What can Disney fairy tales tell us about what we might imagine as possible in our world, and for whom? That is the question that drives my interest in and invocation of Disney in the study of fairy tale and fantasy media. Fairy tales have an implicit connection to fantasy media and how it might encourage audiences to reimagine the world.[1] But in the US-centric imaginary landscape, the fairy tale as a genre or form also becomes intertwined with Disney. It is convention to say something along the lines of “for better or worse” when talking about Disney and the fairy tale, with the emphasis implied on the “worse.” But as I have navigated my own research and lecturing in international academic and public contexts, I’ve dropped that convention. I grew up in the resurgence of not only Disney, but also the Disney fairy-tale musical and all of its implications for networked mass market productions.[2] Scholars such as Cristina Bacchilega draw on the concept of a “fairy-tale web” to draw attention to both the intertextual and networked nature of contemporary fairy tales, and to highlight that the spread of the fairy tale has happened in particular contexts reflecting particular power dynamics.[3] For me as a child consumer, these were neither the pinnacle of fairy-tale production that Disney marketed them as, nor were they some kind of horrible watered-down versions that did not do “original” tales justice. Disney fairy tales were just another part of the fairy-tale web, another branch of readily-accessible versions via the library or bookshop or Blockbuster that I consumed alongside other texts and films that also played with, or reiterated in different ways, the fairy tales I found in the collections we had on the shelf at home.

Looking at Disney fairy tales while reading broadly across the many adaptations and appropriations of the fairy tale in children’s and Young Adult publishing led me to ask questions about versions of tales, how they could be layered, what they were trying to say, and in some ways, if I was included in their wonder. The novelty of where wonder might be relocated and for whom becomes a part of why the fairy tale retains its hold on the imagination. Disney tales are no different. If anything, they become a doorway into learning to ask better, more critical questions about media production and narrative framing. Not just what is the story and how has it been changed, but why.

I currently teach a course on fantasy and its intersections with the real world, and one thing I constantly tell my students is that I am not asking them to memorize every detail of or perfectly understand every assigned text. Several years of guest lecturing or public lecturing changed how I approach teaching: I don’t always have time to impart deep wisdom and knowledge about specific films or stories, and I rarely get the chance to follow up with my students. So in the one to three hours I normally get to spend with students, I have to decide not what can I teach about fairy tales, but what can I teach them about their relationship to a narrative form that is often taken for granted, that people have many assumptions and deeply rooted beliefs about, whether unpacking assumptions about what fantasy is supposed to look like and who is meant to be in it, naming what kinds of people are missing in early animated Disney fairy tales, for instance, or otherwise complicating their perceptions of the intersection of magical story and history and national myth, as we often do when someone brings up Meeko as a favorite character or Pocahontas (Mike Gabriel and Eric Goldberg, 1995) as a favorite film.

Ultimately, like Merlin teaching Wart in between spats with sugar pots, erudite owls, and metamorphizing witches named Mim, I’m asking my students to ask questions, to notice things and wonder why choices in text or screen productions might have been made. I read portions of stories and show film clips or stills decontextualized. I ask them what they think comes next, what they assume each creator is trying to do, and then prompt them to look closely at what their own answers reveal. I’m not asking for right answers. I ask them to learn to see, to make the assumptions of normal or normative narrative transmission more visible. I don’t ask if they like something; I ask what kinds of responses are evoked. I ask them how they will take what they noticed, or maybe didn’t notice at first, outside of the classroom. It is not what they know or think that they know for certain that is important. What is important is the conversation, the discursive process of building webs of knowledge and understanding—connections that are made, questioned, and remade like spiders creating and unpicking and reweaving their creations—between us all within that classroom space.

I think about teaching and learning as an actively woven web of knowledge and understanding between students and instructors in part because that is how I think about fairy-tale adaptation. Disney is far from the only major adaptor of myth, legend, folklore, and fairy tale, but given how visible and financially powerful the corporation is and its constant attempts to claim both legal and cultural ownership of narratives through aggressive marketing and copyright enforcement strategies, its adaptations and appropriations of cultural stories like fairy tales hold a certain position and weight. When I am looking at Disney adaptation in my own research, I often rely on structuralist theories: dialogic constructions, paratexts and intertexts, metatexts, geometric models, and chronotopes. I strive to find out where and how these stories are located and understood and perceived, and what sort of imprint they leave behind—who finds wonder, and who finds harm and exclusion.

But when I start to navigate the films with my students, I start in two particular places: Julie Sanders’ construct of adaptation as a “collaboration”—across time, space, language, and culture,[4] and Jessica Tiffin’s idea of “recognition”—that fairy tales are fairy tales in part because we recognize them as fairy tales when we read them or view them.[5] I have a little doll that represents the “Little Red Riding Hood” story. I take it into classes and just ask the students to tell me a story while passing around the doll to each other. I ask them to then tell me “the Disney version.” Of course, there is no Disney “Little Red Riding Hood” as a feature film. I use the phrase “the Disney version” in a colloquial sense, the “what did you think made Shrek different from Disney” sense. I am not using it to invoke a particular vein of criticism or framing, or even Richard Schickel’s book, for which most of my students will not have any context. I use the phrase to make visible to my students that even if they think they do not have a lot of knowledge of or a deep love for the corporation, they still have an understanding of what Disney stories are, how they operate, what audiences can expect from them, and why that implicit understanding matters.

We use those stories to start to think about what makes something a fairy tale versus a Disney fairy tale. It makes the idea of versions of stories as existing simultaneously visible, and the idea of adaptation as “collaboration” a very real, living thing that can be participated in, pluralistic multivocality in real time. We start to question what it means to be the “real” or “authoritative” story and then look at places that Disney tries to make things look “authentic”—and we together ask why. This allows me to untangle ideas of absolute or authoritative versions, and instead look at fairy-tale adaptations as negotiated spaces, ones whose constructions can help us to ask who speaks, when, and why. We probe what these media productions can help tell us about our wider ideas of power, agency, and belonging: the coloniality implicit in telling other people’s stories with little to no input; the white supremacy inherent in aesthetic and medievalist constructions that preference both European settings and potentials for wonder for only certain people; the ableism; the politics of gender and sexuality; and the inherent cisgender heterosexual patriarchy that these stories and all the surrounding media and merchandise implicitly encode.

We ask who wonder and hope for magical transformation are for, and how these spaces for transformative potential may yet have their doors opened further for more people to experience. And while Disney fairy-tale films are made and remade—sometimes being drastically reimagined and other times being almost identically reproduced from the animated versions—there are plenty of questions to still be asked about who these films’ wonder is for, and who they implicitly exclude. Looking closely at mass-produced, commercial narratives can make the assumed norms far more visible, and therefore bring us closer to realizing a more equitable mediascape. Disney fairy-tale narrative and adaptation becomes a corpus that captures not only moments in time, but a cultural perspective over time.

That idea of cultural perspective becomes paramount—Disney fairy tale adopts the veneer of the universal in its marketing and distribution,[6] its tie-ins to other commercial products,[7] and its spaces. By looking at Disney fairy tales holistically, from 1937 onwards and also within their own times of production, by comparing shifts in presentation and narrative practices over decades and even considering the contexts of who is producing them, drawing them, giving voice to them, we can learn to see the assumptions that a certain segment of US-centered cultural producers hold, such as who is the audience that needs to be addressed. The gaps between versions of already established Disney versions become windows through which to especially examine who is missing from the Disney fantasyscape of fairy-tale wonder.

Cultural perspective over time is something that I examine by looking at Disney CGI remediations against their animated Disney source texts. Comparisons of the princess films are usually a starting point; most of my students can tell me if not the narratives, what they think the problems are with certain Disney princesses. But we do not stop with the comparisons between animation and live-action or even animation and earlier sources. We look at production contexts—who is making the film? What happens when Stephen Chbosky redoes Linda Woolverton’s work? What happens when Linda Woolverton redoes Sleeping Beauty (Clyde Geronimi, 1959) and attempts to unlock the potentials of a villain in Maleficent (Robert Stromberg, 2014)? We ask what is different in how the presentation of racialized bodies feels in, say, the 1997 Cinderella (dir. Robert Iscove) starring Brandy and Whitney Houston, versus the exoticization of nonwhite bodies in Mistress of Evil (Joachim Rønning, 2019), and their implicit ties to nature versus the “civilized” medievalism-inflected kingdoms with their castles and weaponry. In trying to modernize or recontextualize certain narratives, we ask, what is Disney actually doing?

Through this analysis, fairy tale becomes not an artifact consigned to the past, but understood as a living genre or mode. Disney becomes more than family entertainment that can be taken for granted as “safe” or “familiar,”[8] but rather a media corporation that requires interrogation in order to better understand who we, the “we” of US-centric, Westernized mediascapes think belong in the new worlds we are imagining.

1. See, for example: Brian Attebery, Fantasy: How It Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022); Cristina Bacchilega, Fairy Tales Transformed? Twenty-First-century Adaptations & the Politics of Wonder (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2013); Cristina Bacchilega and Pauline Greenhill, “Fairytale Reanimation and Wonder Wanted for a Better Future,” Imagining the Impossible: International Journal for the Fantastic in Contemporary Media 1, no. 1 (2023): 1–23. ↑

2. Peter C. Kunze, Staging a Comeback: Broadway, Hollywood, and the Disney Renaissance (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2023). ↑

3. Cristina Bacchilega, Fairy Tales Transformed? (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2013), 18. ↑

4. Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation Second Edition (Oxon: Routledge, 2016), 60. ↑

5. Jessica Tiffin, Marvelous Geometry: Narrative and Metafiction in Modern Fairy Tale (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2009), 2. ↑

6. Clare Parody, “Franchising/Adaptation,” Adaptation 4, no. 2 (2011): 210–218. ↑

7. Kamilla Elliott, “Tie-Intertextuality, or Intertextuality as Incorporation in the Tie-in Merchandise to Disney’s Alice in Wonderland (2010).” Adaptation 7, no. 2 (2014): 191–211. ↑

8. Tiffin, Marvelous, 211–212. ↑