The Walt Disney Company has a long history of adapting literary works for the screen, beginning with its short cartoons in the early 1930s. Since the 1990s, the company has extended the process of adaptation beyond animated and live action films to include theatrical productions, television programs, theme park rides, and streamed serials. This essay discusses a seminar that examined the Disney studio’s strategic approaches to adaptation over the past century. Topics included the extension of princess culture across multiple media formats; the continual revival of classic works through live-action re-releases, children’s television programs, and prequel stories; the acquisition and integration of the Star Wars universe into Disney’s films, theme parks, and Disney+ venture; and Disney’s plans to leverage the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) into its media empire. The class was informed by readings in adaptation theory, transmedia studies, animation studies, and musical theatre to assess how adaptations are shaped by factors such as corporate culture, brand identity, studio history, prevailing visual and narrative styles, technological developments, and other contemporary forms of media. Though the seminar was offered in a department of film, television, and theatre, the inclusion of a range of cultural forms would make this topic suitable as an interdisciplinary humanities offering as well.
The first third of the class explored Disney Princess culture as a framework within which to define the concept of “Disney” animation and identify the production methods and narrative and stylistic features that characterized the classic period. We analyzed configurations of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (David Hand, 1937), Cinderella (Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson, and Hamilton Luske, 1950),and Sleeping Beauty (Wolfgang Reitherman, Eric Larson, and Les Clark, 1959)across a range of narrative forms and historical periods. Students traced the roots of these princess films in the tales of the Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault’s fairy tales and assessed how the films reinforce or revise their literary sources. In class discussions and online posts, they noted how characters who are barely described in the literary sources become unique and memorable individuals in the films, such as the dwarfs in Snow White or the fairy godmothers in Sleeping Beauty. Princess films also enable us to explore the stylistic and narrative features that characterize “classic” Disney animation: an emphasis on naturalism, color, human and animal character development, memorable songs, and closely synchronized sound and image sequences. We examined the specific production techniques responsible for these features, such as the use of storyboards, hierarchical division of labor, and the multiplane camera. In the assessment for this section, students analyzed the sequence “Part of Your World” from The Little Mermaid (John Musker and Ron Clements, 1989) in relation to its literary source in Hans Christian Andersen’s tale and drew on clips from other Disney princess films to discuss how the film exploits the medium of animation.
Princess culture embodies assumptions about gender roles and “feminine” behavior, and these became more vivid when we explored live-action adaptations of the films, including Kenneth Branagh’s remake of Cinderella (2015) and Robert Stromberg’s Maleficent (2014). The emphasis on shoes and clothing in the Cinderella narrative and the controversy surrounding Lily James’ use of a corset prompted discussions of how costumes construct gender in film. A close viewing of Maleficent shifted attention to constructions of age, youth, and maternity.[1] The discussion of princess culture concluded by examining how Disney both mocks and modernizes its princess tradition in Enchanted (Kevin Lima, 2007).[2]
The second third of the class took advantage of the recent release of Cruella (Craig Gillespie, 2021) to trace the evolving narratives of 101 Dalmatians. The class read Dodie Smith’s novel (Heinemann, 1956) and compared this with Disney’s 1961 animated feature as well as the live action remakes 101 Dalmatians (Stephen Herek, 1996) and 102 Dalmatians (Kevin Lima, 2000) and the UK/Canadian television series 101 Dalmatian Street. In each case we noted how a project made use of specific formal properties of its medium and took advantage of the technological possibilities of that era, such as the use of Ub Iwerks’ new xerography process to trace the animated drawings directly onto cels in the 1961 film. One of the most fascinating qualities of the live-action remakes is the way in which they use heightened stylization and caricature to create cartoon-like environments and characters. The angular ceilings and intense black and white contrasts in Cruella’s office give the remake an almost expressionistic quality, and her exaggerated facial expressions and dramatic gestures make the live-action character as animated as her cartoon counterpart.
The animated television series 101 Dalmatian Street was produced in the UK and Canada for the Disney Channel and Disney+ and aired in the UK and Ireland in 2019-2020 and in the U.S. in 2020-2021. Though the series was cancelled due to low ratings, it represented a creative and original approach to the story. In the London of 2019, the family lives in trendy Camden Town, rather than upscale Regent’s Park, and includes parents Doug and Delilah and 99 pups. Delilah is a descendent of Pongo from the 1961 film, so she is British, and Doug is American, creating a family that blends two cultures. The two oldest offspring Dylan and Dolly supervise their younger siblings and rescue them from misadventures. The animators thought of the dogs as “tweens” who must “find their spot” and develop their own identities. Though animators said they felt the “burden of responsibility” to respect the earlier film, they also wanted to update the story to make use of the creative possibilities of new digital technologies.[3] The fast pace and zany humor of the programs incorporates recognizable London landmarks and makes the younger members of the family the focus of attention, rather than the parents (as in the 1961 film).
Though the character of Cruella de Vil only appears in the finale of the television series, she is the protagonist of Disney’s two live-action remakes and one of the key figures in Craig Gillespie’s 2021 live-action feature Cruella, starring Emma Thompson as fashion designer Baroness von Hellman and Emma Stone as a teenage Goth who becomes Cruella. In discussing this film, the class benefited from a Zoom talk by Dr. Elisabeth Castaldo Lundén, a scholar of fashion and author of Fashion on the Red Carpet (Edinburgh University Press, 2021), who argued that the film illustrates the clash between high-fashion couture houses like the one founded by Emma Thompson’s character and the emerging street fashion and boutique culture of Sixties London, exemplified by Emma Stone’s punk-Goth style. Cruella expands elements of the earlier live-action films to focus on issues of identity and the nature of “family” in ways that foreground the more sentimental qualities of Disney’s 1961 feature.
The final section of the class examined how Disney is expanding its intellectual properties beyond film and television by focusing on Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge (2019) and the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Like Cinderella’s and Sleeping Beauty’s castles, Galaxy’s Edge incorporates visual and design elements of the films to create simulacra of specific locations and narrative moments. Visitors can experience hyperspace with a ride on the Millennium Falcon or fight the Empire with newly purchased light sabers on Rise of the Resistance.[4] Students learned more about the design process when we zoomed with a recent graduate who had written her senior thesis on Galaxy’s Edge. This close examination of Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge also presented the opportunity to talk about Disney’s acquisition of George Lucas’ media empire and its impact on the company’s strategic vision.
One of the key differences between traditional adaptations and transmedia adaptations is that traditional forms, such as “page to screen” translations, encourage a one-to-one comparison of how each narrative is constructed, while transmedia adaptations construct stories through collections of texts; the complete narrative universe is not defined in only one story.[5] Both Star Wars and Marvel construct their narratives across films, novels, and streaming series. The class examined Rogue One (Gareth Edwards, 2016) and the streamed Mandalorian series (Disney+, 2019) to consider how these projects expand the original Star Wars narratives to revise the role of women and highlight the multi-generic influences on that saga. In each case the series or spinoff adds new characters and narrative dimensions to the existing collection of texts.[6]
The Marvel Cinematic Universe represents one of the most intense attempts to disperse elements of a fiction across multiple delivery channels, to use Henry Jenkins’ well-known formulation. The final segment of the class examined Marvel’s history, from its early days as a comic book series in the 1940s, to the recent Captain America, Spider-Man and Avengers films. Looking at the development of these narrative worlds across time and changing media formats also affords an opportunity to discuss the intertextual structure of adaptations and the impact of industrial convergence on the construction of serial narratives.[7] Spider-Man: No Way Home (John Watts, 2021), for example, incorporates earlier versions of the character in a three-way showdown that erases past representations and creates new narrative opportunities for Sony, the studio that owns the character. Whether and how Sony’s Spider-Man might interact with Marvel characters who are now Disney’s intellectual property is an open question and served as a writing prompt for students’ final papers.
From the “page to screen” comparisons of classic Disney princess films, to transmedia narratives of the convergence era, Disney’s hundred years of history offer many opportunities to discuss both the process of adaptation and shifts in adaptation theory that speak to franchising and transmedia storytelling.
Larissa Schlögl and Nelson Zagalo, “From Animation to Live-Action: Reconstructing Maleficent,” in Body and Text: Cultural Transformations in New Media Environments (Switzerland: Springer International, 2019). ↑
Paul R. Laird, “Musicals in the Mirror: Enchanted, Self-Reflexivity and Disney’s Sudden Boldness,” in The Disney Musical on Stage and Screen (London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2017). ↑
Information about the production history of the series comes from the 101 Dalmatian Street Work in Progress panel, Annecy Animation Festival, Annecy France, June 14, 2018. ↑
“Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge is Now Open at Walt Disney World Resort!,” StarWars.com, August 29, 2019, https://www.starwars.com/news/star-wars-galaxys-edge-now-open-at-walt-disney-world-resort. A news release in February 2023 reported that Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge is slated to close due to high maintenance costs. See “Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge Closing Permanently,” Mouse Trap News, February 24, 2023, https://mousetrapnews.com/star-wars-galaxys-edge-closing-permanently/#google_vignette. ↑
Henry Jenkins, “Transmedia 202: Further Reflections,” https://henryjenkins.org/blog/2011/08/defining_transmedia_further_re.html ↑
Matt Hills, “From Transmedia Storytelling to Transmedia Experience: Star Wars Celebration as a Crossover/Hierarchical Space,” in Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Storytelling (The Netherlands: Amsterdam University Press, 2018). ↑
James C. Taylor, “Reading the Marvel Cinematic Universe: The Avengers’ Intertextual Aesthetic,” Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 60, no. 3 (Spring 2021): 129–156 and Felix Brinker, “Transmedia Storytelling in the ‘Marvel Cinematic Universe’ and the Logics of Convergence-Era Popular Seriality,” in Make Ours Marvel (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017). ↑
