learn things, they predate the times when people thought children needed their own forms of entertainment.  However, when Perrault wrote his collection, he felt the need to stick in a pretty little moral at the end of each one, a happy little rhyme for the kiddies, and most of them are dumb and should be skipped when reading his otherwise excellent work.  For example, the moral for “Bluebeard” that he wrote tells women to not poke into their husband’s business, even though following that advice would have resulted in the protagonist of Bluebeard locked up in her hubby’s murder-dungeon.

            More to the point, I advise any parents concerned with the lack of “feminist” tales to simply put down three-hundred year old Frenchman’s collection and pick up Joseph Jacobs’s English Fairy Tales, and More English Fairy Tales, which contain more strong female protagonists than most recent books (coughTwilightcough).  Perhaps even too strong; Molly Whuppie is a dangerous criminal and would’ve been hanged for her crimes had the victim not been a cannibalistic giant.  Damn, England used to be badass.  There’s also “Kate Crackernuts”, about two princesses who rescue each other, the haunting “Tamlane” about Berd Ellen rescuing her beloved from the fairy queen, and the tragedy of “Binnorie”, which is like the ending of School Days but with drowning instead of decapitation.  All the same, while there are some good “feminist” rewritings of fairy tales, such as Beauty and The Robber Bride, those are novels for adult people. Calm yourself.

            Now, as much as I would love to glomp Joseph Jacobs and his collections, and ramble on and on about his various stories and the clever poetry that he incorporated (and in an appropriate context too! Suck it Perrault), Disney hasn’t adapted any of his stories into a movie.  If they ever adapt “Molly Whuppie” I’ll watch the shit out of it, mind.  Then I’ll buy the stupidly expensive DVD release (seriously it’s like they don’t actually want you to buy their movies). But enough digression.  The three stories that I decided all three collections, i.e. Disney Animated Canon, Hausmarchen, and Mother Goose, have in common are “Snow White”, “Cinderella”, and “Beauty and the Beast”.  Sure I could go on about how in Grimms’ “Rapunzel”, the prince nocks her up, but I haven’t read Perrault’s version, or how in Boccaccio’s “Sleeping Beauty” the prince rapes her in her sleep, but I want you to like fairy tales, and that’s the only Boccaccio I’ve read that was even memorable.

            Right, so Snow White was the first film in the Disney Animated canon and the third or so feature-length animated film ever.  It has some pretty heavy street cred.  It has really influenced all future interpretations of the fairy tale.  Even the grimmest deconstruction of the fairy tale genre will have the titular princess dressed in blue and yellow, or wearing her hair in a bob, or being a curvy young woman, but we’ll get to that.  Also, it’s the first interpretation to give the dwarves distinct personalities.  Now, a lot of pedants will have a problem with the ending of the bloody thing, they’ll say in their Simpsons-comic-book-guy voice “in the original the apple is stuck in her throat and gets bumped out when the prince takes her body away to put on display in his palace!  Worst.  Movie.  Ever.” 

            Fuck you, bro.  You’re talking about the Grimm version.  The Grimm version also included scenes where the witch-queen tries to kill Snow White repeatedly using enchanted objects, like a poisoned comb and a girdle that’s too tight.  Perrault used the kissing scene because he was French and enjoyed things like that, whereas the Grimms were scholars trying not to preserve the oral tradition but its Germanness, and Germans are dour sorts, and have been since antiquity.  The Grimm version also tries to emphasize Snow White’s innocence and purity as the reason for the fact that she let the same horrible woman try to poison her three times in a row, and actually imply that she’s a child.  Now how does it look when a child is being led off to marriage by a stranger?  It’s one thing to read about it in the Grimms’ comforting minimalist style, or it in Perrault’s frankly beautiful language, but another thing entirely to see it on film.  So Disney stuck with Perrault’s kiss because it was less anti-climactic, because seriously, bumping a coffin, come on, and they made Snow White an adult or near adult to make it acceptable, emphasizing her physical maturity *ahem* probably more than any other Disney Princess, and they cut out the multiple assassination attempts because innocence and purity is all well and good, but a young woman needs common sense goddammit.

            And now, for the witch herself.  So, you ignorant pissants, did you know that the Grimms themselves actually toned their shit down to make it more age appropriate?  The Hausmarchen started out as a serious anthropological work meant to collect, well, Children’s and Household Tales native to the Germanic region (Germany not being a unified country until several decades later), but stupid people would go into a store and see something with a title as friendly as KINDER-UND HAUSMARCHEN GESSEMELT DURCH DIE BRUDER GRIMM!  HEIL HYDRA (X)!  ROT SCHADEL ICH BIN EIN UBERMENSCHEN! (don’t you just love the German language?), and they would buy it and take it home and read it to the kids and then they’d complain to the publisher.  Once the bros realized that kids were actually reading their collection instead of scowling, elderly, pre-Imperial Teutonic scholars with hook noses and tiny, tiny glasses, they decided to alter a few things.  They got rid of some sexual references, and then they changed the alarmingly high rate of evil mothers into evil step-mothers.  One wonders why there were so many evil mothers in the first place, but then again this is Germany, and getting yelled at to clean up your room by an old housefrau is probably scarier than getting yelled at by an average non-German mother.  That said they left in all of the gore and the grimdark.  If they were alive today, they would definitely read Terry Pratchett, seeing as they prescribe to his idea that children “on the whole, are quite keen on blood provided it's being shed by the deserving”.  And good lord do they shed.

            The witch’s death in the Grimm version is being forced into red-hot iron shoes and made to dance until she dropped dead for the newlyweds’ amusements.  Aside from being the most metal thing I’ve ever written, it’s also pretty awful.  I’m not going to say that it’s bad for children (see above quote), but damn, read that shit in a silly voice when you get to it or something.  And is it really all that much worse than being chased up a mountain by dwarves and then falling off it?  Track that scene from the Disney version down on YouTube, it’s actually kind of scary.  See in a film, you can actually get scary imagery plugged right into your brain through your eyes, but in print you need to sort of be led into it with pretty, ominous words; my summary of the witch’s death scene is probably scarier than the actual one because they don’t use words like “forced” and “amusements”.  And actually, I think that the Disney version is better because it’s just more dramatic.  It happens before Snow is woken up instead of being part of the denouement, and the people who care about her are actually involved, and trying to get their revenge.

            And of course there’s the minor note of at the very start of the story, when the witch/mother/step-mother asks the huntsman to kill Snow and bring her something.  In the earliest editions of Grimm, she asked for Snow White’s heart, liver, lungs, and a bottle of her blood stoppered with her toe, so she could eat that shit to gain her beauty.  \m/(*o*\m/)  I’m hategasming for this lady so hard that if some kid using turn of the century euphemisms started inexplicably punching me and accusing me of putting Juggalos in the White House, I wouldn’t even notice.  It was later simplified to just the heart and a diet coke.  Proto-Grimm version is best witch!

            Now, onto Cinderella.  I could actually just write about thirty pages on this one alone, because it is literally the most adapted fairy tale in history.  And it is based on a true story!  Rhodopis was a courtesan in Crete or some other Mediterranean backwater and rose above her station to marry the King.  Dreams do come true!  This was 3000 years ago by the way, so not that often.  Therefore, if some hipster ever melts out of the shadows and starts describing the Grimm version at you while you’re humming “A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes”, make a straw effigy of him.  Then, take it to some holy ground, or a place where spirits are known to dwell, find the oldest, biggest, most beautiful tree there, and nail the straw doll to it with a rusty old six inch railroad spike.  The guardian spirit of the region will strike your hipster dead within a fortnight.

            Now oddly enough, or so it will seem if you’re only familiar with the Disney version, most international interpretations will feature talking animals as the girl’s beneficiaries instead of a fairy godmother, as well as multiple balls, and the fact that whatever we call her isn’t actually her real name but some cutesy insult. In fact, the wonderful Joseph Jacobs made up a story for his collection that splices various elements from the local British versions to see if anyone would notice.  Anyway, I will refer to the three Cinderellas as Cinderella (Disney), Aschenputtel (Grimm), and Cinder-wench (Perrault; the actual French name is Cindrillon, I’ll explain later).

            Disney explicitly uses Perrault as a source for most of their fairy tale adaptations, which is why their version has a fairy godmother.  I don’t know if Perrault made up the fairy godmother or if she’s a traditional element of the story in the France.  Now, the Disney version is actually fairly original as far as the most adapted story ever goes, even though the film is all but explicitly set in France; the extravagant architecture, as well as the names give it away (Tremaine, Jaq, etc).  They even added the animal friendship that Aschenputtel exhibits in her story.  For example, Aschenputtel has to do some stupid mindless busy work in order to attend the ball, but her bitch of a step-mother tells her no anyways after her bird friends do it for her.  Cinderella also has to do a chore, but here she just needs to find something to wear.  Her mice friends make her a dress, but in a very traumatic and well done scene, her bitch step-sisters rip it right off her.  You’re making me tear-bend!

            As to the fairy godmother herself, it seems that Cinder-wench knew she was a fairy from the beginning.  There’s no big entrance where she proves her magical abilities, she just shows up and they act like palls.  This is odd to me, because why would her step-sisters mess with her so much if they knew she had a goddamn fairy for a guardian?  Just be glad it’s not an English fairy, or she’d sing a scary song at you and transform you into the animals you most resemble.  “Had I BUT THE WIT yes’treen / that I have got today, / I’d’ve PAID THE FIEND SEVEN TIMES HIS TIEND, / ‘ere you be won away!  For messing with my god-daughter.  But in rhyme.  Maybe some musical accompaniment?”

            For narrative purposes, Cinderella only goes to the ball once, whereas Aschenputtel has to attend three times and Cinder-wench goes twice.  This is another aspect of adapting an oral tradition to film.  Repetition is good when you’re in your spinning circle with the other women and you’ve forgotten the next part of the story, or you need to pad the length, and it makes it much easier to remember (now don’t be trippin’ and calling me a sexist, that’s how most stories started), but there’s no real narrative reason for her to go more than once.  Also, in other versions she usually wears more and more extravagant dresses to the following visits and the animation team probably would’ve gone on strike for that.  I mean, her dress is probably the second most extravagant Disney dress after Belle’s, and that movie was forty years later. 

            Anyways, the glass slipper.  Fairy-tale aficionados will tell you that the original French version has a fur slipper and it was mistranslated to glass, since the two words are vair and verre, but I’m pretty sure that’s just a myth.  Even so, imagine wearing some slippers lined mink or ermine; that would be pretty sweet.  Fur is a valuable commodity, and being able to put it on your feat would pretty much cement the fact that you are just lousy with cash, so get your head out of the gutter.  Also, Cinderella has a little plot point where she gets locked up while the duke comes over with the slipper.  This is taken from the Grimms, but the point where they drop the slipper and she produces the matching one is actually not present in either of the two versions, and since the fact that it’s made of glass is not present in any other version, we can only assume that it’s a Frenchman’s extravagance.

            Since the Cinderella and Cinder-wench are so similar, I’m only going to make one more comment on the later.  Cinder-wench’s tale is the first one to utilize the plot point in a lot of modern adaptations that she has a mean sister and a nice one.  The bitch sister calls her Cinder-wench to be a bitch and the nice sister (Charlotte?  Maybe….) calls her Cinderella to be cute, and Cinder-wench to decides to go by that instead.  Also, the tacked on moral is actually appropriate and even good: “Without doubt it is a great advantage to have intelligence, courage, good breeding, and common sense. These, and similar talents come only from heaven, and it is good to have them. However, even these may fail to bring you success, without the blessing of a godfather or a godmother.”  Moving on.

            Aschenputtel might as well be from a completely different story.  Those Germans do love their Grimmness.  The other stories just gloss over the fact that the girl’s now motherless, but Aschenputtel makes it a plot point!  I know I said that most other stories have talking animal assistants, but Aschenputtel is completely in command of her situation.  The animals, doves in this version, do things because she wants them to, not because she broke down crying.  But back to the topic, her prime beneficiary is a tree.  She planted a twig on her mother’s grave and cried, and it sprouted into a full-fledged tree.  This is not explained by fairies or some such, but that good old folk magic that common people seem to possess in Grimm’s tales, as if to compensate for their poverty.  The tree is implied to be possessed by her mother’s spirit, and gives her nice things when she asks.  But for some reason, there is no deadline like in other versions.  Aschenputtel leaves the ball of her own free will at midnight every night.  Presumably, this was intended to play hard to get, the naughty little minx, as the prince’s attempts to follow her are more desperate every time until he spreads tar on the palace steps in order to catch her, but just gets one of her golden shoes.

            So he goes around asking every girl in the country to try the shoe on as per usual, and gets to Ash’s house.  She’s locked up in the cellar and her two sisters try on the shoe, and here’s where shit gets gory.  The sister’s feet are too big to fit the shoe.  Luckily their mother realizes this before they try it on.  Unluckily, her solution is to take them into a private room and chop off parts of their feet until she thinks they’ll fit, on the grounds that walking is for poor people and communists.  Sure looks like these heels were…*removes sunglasses*…murder (YEAAAAAAAAAAAH).

            Since the prince is apparently blind or retarded (thank god he’s rich and pretty, I guess), he doesn’t notice the blood gushing out of each step-sister’s foot until Ash’s birds point it out to him.  He actually agrees to marry first one then the other, until he finds out that they’re in horrible agony and kicks them out of his carriage.  He goes back, saying that he’s checked out every girl in the kingdom and they must have another one living in the house, and as a joke they let Ash try it out, and then she’s the only one laughing.  Not being very vindictive at all, oh no, she invites her tormentors to the royal wedding, and on the way there her doves peck their eyes out.  Grimm Cinderella is best Cinderella.  She’s so badass; imagine if she and KAZUO KRIYAMA had babies….

            Ah, Beauty and the Beast.  A classic tale about the redeeming power of love, truly, as the Disney film claimed in its tagline, the greatest love story ever told.  Surely I’ll harp on about this for hours and hours—the three versions I’m comparing are exactly the same.

            Fuck, I hadn’t actually read the Grimm version until I started this project.  I have the movie on my iPod, and the Perrault version in a collection of “world folklore” representing France, but not this one.  And now, I have so little to say.  Just some slight differences between the three of them:

            In Perrault’s version the beast is very nice to Beauty, but is unattractive and unintelligent.  The tacked on moral is about how a woman should just be grateful that a man wants to marry her at all, you ugly cow.  Perrault must have been drunk when he thought that one up.

            In the Disney version, the Beast is a rat-bastard but starts to show his soft side.  It also features Gaston, and is therefore the best version, because no one fights like Gaston, douses lights like Gaston, in a wrestling match nobody bites like Gaston, for there's no one as burly and brawny, as you see he’s got biceps to spare, not a bit of him's scraggly or scrawny, And ev'ry last inch of him’s covered with hair!  Also, the living appliances.  I haven’t the foggiest idea where they came up with those, though actually, they may have evolved from the “invisible hands” that served in Cupid’s mansion in Cupid & Psyche, which I told you a while ago was the basis of this story, pay goddamned attention.

            The Grimm’s version features a Beast who is unattractive, but also kind and intellectual.  He gives Beauty leave to visit her sick father like in the other two versions, but starts getting sick when she doesn’t come back before the seven days he let her go.  He’s only cured when she comes back and agrees to marry him, healing his curse as well.  Some illustrations of this version are of an anthropomorphic lion in a nice 1700s era suit, probably inspiring the Disney version.

            Damn, I feel like at the end of The Complete Works of Shakespeare (Abridged) [Revised] when the actors somehow managed to finish early and just try to remake Hamlet increasingly shorter until they just all fall down dead at once.  Then they do it backwards.

            Right. I guess I can talk about other stories.  How about Furrypelts?  I bet the one amateur folklorist in the audience just squeeed a bit.  This is a fairy tale that was adapted by Perrault as “Donkeyskin” and by the Grimms as something unpronounceably German, but Disney wouldn’t dare ever touch this one.  It’s about a king who falls in love with his daughter and demands to marry her.  She proceeds to cleverly plan her escape, delaying the wedding by asking for four ridiculously extravagant gifts; a dress that shines like the sun, one that shines like the moon, one that glitters like the stars, and a cloak made from every kind of animal in the kingdom, though Perrault’s version just wants a donkeyskin, because she’s dumb. 

            Of course, the French apparently draw the line at incest, because in his version the king asks her how much she loves him and she says “as much as meat loves salt”, which offends him for some reason so he banishes her and these are her parting gifts.  I really like the setup of this story because it’s so very different, but the ending feels a bit too much like Cinderella; she finds work at a castle in a neighboring kingdom disguised as a horrible furry monster (apparently they let monsters work in castles) and sneaks out at nights in her dresses to attend the balls, blah blah blah.  You can figure it out.  Of course, to prove that he really is a perv, Perrault’s version has the prince spy on her while she changes into her outfits, and treats her as if she’s being a tease.  Now, Perrault’s version is very, very beautifully described.  No one throws a royal wedding like a sexually deprived Frenchman.  But the Grimms’ version is a lot more hauntingly beautiful in its audacity, and I think it just works better.  Anthropologists must disagree though, seeing as their name for the whole meta-story is something like “Meat for Salt 209” or some shit.

            I guess that wraps it up for now—what’s that?  The Little Mermaid?  That’s not a fairy tale, silly.  It’s a short story by Hans Christian Andersen in the style of fairy tales, and it’s really quite good.  Astute readers will know about the notoriously sad ending where the little mermaid’s prince marries someone else and her sisters show up to give her a magic knife that they traded the sea-witch for that’ll let her come back to the sea if she kills him and his wife with it but she refuses and FUCKING DIES *gasp* *gasp*.  I think I like it better than the movie.  Not that it was bad.  It kicked off the Disney Renaissance, and basically saved animation.  It probably has the second best score of any of them (the first is of course The Hunchback of Notre Dame), and the highest concentration of good songs, especially Ursula’s.  Sebastian is the best Disney sidekick because he gets you laid, and Ariel’s a great character.  And the fact that she’s half-naked for half the movie doesn’t have anything to do with that; I felt legitimately protective of her once I saw that all of her knowledge about humanity comes from a retarded seagull.  I also get a kick out of seeing that the Prince is basically Aladdin. 

            But, this movie is more like a prototype of the Disney Renaissance.  The parts are all there, but it’s not quite as good as the ones after it for some inexplicable reason.  Also, the original story has a wonderful character, the mermaid’s grandmother, who’s just hilariously over the top and melodramatic, and she was replaced by Zeus I mean Triton, who’s bland as Hell.  Another note; I find it really weird that in all of the Princess merchandise, Ariel is wearing this big puffy dress that was only in the movie for like two seconds.  She actually wears this cute blue and black number for most of the time she’s human, but you would never know it based just on say, trailers, or the stuff you buy your niece.  Probably because it looks like something someone would actually wear!

            Right, I’m done for real now—Red Riding Hood?  You’re just fucking with me now, there’s not even a Disney version.  A Looney Toons one I think.  I guess…. There’s a lot of early versions that were told around a different sort of campfire, *ahem*.  These usually involve a sexy teenage version of little red and an inventory of her clothing *ahem*.  Oh, on a different note, Perrault was the first person to publish it, and it’s his version with the sad ending where she dies, while the Grimms had the woodsman save everybody and they even actually gave it a sequel!  So much for that old Germanic predisposition towards the morbid, eh?  Also, anthropologists can’t find versions of this story older than the late middle ages in Europe, but think it might be descended from a Chinese story called “Great-Aunt Tiger”.  Neat!

            I like learning more about the origins of a story rather than the alleged symbolism.  This is folklore after all; there’s probably not that much of it!  Average folk want stories that are easy to understand, not some bullshit about how her hood represents the sun or the red means sexual awakening or some nonsense.  It’s completely conceivable for instance that the talking wolf may have come from the werewolf hunts in Europe at the time, or that he represents bandits or sexual predators, but I cannot believe that it’s a sexual thing for her—except in the naughty versions of course.  So what’s the best version?  This:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=pYW2GmHB5xs

I’m in love.

            Right, real quick, here’s my sources.  The Annotated Brothers Grimm and Annotated Classic Fairy Tales are wonderful collections edited by Maria Tatar that act as a sort of greatest hits of Fairy Tales in general, and feature beautiful full color illustrations from across the ages as well as scholarly introductions to each tale as well as helpful side-notes, set apart from the text in the margins so as not to interrupt the flow.  Joseph Jacobs’ English Fairy Tales and More English Fairy Tales are excellent, as I’ve said, and ABC-Clio collects them into a single volume, though I’ve heard some bad things about the company since.  I really love fairy tales, if you can’t tell, and I’ll probably write my thesis about them, but that won’t be any fun like this was!

            Next week on Pop-Culture Attorney:  Digimon vs. Pokémon!

One of the above statements is a lie, by the way.  Have fun trying to figure it out.