FOUR FAVOURITE FAIRY TALES and THEIR DISNEY FILM ADAPTATIONS by ANGELIKA M. OFFENWANGER Integrated
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ONCE UPON A MOVIE SCREEN: FOUR FAVOURITE FAIRY TALES AND THEIR DISNEY FILM ADAPTATIONS By ANGELIKA M. OFFENWANGER Integrated Studies Project submitted to Dr. Jolene Armstrong and Dr. Joseph Pivato in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts – Integrated Studies Athabasca, Alberta July 2014 Table of Contents Abstract...........................................................................................................................................1 The Beginning: Once Upon a Time There Was a Story..................................................................2 The Power of Fairy Tales................................................................................................................4 "Cinderella": From Ashes to Palace................................................................................................8 "Sleeping Beauty": Enduring Through the Spell...........................................................................17 Interlude: Disney As Folktale........................................................................................................24 "Beauty and the Beast": Transforming the Animal.......................................................................27 "The Frog Prince": A Transformation Tale Transformed.............................................................37 And the Stories Live Happily Ever After......................................................................................46 Notes..............................................................................................................................................48 Works Cited and Consulted...........................................................................................................49 Offenwanger 1 Abstract "Cinderella", "Sleeping Beauty", "Beauty and the Beast" and "The Frog Prince" belong to the list of perennially favourite fairy tales, important parts of the canon of Western folklore. The reason for their popularity is the underlying story of each tale, which is empowering for its audience. Viewers and readers are able to experience the plot of a story through identification with the protagonist. These fairy tale plots are inherently empowering through their base story of the transformation from a spell-bound or oppressed existence to radiant happiness, a transformation that is either experienced or effected by the young woman who is the protagonist of the story. Fairy tales are re-told in myriad ways and often change significantly in detail during this process; however, each of the versions retains the key plot elements while adapting to the time and place of its telling. The example of these four fairy tales shows that the Baroque and Romantic fairy tale collectors—Charles Perrault, Mme de Villeneuve, Mme de Beaumont and the Brothers Grimm—adapt their versions to their culture as much as the Disney company does with their films. The Disney variants of the fairy tales take their place alongside the older written versions as a form of modern American folklore, disseminating the tales to today's audiences. Offenwanger 2 The Beginning: Once Upon a Time There Was a Story Sleeping Beauty is alive, and her home is in Pennsylvania. According to a 2012 news report (Breyer), Nicole Delien, a seventeen-year-old girl in the Eastern United States, goes through periods in which she sleeps for up to nineteen hours a day, including one episode of sleeping for sixty-four days at a stretch. She suffers from Kleine-Levin Syndrome, a very rare condition that causes hypersomnia. Not surprisingly, the disorder has also been dubbed Rip Van Winkle disease or, more commonly, Sleeping Beauty syndrome. Much like the slumbering princess of the fairy tale, Kleine-Levin patients cannot be properly roused until the episode of hypersomnia, which comes on suddenly and irresistibly, has run its course. The disease most commonly affects teenagers, causing them to miss out on large parts of their life as they literally sleep their youth away; over and over, the media accounts of Kleine-Levin-Syndrome sufferers assert that their life is no fairy tale. Fortunately, the disease tends to resolve itself spontaneously; adolescent-onset patients are often cured by the time they reach thirty ("Kleine-Levin Syndrome"). If it was not for the hundred-year duration of Sleeping Beauty's slumber, one might almost assume that the fairy tale was telling the story of a royal Kleine-Levin sufferer. Rare as the condition is, the immediate association of a young person who is sleeping for weeks at a stretch with the fairy tale attests to the popularity of the story. "Sleeping Beauty" is one of the tales German folkloristics calls Lieblingsmärchen, Favourite Fairy Tales (Uther 118), a relatively short list of fairy tales which are ubiquitously known in Western society; the list also includes the other three tales which form the subject of this paper: "Cinderella", "Beauty and the Beast", and "The Frog Prince". All of these stories have been told and re-told in a myriad of Offenwanger 3 ways, from straightforward reprintings of the Grimms', Perrault's or Beaumont's versions, through novel-length adaptations, to movies which started with the nineteenth-century beginnings of film-making and are still some of the biggest box-office draws today. For example, at the time of this writing two multi-million-dollar live-action fairy-tale film productions are being talked about, one newly released, one forthcoming: Kenneth Branagh's Cinderella with a star-studded cast of British actors in the roles of the 1950 Disney1 film is promised for 2015, while May 2014 saw Disney's Maleficent, a much darker-toned retelling of the 1959 Sleeping Beauty which turns the older story on its head, making the wicked fairy the sympathetic main character and the king the evil antagonist. With these movies the Disney company is reinventing, or at least revisiting, two of its biggest successes. The animated films have enjoyed unabated popularity since their release; in fact, Disney's films have come to dominate viewers' understanding of the tales. As far as much of North America is concerned, Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella are blonde, have angelic singing voices, wield a duster with great expertise and consort regularly with small animals, while their highest ambition is to find a prince to marry. This view of femininity is the exact reflection of the decade in which the films were produced, the time of the idealisation of the role of wife and mother. Disney's 1991 Beauty and the Beast also taps into its time's cultural concerns and has become a definitive version of the fairy tale, while the studio's 2009 "Frog Prince" film tells a story which, though different from the written variant of the fairy tale in most of its details, presents the same underlying message as the older versions. Even in the twenty-first century, the 1950s Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella are still eagerly watched by young girls, although few of them would state as their life's dream the hope Offenwanger 4 for a husband and a household full of small children, and the turn-of-the-millennium films Beauty and the Beast and The Princess and the Frog were a hit with audiences from the moment of their release. The main reason for the unabated popularity of the films is found in the strength of the underlying fairy tales themselves, stories which have endured through centuries and gone through many incarnations in that time. Disney's American twentieth-century film adaptations join French Baroque tales and German Romantic folk versions in telling stories which have an enduring power, which, in fact, are empowering. "Cinderella", "Sleeping Beauty", "Beauty and the Beast" and "The Frog Prince" are tales of transformation, stories which give hope to their audience that such a transformation can take place in the viewers' or readers' own lives. The Power of Fairy Tales Fairy tales, in common parlance, stand for unrealistic escapism, unobtainable perfection, and magical solutions. How can any such story be an instrument of empowerment? The answer lies in the nature of story itself and its function in human development. Brian Boyd, in his book On the Origin of Stories, speaks of art as "cognitive play [which] augments our capacities so that we can, at least in the domain on which each art focuses, efficiently produce ideas or actions" (95). One of the ways the art of story does this, Boyd claims, goes right down to the level of biology: "Mirror neurons, whose function was discovered only in the early 1990s, fire when we see others act or express emotion as if we were making the same action and allow us through a kind of automatic inner imitation to understand their intentions and attune ourselves to their feelings" (104). In other words, humans have the capacity to experience the experiences of Offenwanger 5 others by proxy, merely through watching or hearing of them. Engaging with story is a human tool. Janice Radway, in her influential 1984 study Reading the Romance, looked at the functions of love stories and concluded that romance novel readers use the act of reading as "combative and compensatory" (211). In a similar vein, Susan Elizabeth Phillips states in "The Romance and Empowerment of Women" that engaging with the standard romance novel plot—a woman wins the love of a powerful man, thereby bringing his strength under her control—serves as a tool of empowerment in presenting the reader with the possibility of power. "Creating a fantasy world is one of the primary