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3. BREAKING THE DISNEV SPELL It was not once upon a time, but in a certain time in history, before anyone knew what was happening, Walt Disney cast a spell on the fairy tale, and it has been held captive ever since. He did not use a magic wand or demonic powers. On the contrary, Disney employed the most up-to-date technological means and used his own ''American" grit and ingenuity to appropriate the European fairy tales. His technical skills and ideological proclivities were so consummate that his signature has obfuscated the names of Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, and Collodi . If children or adults think of the great classical fairy tales today, be it Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, or Cinderella , they will think Walt Disney. Their first and perhaps lasting impressions of these tales and others will have emanated from a Disney film, book, or artefact. Though other filmmakers and animators produced remarkable fairy-tale films, Disney managed to gain a cultural stranglehold on the fairy tale, tightened by the recent productions of Beauty and the Beast (1991) and Aladdin (1992). The man's spell over the fairy tale seems to live on even after his death. But what does the Disney spell mean? Did Disney achieve a complete monopoly of the fairy tale during his lifetime? Did he imprint a particular American vision on the fairy tale through his animated films that dominates our perspective BREAKING THE DISNEV SPELL 73 Illustration by Charles Folkard, 1911. today? And, if he did manage to cast his mass-mediated spell on the fairy tale so that we see and read the classical tales through his lens, is that so terrible? Was Disney a nefarious wizard of some kind that we should lament his domination of the fairy tale? Wasn't he just more inventive, more skillful, more in touch with the American spirit of the times than his competitors, who also sought to animate the classical fairy tale for the screen? Of course, it would be a great exaggeration to maintain that Disney's spell totally divested the classical fairy tales of their meaning and invested them with his own. But it would not be an exaggeration to assert that Disney was a radical Project MUSE (2024-04-23 07:46 GMT) 74 f'AIRV TALE AS MVTH filmmaker who changed our way of viewing fairy tales, and that his revolutionary technical means capitalized on American innocence and utopianism to reinforce the social and political status quo. His radicalism was of the right and the righteous. The great "magic" of the Disney spell is that he animated the fairy tale only to transfix audiences and divert their potential utopian dreams and hopes through the false promises of the images he cast upon the screen. But before we come to a full understanding of this magical spell, we must try to understand what he did to the fairy tale that was so revolutionary and why he did it. In order to grasp the major impact of film technology on the fairy tale and to evaluate Disney's role during the pioneer period of fairy-tale animation, it is first necessary to summarize the crucial functions that the literary fairy tale as institution had developed in middle-class society by the end of the nineteenth century: 1. It introduced notions of elitism and separatism through a select canon of tales geared to children who knew how to read. 2. Though it was also told, the fact that the fairy tale was printed and in a book with pictures gave it more legitimacy and enduring value than an oral tale which disappeared soon after it was told. 3. It was often read by a parent in a nursery, school, or bedroom to soothe a child's anxieties, for the fairy tales for children were optimistic and were constructed with the closure of the happy end. 4. Although the plots varied and the themes and characters were altered, the classical fairy tale for children and adults reinforced the patriarchal symbolical order based on rigid notions of sexuality and gender. 5. In printed form the fairy tale was property and could be taken by its owner and read by its owner at his or her leisure for escape, consolation, inspiration. 6. Along with its closure and reinforcement of patriarchy, the fairy tale also served to encourage notions of rags to riches, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, dreaming, miracles, and such. BREAKING...

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