Lecture 25

Grimms’ Fairy Tales

  • Snow White: first feature film that Disney put out.
    • Launched Disney into success.
    • Huge technological progress.
  • Zipes: “revolutionary technical means capitalized on American innocence and utopianism to reinforce the social and political status quo.”
  • Private corporation takes a public good and sells it back to the society it stole it from.
    • Now it’s less available to lower classes (have to be able to read, or buy movie tickets, or buy Disney World tickets).
  • The spectacle: don’t have an explicit moral.
    • That gets in the way to selling to as wide an audience as possible.
      • Make everything digestible, infantile, simple.
  • Snow White is dumbed down.
    • Evil stepmother only visits once.
    • Deletion of Snow White’s birth mother and her death.
      • It took a while for American audiences to be okay with a devastating death out of the gate.
  • Disney: “We just try to make a good picture. And then the professors come along and tell us what we do.”
    • He refused to reckon with the ideologies with which he lived.
    • Silence is complicity.