Disneyfication: Difference between revisions

[[File:disneyfication2 hunchback 163.png|link=The Hunchback of Notre Dame|frame|Also, there is [["I Want" Song|singing]].]]

 

 

A form of editing, known for often falling into [[Adaptation Decay]], that renders a story "safe" for juvenile audiences (or the parents thereof) by removing undesirable plot elements or unpleasant historical facts, adding Broadway-style production numbers, and reworking whatever else is necessary for a [[Lighter and Softer]] [[Happily Ever After]] Ending. [[Talking Animal]] sidekicks tend to be tacked on somehow.

 

Not to be confused with [[Disneyesque]].

 

{{examples}}

* ''[[Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (Disney film)|Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs]]''. The original script was actually closer to the original fairy tale than the final film, but as the film was made during the [[Great Depression]], the animators could not afford to make the film as long as the source material demanded (such as having the witch try multiple times to kill Snow White, and the opening with Snow White's mother.)

** In the original story, the queen is exposed for her crimes at Snow White's wedding to the prince, and is burned to death. In the Disney film, she is chased on top of a cliff by the dwarves, struck by lightning, [[Disney Villain Death|falls off]], and is presumably eaten by vultures. A bit more violent to be sure, but at least this way, [[Self-Disposing Villain|none of the heroes had to do the dirty deed]].

* ''[[The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Disney film)|The Hunchback of Notre Dame]]''. You wouldn't think [[Victor Hugo]]'s [[The Hunchback of Notre Dame (novel)|original novel]] would be suitable fare for a children's movie. Despite being one of Disney's darkest movies, they still made it much nicer than the book - Esmerelda was nicer, Phoebus was nicer, Quasimodo was nicer, there was a clearer line between good and evil, and the good guys didn't all die or kill themselves at the end.

* ''[[Hercules (1997 film)|Hercules]]'' not only has a [[Hijacked by Jesus]] style, but also implies that the Greek gods had wholesome family values! Remember, in the original myths, pretty much every god is up to sexual hijinks at one point or another.

** The [[Everybody Hates Hades|Disneyification of Hades]] from [[Dark Is Not Evil]] to [[Big Bad]] is pretty amazing. They took the Greek concept of the Underworld and Hades (which was more or less pretty much a neutral judging point) and spun it to better resemble Hell and the Devil. Complete with imp minions. Luckily, [[Chewing the Scenery|James Woods]] is a great actor. They also made him quite cynical (and possibly the [[Only Sane Man]]), which only helped.

** In the original myth, not only was Heracles the product of an extramarital affair (with a mortal woman, Alcmene), but Hera loathed him and tried multiple times to torture and kill him. At one stage she inflicted a madness on him that drove him to murder his children and his first wife, Megara - and it was Heracles who had to carry out penance for this in the form of the Twelve Labours.

{{quote|''Once more she looked at the prince, with her eyes already dimmed by death, then dashed overboard and fell, [[media:LittleMermaid.jpg|her body dissolving into foam]].''}}

* Another [[Hans Christian Andersen]] story, "[[The Steadfast Tin Soldier]]", was given a happy ending by Disney in ''[[Fantasia]] 2000'', partly from the [[Soundtrack Dissonance]] that would occur if they did keep the original ending. The animators had storyboarded the sequence ending with the tin soldier and the ballerina melting into a heart-shape. (Yes, Andersen [[Creator Breakdown|had issues]].)

* Disney's so-called adaptation of Mary Norton's ''[[Bedknob and Broomstick]]'' dropped the original book's ''entire plot'', and instead created a new one from whole cloth involving Eglantine Price's attempt to learn magic solely in order to help the British effort in [[World War Two]]. Along the way, a medieval sorcerer became a modern con-man, an island of [[Talking Animal]]s was added apparently just to give Disney's animation division something to do that year, and a climactic battle scene of magically powered suits of plate armor versus a Nazi invasion force replaced the book's much more low-key conclusion. Oh, and they made it a musical. A major plot element complete with its own musical number, critical to the climax of the film, was conjured up out of a random two-word phrase ("substitutiary locomotion") that appears only once in a minor conversation on which the children eavesdrop in the book. And on top of all that, they pluralized both nouns in the title for no obvious reason.

* Likewise, ''[[Mary Poppins]]'' began as a series of seven books about a quite snarky and unpleasant magical nanny. Particularly towards the final books, the series become increasingly bizarre and increasingly interested in mythology, mysticism and herbalism (as was [[Author Appeal|its author, P.L. Travers]], a devotee of Theosophy). It's all a far cry from the Disney film version, which Travers loathed.

* ''[[Pocahontas]]'' pretty much shredded everything we know about the historical woman. For one thing she was between 10 and 12 years old when she first met John Smith, making a romantic relationship unlikely at best. Her father had fifty wives and many children. She was taken to Jamestown as a hostage and married before her trip to London, and no Armada was threatening to annihilate her people. John Smith was not a Prince Charming type, but in fact an unattractive, short man with a giant woolly beard. Just about the only bit they got right was her saving Smith from execution, and even ''that'' is considered by some historians to have been the enactment of a ritual (and thus Smith wasn't in any real danger). [[Unreliable Narrator|Still other historians suspect Smith of making up the entire story, since it doesn't appear until he wrote his memoirs, four years after her ''death'']].

** And she didn't actually marry John Smith. She married John ''Rolfe''. The sequel addresses this, albeit in an inaccurate way, playing with drama between the two Johns. History reports that when she met John Smith in London, she slapped his face.

** Of course, one must point out that the newspapers ''never actually lowered their prices'' in the end; they came to an agreement with the newsies where they agreed to buy back their unsold papers. While this agreement was pretty mutually beneficial, clearly the idea of the rag-tag kids' union getting everything they wanted in the end was too good for Disney to pass up.

* ''[[The Fox and the Hound (film)|The Fox and The Hound]]''. In the [[The Fox and The Hound (novel)|original book]], {{spoiler|Tod and Copper were never friends to begin with, Tod loses his mate to a trap, Chief doesn't survive his encounter with that train, and at the end Tod dies of exhaustion while being relentlessly chased by Copper and Slade. And then Copper is [[Shoot the Dog|literally shot in the head]] by his owner to avoid having to abandon him.}}

* The story of [[Robin Hood]] had been thoroughly bowdlerised before Walt Disney was born, and [[Robin Hood (Disney film)|their take on it]] is actually far from the worst abuse of the mythos.

** To be fair, the narrator outright admits that everybody has their own version of the story (true enough) and that this was just "the version that the animals tell".

** One interesting example is what they did to the story of "[[Rapunzel]]". In the most commonly encountered version, Mother Gothel learns that Rapunzel's being visited in her tower when ''Rapunzel tells her''—asking her, "How is it, good mother, that you are so much harder to pull up than the young Prince? He is always with me in a moment", which makes the heroine seem at best a bit on the dim side. In the original edition, Rapunzel was only naive, not stupid: she wanted to know why her dresses had grown so tight.

*** Specifically, why they're so tight around her stomach...

* ''[[Gulliver's Travels]]'' is often a victim of this trope because it has giant Brobdingnagians and small Lilliputians which make for easy kid appeal, but the original novel is satirical and includes a scene where Gulliver upsets the Lilliputians by pissing on a fire to put it out. This scene, needless to say, is nearly always changed.

** Most modern renditions leave out ''vast'' amounts of ''Gulliver's Travels'', starting with scenes like the one in which a Brobdingnagian woman uses Gulliver as a ''dildo'', and moving on to excise the entire ''second half'' of the book with the voyages to Laputa and the land of the Houyhnhyms, which can in no way be made kid-friendly.

 

=== Web Comics ===

{{quote|'''sidekick''': Look, Lars, Orcish Chiropractors!}}

 

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