Fading fairytales

Everyone has a favorite fairytale. I’m sure most people grew up listening to or watching stories of Snow White or Sleeping Beauty or Hansel and Gretel or The Little Mermaid. I think this is also true for the recent generations as technology has made these stories easily available through movies and full-color story books. But I think it is important that we realize that most of us grew up with watered down, commercialized and, in a sense, co-opted versions of these classic fairytales.

Walt Disney has transformed some of the most wonderful fairytales into institutions of childhood – but at what price? By being part of a culture where visual entertainment has greatly overtaken the written art form, we forget that, once upon a time, these fairytales were more than just stories to entertain kids. These fairytales existed to show the beauty of incorporating fantastic characters with real-life emotions. They weren’t about princesses and princes, witches and pirates, dwarves and talking wolves or even happy endings. They were about love, sacrifice, jealousy, greed, morality and all sorts of other relevant things that have been made secondary by Disney animations. I think people like the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen don’t get enough credit.

Andersen’s Little Mermaid, for example, involved the talk of souls and the slaying of the Prince – something left out of the Disney feature – in the telling of this classic. The earlier versions of Snow White involved a lot more violence than the cartoon that we watched in the movies or saw on TV. The tale of Hansel and Gretel had themes of infanticide in its original text, as an analysis of the story suggests.

In the condensation of the fairytale to fit society’s dictates of what children can see and hear, a dimension of the author disappears. We no longer experience the story the way it was originally intended. Some of the original magic is sacrificed for a GP movie rating or a publisher’s approval.

I recently bought a copy of Neil Gaiman’s Smoke and Mirrors, a collection of short stories which have certain twists and allusions to long-standing legends and tales like the Holy Grail or Beowulf. In this book, I found weird, twisted versions of the stories of Santa Claus and Snow White, the former being portrayed as a prisoner of the elves and being doomed for eternity and the latter as an evil, blood-sucking creature who killed the queen (who, in the Disney version, was the witch).

Given that this book is probably not for the same audience as those who watched the Lion King (which, incidentally, among Disney’s classics, is the only one they claim as their own story) because of its graphic nature and more mature themes, it still succeeds in delivering that pure human magic that, not so long ago, fairytales had. It does it by creating a world where beauty isn’t necessary and bloodshed isn’t taboo and things don’t always end with a happily ever after. Gaiman goes back to that genuine art of fairytales, albeit in a twisted way, where the fantastic isn’t for commercial appeal.

Nowadays, fairytales are too absorbed with happy endings. Animation companies are too concerned with looking pretty that they are willing to do away with the inherent morality that fairytales possess in order to fashion something that glows with beauty and drama.

Fairytales aren’t, or shouldn’t be, special because they entertain and they make you cry and they have all these catchy songs. They are special because they exist to give a child something that a normal song, show, book or movie cannot give. I think G.K. Chesterton put it best when he wrote:

Fairy tales are more than true –

not because they tell us dragons exist,

but because they tell us dragons can be beaten.

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For comments please e-mail Carl at emailcarlramirez@yahoo.com.