Sanitization: Andrew Lang & Disney

In her dissertation...
Goddard-Pritchett, G. C. (2010) Phantasmagorical Culture: A Discussion of Disney as a Creator and a Cultural Phenomenon. Print.

p.2

Disney Studios uses stark American ideals - sanitation, innocence, and the division between good and evil - to homogenize, sanitize, and neotenize European fairy tales into trademark Disney versions.

Walt Disney Studios has a self-serving agenda that, in part, prescribes social norms and roles that would be inappropriate were they witnessed outside a Disney film. Innocence, or the carefully manipulated impression thereof, undercuts any criticism of Disney film, so American culture accepts and embraces denigrations of both race and gender.... people resist seeing it as offering anything but benign entertainment.

America is not likely to change its attitude toward Disney. Disney Studios is so successful because, at least in part, at one time in their history, the studios figured out what people wanted and how to give it to them. Disney movies evoke memories of golden childhood days.

p.5

By the late 1800s, scholars discouraged distributing fairy tales to youth based on the idea that they were too violent and too full of escapism and other fantastic elements.

In 1889, a Scottish literary critic named Andrew Lang published what was to become the first of a series: The Blue Fairy Book. Andrew Lang's Coloured Fairy Books, published 1889-1910, brought the stories, this time collected from all over the world, to the front of children;s literature. His collection was designed to accommodate a strictly children's audience, and it so successfully reignited interest in the genre that enthusiasts and imitators brought the series to the United States.

..the fairy tales Lang collected are sanitized versions of earlier stories

p.383 (Someday my prince will come - Lieberman)

Andrew Lang, for instance, chose the tales in his Blue Fairy Book (first published in 1889) from among literally thousands known to him as a folklorist; and he chose them partly for their moral lesson. Folk takes recorded in the field by scholars are full of everything Lang leaves out: sex, death, low humour, and female initiative.

p.6

And thus the twentieth century tamed the fairy.

Concurrent with the sanitization, the fairy tale moved from page to screen with the production of motion pictures.

In each transformation of media, the fairy tale lost some of its power.

In 1937, when Walt Disney entered popular fairy tale discourse with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the fairy tale was primed for popular consumption, especially in a culture reeling from the Great Depression. Disney films gave a disappointed and disillusioned public hope and offered an escape from financial worries. Part of Disney's success in the endeavor stemmed from his marketing of his own rags to riches story. 

p.12

Today, Disney Studios operates on the same principle of sanitation and control that guided the development of Snow White. The "good" characters are generally drawn with childlike characteristics: big, round features and bright colours; "bad" characters are big, dark, and have sharper angles in their features (i.e., the Genie and Jafar in Aladdin).

p.15
Generally, the changes Walt Disney made were to the original themes and characters; however, many argue that the Disney version of fairy tales tends to take away the essence of the original tales, and by sanitizing the plot to suit an American audience, takes away the motivations of the characters and changes the original intents of many of the tales.