The Disney Stories Debate

Part 3
More Disney Discourse

Here is a response to the responses to Heather Burtch’s article on Disney’s classic tales.

From Sam Yada Cannarozzi:
It’s your local, neighborhood disney nemesis back at his word processor. Thanks in particular to Heather for her open spirit that this be a discussion for all of us to learn from. So let’s continue.

First reference, Team Rodent, How Disney Devours the World, Carl Hiaasen, Ballantine, New York, 1998. A real eye-opener by a top-notch investigative reporter. Because in asking how one feels about disney’s treatment of traditional story, it is intimately tied up in its general hegemony of appropriating culture.

First point I’d like to get back to, if one is willing to concede that disney has some genial ideas in the area of creativity, then why don’t they just make up their own stories instead of trying to rewrite the world’s imagination? You mention you want to have the discussion revolve around traditional stories. How about Andersen’s literary tale "Den Lille Havfru," "The Little Mermaid." My wife is Danish and I’ve had the thrill of listening to and reading some of Andersen in the original. It is a philosophical tale and conforms in part to Andersen’s way of looking at fantasy. And in the end, the main character dies. But disney totally distorts and manipulates the storyline so that colors and imagination make for that eternal happy ending à la mouse.

You make a good point in asking what gives storytellers the right to alter or change things in stories as I do in my reworking of frame tales. We don’t know each other personally, but I can intuit that you and I and the others who partcipate in and contribute to WIP do so with professional ethics, heart and imagination. I research any changes sometimes months, if not longer. I wrestle with the ethical questions all the time. I experiment with them and take chances presenting them to live audiences, and hide nothing of it. I always work into a performance, orally or in the program, the reasons why I make my presentation of a story. Do you really think that disney seems to give a damn about anything other than box office sales and making sure it stays in the top entertainment slot?!

You know, perhaps, that they tried to buy up a Civil War battle field to make it into a theme park. Hiaasen talks of this and the arrogant attitude they went about it with. After rewriting fantasy why not rewrite history itself? Especially if it can sell a few more disney stuffed toys. The entire local civilian population up in arms after disney declared it would go through with it no matter what, came out on top. And disney quickly retreated lest it leave the tiniest tarnish mark on its impeccable image. This is serious stuff. George Orwell thought of it also in his 1984.

So disney story rewrite (we already have historical examples, for example Perrault’s politically correct watered-down versions of Grimm for children) is not just a harmless change, they give themselves no limit whatsoever. They take stories that come down to us through the millenia sometimes, that each culture has carefully molded and adapted to its own genius, with the respect of leaving the sacredness of the story in its essence intact. And along comes a mouse who says "Yeah that bit’s OK, but this other stuff is hogwash. I’l1 make it better. It’ll pay, too."

Is it better to hear disney’s tales or none? Well first of all there’s a lot of well adapted, re-vivified, artistically and sensitively reworked story tradition out there. I know because we are part of it. It is then our responsability to keep the Word alive. Had fascism or totalitarianism won and rewritten literature, I certainly hope I wouldn’t be one to say, well we’ll have to make do. So I say here no disney tales, our tales!

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