The Untruthful Representation of Fairy Tales by Disney

The modern Disney Movie fairy-tale is a romanticised and false version of a story that everyone believes to be romantic– the prince and the princess fall in love and they live happily ever after due to a nice adventure together where they save the kingdom. However, Disney movies are the ultimate twisting of a real story. In reality, these stories are far more morbid and not child-friendly, so while it is understandable that Disney alters the original tales, the real stories have become hidden to the modern viewer and so we are

Over hundreds of years, men like the Brothers Grimm have been accumulating stories of princes and princesses. Many of these stories were not happy. There was plenty of death, trickery, heartbreak, and sexual misconduct throughout their tales, making them the opposite of the modern “happily ever after”. A Disney movie takes terrible stories like this in which both women and men are hurt or abused (by each other), and turns them into a romantic tale. They have created a structure for these stories in which the prince and princess put aside their differences and fight for the love they have.

This is a lie.

These people may have seemingly fallen in love over time, but in the most disturbing and terrible ways possible. The reality of their abuse and pain was hidden from the world by those who would take their true stories and twist them into something child friendly, allowing us to believe in a lie.

Because of this fact, I want to focus on popular Disney movies that have taken incredibly sad stories that are indeed the true fairy tales, and changed them into a format that is more consumer friendly than truthful. What these people went through and the true moral of their stories should be what the public knows. We should not be allowed to believe in lies and base our conceptions of the world on falsities. One would never tell their parents that they wanted to be Pocahontas when they were older if they knew her true fate and how she and her people were treated by John Smith.

It is wrong, and that is why I have chosen to focus on the romanticisation of Disney movies and the lies they allow us to believe as my topic for Brief 2.