The Story of Disney: 100 Years of Wonder

“Everyone working on the film has the same goal in mind—to tell a wonderful story for the ages, filled with heart and humor, about something that is important to us.”
—Osnat Shurer
Producer, Raya and the Last Dragon and Moana
 
CHAPTER 3: WHERE DO THE STORIES COME FROM?
 
THE POWER OF SEVEN
 
From the beginning, almost every Disney creation has been grounded in storytelling—and for good reason: Walt was himself a uniquely gifted storyteller who could hold a roomful of people spellbound for hours as he narrated and acted out his detailed visions. Spirited story-pitch meetings became a routine at the studio, but nobody could do it quite like Walt.
 
Yet even more critical to his success was his innate ability to recognize a strong story that would resonate with people. His story-mindedness led him to revolutionize early animation by shifting away from merely presenting a series of stand-alone sight gags toward in-depth storytelling that established an emotional connection with audiences. The gags would remain, but in the service of the story.
 
As a storyteller, Walt Disney was drawn to material that had already demonstrated its broad appeal, like popular fairy tales, folklore, mythology, and fables—literary forms that were the direct descendants of the oral tradition dating back to the Bronze Age (and possibly even earlier). It reflected a common need to define, explain, and appreciate the moral dimensions of the human experience. Over the years Walt had adapted a number of fairy tales and fables for his Laugh-O-gram, Silly Symphony, and character-based short cartoons, and when it came time to take on the enormous artistic and financial challenge of producing the first-ever feature-length animated film, he decided to use the Brothers Grimm classic “Snow White.”
 
But why did he choose the story “Snow White” in particular as the basis for the riskiest creative endeavor of his career? According to Disney biographer Bob Thomas, as a teenager in Kansas City, Missouri, Walt saw a silent film version of the story starring Marguerite Clark, and it formed “the most vivid memory of his moviegoing childhood.” Both the story and the storytelling power of film as he experienced it that day resonated deeply with Walt, and twenty years later, he had positioned himself and his studio to do for “Snow White” what he had done for the fledgling animation industry and what he would later do for the amusement park: take a good thing and make it exponentially better through superior storytelling.
 
The standard running time of a cartoon short was eight to nine minutes, and thus audiences had been conditioned to see animation as diverting filler before the main event of the live-action feature. The idea of paying to see a feature-length cartoon struck critics and potential distributors as absurd. As Walt’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was being prepared to roll out to various markets, Central Press staff writer Obera H. Rawles noted in a January 12, 1938, article that industry professionals were referring to the seven-reel animated project as “Disney’s Folly.” The anecdote was later widely picked up by newspapers across the country. But Walt had pushed ahead undaunted because he had the vision and resources to create something that he knew would forever change animation as an art form. He had built a stunningly detailed and layered animated world requiring the talents of the best artists and animators in the business and the illusion of three-dimensional depth afforded by the Disneys’ new multiplane camera.
 
Still, none of that would matter without a strong story capable of engaging the sympathies of an audience for over an hour.
 
It also meant populating the story with characters that audiences could identify with—something that was in short supply in the original “Snow White” tale. Although all the characters are crucial to the plot, in terms of relatability, the story needed that Disney touch. Snow White is too innocent, the Queen is too villainous, and the Prince is too noble, plus absent for most of the action. That leaves the Dwarfs, who, in the Brothers Grimm version, are just a monolithic group with no names and no distinguishing personalities.
 
But Walt saw their potential right away. “The figures of the Dwarfs intrigued me,” he later recalled. He tasked the Story Department with creating seven distinct character types that audiences would recognize from real life and giving them names descriptive of their personalities. Among the dozens of monikers considered and rejected early on were Scrappy, Weepy, Shifty, Jumpy, Blabby, and even Snoopy. In the finished film, the individuality of each Dwarf is encapsulated in his name and constantly reinforced, and their charm and humanity ultimately constitute the entertainment core of the story. To this day, it’s a point of honor among Disney fans that they can rattle off those seven names without pause: Sneezy, Sleepy, Bashful, Happy, Grumpy, Doc and, of course, Dopey.
 
The eventual inclusion of some memorable musical numbers also added to the movie’s storytelling heft, partly because they helped portray a character’s inner thoughts and deepest desires and partly because the songs themselves were good enough to stay with audiences long after they left the theater. In fact “Whistle While You Work,” “Heigh-Ho,” and several other songs from the soundtrack became top ten hits, inaugurating a tradition of Disney animated films yielding music that has become a fixture in the collective cultural memory.
 
In addition to expanding the action of the relatively brief story to accommodate the feature-length format, Walt and his writers made other critical adjustments to the original fairy tale that maximized the story’s emotive weight, like building up the relationship between Snow White and the Prince. In the Brothers Grimm story, they meet only after she has been poisoned and revived, whereas in the Disney version, the entire plot is driven by their having met and fallen in love early on. The audience’s warm reception was a triumphant moment for Walt, who had successfully created an entirely new long-form storytelling vehicle capable of connecting with moviegoers on a much deeper level than anyone had thought possible for animation. It was both a vindication of Walt’s grand vision for the medium and proof that he could breathe spectacular new life into an old story.
 
UNTANGLING OLD STORIES
 
Walt’s insistence on strong storytelling became part of the company’s DNA from the early 1930s on, and it is hard to imagine Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) or any subsequent Disney film without the significant story alterations from the original source that transformed the material into a recognizably Disney product. As an admirer of Aesop, the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, Charles Perrault, and Jean de La Fontaine, Walt considered all fables, fairy tales, folklore, myths, and even classic literature as a starting point for story development.
 
A good illustration of Walt’s vision is the way he adapted the original story of The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi. In Collodi’s tale, the title character is thoroughly unlikable from the start, such as kicking Geppetto as soon as his feet are carved and running away. Walt understood that his audience needed to be able to sympathize with the protagonist, and Collodi’s puppet is obnoxious and cruel until his redemption near the end of the book. So Walt changed the story, getting rid of Pinocchio’s more violent and depraved behavior and making his mistakes seem less the result of a character flaw and more the product of his inexperience and innocent lack of understanding of good and evil. It also makes more sense for a sentient puppet that has just come into being to be naïve about the world than it is to have him pop into existence as a reprobate in need of a lesson.
 
However, as Disney historian J. B. Kaufman observes, Walt also decided to make the world that Pinocchio is born into even more fraught with evil than in the Collodi tale. “In some ways,” says Kaufman, “Disney’s Pinocchio (1940) is much darker and more sophisticated than the original book. So for example, in the novel, Pleasure Island is relatively benign, and you can see in the concept drawings that the artists were inclined to picture it as this sunny land of candy and carnival rides, and it was Walt who pulled them back and said, ‘No, this is a bad place.’ And so in the end, it was depicted as being really dark and sinister.” Walt also had the animators and Story Department turn Mangiafuoco, the puppet master character in the book, into the much more terrifying Stromboli. As with making the Pinocchio character more likable, the net effect of enhancing the wickedness of the world he inhabits was a dramatic increase in audience sympathy.
 
The notion of treating existing source material as a foundation on which to build and reimagine has been around since the earliest days of storytelling. Thus the Disney version of a classic tale is a single point in a continuum of adaptation that may be hundreds or even thousands of years in the making. Take, for example, “The Little Mermaid.” The concept of mermaids can be found in the folklore of cultures around the world, and the Hans Christian Andersen story is itself an adaptation of Undine by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué. Fouqué, in turn, was inspired by the story of Mélusine, an ancient French folk tale likely borrowed from even earlier Greek mythology. Therefore, the tale Disney adapted for the feature The Little Mermaid (1989) was just the latest in a long line of interpretations that stretched back as far as history records, demonstrating the timelessness of the core story.
 
The Disney connection to “The Little Mermaid” actually began back in the late 1930s and early 1940s, when Walt was considering creating a package feature consisting of a series of vignettes based on Hans Christian Andersen stories, but the project was shelved. Decades later, Disney writer-director Ron Clements happened upon a collection of Andersen tales in a bookshop and was inspired to create a two-page draft for a proposed film version of “The Little Mermaid.” Once it was approved for production, Clements and co-director John Musker began working on the script, and when songwriter Howard Ashman became involved, it led to some significant changes in the way the story was presented, eventually giving the production the feel of a Broadway musical. For example, Ashman suggested the prim and proper British crab character called Clarence in the original be changed to a musically talented Jamaican crab named Sebastian, which made him a far more entertaining presence in the film. This also led to a crucial Caribbean influence being added to the musical theme, culminating in the wildly popular song, “Under the Sea.”
 
Music had been used as a storytelling aid in films since the days of silent films being screened with a live piano or organ accompaniment, and over the years Disney films in particular had successfully tapped into the appeal of combining a strong story and visual product with irresistible melodies. However, the soundtrack album for The Little Mermaid, written by Ashman and Alan Menken, exceeded all expectations, winning Academy Awards for both Best Original Score and Best Original Song, and becoming a platinum best seller. From a storytelling perspective, it is a rare luxury to be able to connect a story with unforgettable songs that keep the memory of the story alive.
 
A NEW SPELL IS CAST
 
When it came to selecting stories, Walt was an avid reader and researcher, but he was also deeply influenced by his own life story. One prime source of the material Walt would return to again and again was the trip that he, his brother Roy, and their wives took to Europe in 1935. Apart from his brief stint as an ambulance driver in France just after the end of World War I, it was the first time Walt had traveled abroad, and it made a lasting impression on him. Wolf Burchard, curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition Inspiring Walt Disney: The Animation of French Decorative Arts, observes that the trip helped determine much of Disney’s subsequent creative output. “Over the course of his grand tour of Europe,” says Burchard, “Walt Disney acquired about 335 art and illustrated books—the entire pantheon of European children’s literature. And this is really important because all those fairy tales are set in historic spaces, ranging from the Gothic to the rococo, and these illustrations in a way provided Disney animators with a first step in translating European visual traditions into this new idiom of animation.” The influence of these traditions can be seen not only in the animated details of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Pinocchio, but also in the entire look and feel of more recent productions like Beauty and the Beast (1991) and its 2017 live-action reimagining.
 
Among the classic fairy tales collected by the Brothers Grimm, “Beauty and the Beast” is perhaps the most popular of all time. Since it first appeared in print in 1740, there have been innumerable adaptations of the story, including plays, novels, an opera, a ballet, and a classic live-action film by Jean Cocteau. The tale’s romantic core and its ageless themes of transformation, redemption, and looking beneath the surface for the truth appealed to Walt Disney. And in fact, legendary Disney animator Ollie Johnston recalled that Walt had considered making an animated feature based on the story in 1940. It was also considered for television development in the mid-1950s, but the project never went anywhere.
 
Then in the late 1980s, the studio’s renewed focus on animation led to the idea being picked up again, and screenwriter Linda Woolverton was tapped to draft a screenplay. This was the first Disney animated feature to begin life as a screenplay; since Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the process of building a narrative had almost always begun with story conferences and storyboard review sessions. Woolverton worked with executive producer and lyricist Howard Ashman, whose contributions to The Little Mermaid had been critical to its success, and it was Ashman who came up with the idea of bringing to life the servants that had been turned into household objects by the same spell the enchantress used to transform the young prince into the Beast. The resulting characters of Mrs. Potts and Chip, Cogsworth, and Lumiere all but steal the show, and their presence enlivens the story’s otherwise gloomy middle section, when the Beast is holding Belle captive. Ashman also collaborated with composer Alan Menken to create the now-iconic music that formed an indispensable component of the narrative. As executive music producer Chris Montan put it, “One element that made this movie so successful is that the songs help tell the story.”