Disneyfication: The role of the Walt Disney Company® as modern fairy tale collectors

Fairy tales have been around for centuries, always changing and adapting along with the cultures in which they're recreated. And yet, when Disney fairy tales are brought into the conversation, the response from critics and scholars is almost always a negative one. Through analysis of famous fairy tale collectors Giambattista Basile, Charles Perrault, and the Brothers Grimm, I highlight how sociopolitical conditions affect the way fairy tales change over time. I then dive into Walt Disney and The Walt Disney Company© to explore the influences that helped to shape their versions of the tales. To show these effects more specifically, I analyze each of the above-mentioned collectors' versions of Cinderella and how the different themes in each version of the tale were reflective of the societal and personal beliefs of the collector who wrote it. Through this, I hope to argue that the Disney versions of the tales have gone through the same "sanitization" process as every other version of the tale and that the changes they made were necessary for the preservation and continued popularity of the genre.