Disneys Medievalesque Sleeping Beauty Essay -- Essays Papers

Disneys Medievalesque Sleeping Beauty It was not at angiotensin-converting enzyme time upon a time, but in a certain time in history, before anyone knew what was happening, Walt Disney cast a spell on the coffin nail tale. He did not use a magic wand or goddamn powers. On the contrary, Disney employed the most up-to-date technological means and utilize his own American grit and ingenuity to appropriate European fay tales. His expert skills and ideological proclivities were so consummate that his signature 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 reverse White, Sleeping Beauty, or Cinderella, they will think Walt Disney. --Jack Zipes, Breaking the Disney Spell (72) Zipes, one of the foremost scholars on the fairy tale has published numerous commentaries on Disneys cinematic versions of fairy tales and critiques Disney for using them to perpe tuate what Zipes sees as cultural ills. In the same essay he writes, The manner in which he copied the musical theater films and plays of his time, and his close adaptation of fairy tales with patriarchal codes indicate that all the technical experiments would not be used to raise social change in America, but to keep power in the hands of individuals like himself, who mat up empowered to design and create new worlds (Zipes 93). Zipes ultimately sees Disneys egotism as guilty of failing to utilize the opportunity afforded within a long suit such as the animated fairy tale to acknowledge and foster change within the social order. Zipes, along with other scholars such as Eleanor Byrne and Martin McQuillan, authors of the book Deconstructing Disney, explore and catalogue the various ways in which Walt Disney-the man-and Disney-the throne that is his legacy-perpetuate social figurations of race, gender and ethnocentrism through they films they produce. They furthermore critique Di sney for reducing fairy tales to over-simplified, over-sanitized and over-sentimentalized banalities designed solely as a profit-generating products. Such analyses prove to be truly important work, as the socio-cultural ideas propagated by Disney, as well as the means by it executed such propagation prove primal in unlocking the messages that are sent through seemingly harmless recreation. As Zipes keenly point out, Yet, amus... ...Cited Byrne, Eleanor and Martin McQuillan. Deconstructing Disney. Great Britain Pluto Press, 1999. Dorfman, Ariel and Armand Mattelart. How to Read Donald sop Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic. Trans. David Kunzle. New York International General 1984. Lefebvre, Henri. make and Leisure in Everyday Life. Everyday Life Reader. Ed. Ben Highmore. Great Britain Routledge, 2002. 225-36. Marx, Karl. constituent to the Critique of Hegels Philosophy of Right Introduction. 1844. The Marx-Engels Reader. Ed. Robert C. Tucker. 2nd ed. USA Norton, 1978. 53-65. Once Upon a Dream The Making of Sleeping Beauty. Documentary. Disney, Inc., c. 1959. Perrault, Charles. The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood. 1697. Perraults Complete Fairy Tales. Trans. A.E. Johnson. USA Dodd, Mead & Company, Inc. 1961. 1-15. Sleeping Beauty. Dir. Wilfred Jackson. Walt Disney Studios, 1959. Sleeping Beauty commemorating Booklet. Disney Inc. c. 1997. Willis, Paul. Symbolic Creativity. Everyday Life Reader. Ed. Ben Highmore. Great Britain Routledge, 2002. 282-294. Zipes, Jack. Fairy Tale as Myth. USA University Press of Kentucky, 1994.