Disney Rides Again

As a child I knew Grimm’s and other fairy tales by heart before I was myself old enough to read. My mother in her precise English, my Aunt Amy with her somewhat nasal New England accent, would read to me through the enchanted afternoons those stories of our Western inheritance that became almost more real than the actuality of the shabby Boston suburb where we lived. The wind curling across our hill was the wind that blew Conrad’s hat away. Falada’s voice echoed under the American pignut trees. Rapunzel, Rumpelstiltsken, the Frog Prince, were part of my created world. And the background that at times ran dark and bloody—wronged children and poor Falada’s head nailed above the gate—was the age-old background of life, not that of an antiseptic suburb; something that a child’s instinct accepted naturally. When from the upper bedroom window of our two-family house I could see the red sunball sinking over the line of the Canterbury hills I knew that somewhere beyond the ridge was the land east o’ the sun and west o’ the moon, a land one reached by traveling for a year and a day.

The other afternoon I thought again of the world of wonder and mystery that these old tales have renewed for each generation of children as I watched a matinee performance of The Sleeping Beauty. In charity one must admit that Disney’s task was an impossible one. For the fairy tale is something to which a child must bring his own creative self. Dreams that are confected by someone else are no dreams, even if that someone else is a corporation willing to spend six or eight million dollars and employ some hundreds of artists for a period of several years. Seeing the film, I was reminded of those chickenwire and plaster Storeyvilles in the Adirondacks where one may find Rapunzel’s papier-mache tower with a dummy prince fastened on for the season at the half-way mark.

FR

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Francis Russell

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As a child I knew Grimm’s and other fairy tales by heart before I was myself old enough to read. My mother in her precise English, my Aunt Amy with her somewhat nasal New England accent, would read to me through the enchanted afternoons those stories of our Western inheritance that became almost more real than the actuality of the shabby Boston suburb where we lived. The wind curling across our hill was the wind that blew Conrad’s hat away. Falada’s voice echoed under the American pignut trees. Rapunzel, Rumpelstiltsken, the Frog Prince, were part of my created world. And the background that at times ran dark and bloody—wronged children and poor Falada’s head nailed above the gate—was the age-old background of life, not that of an antiseptic suburb; something that a child’s instinct accepted naturally. When from the upper bedroom window of our two-family house I could see the red sunball sinking over the line of the Canterbury hills I knew that somewhere beyond the ridge was the land east o’ the sun and west o’ the moon, a land one reached by traveling for a year and a day.

The other afternoon I thought again of the world of wonder and mystery that these old tales have renewed for each generation of children as I watched a matinee performance of The Sleeping Beauty. In charity one must admit that Disney’s task was an impossible one. For the fairy tale is something to which a child must bring his own creative self. Dreams that are confected by someone else are no dreams, even if that someone else is a corporation willing to spend six or eight million dollars and employ some hundreds of artists for a period of several years. Seeing the film, I was reminded of those chickenwire and plaster Storeyvilles in the Adirondacks where one may find Rapunzel’s papier-mache tower with a dummy prince fastened on for the season at the half-way mark.