Breaking the Disney spell

Abstract

The article, entitled “Breaking the Disney spell” by American fairy tale scholar Jack Zipes is dedicated to Walt Disney’s famous classical fairy tale animations, such as Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and Cinderella. He also includes two animations produced by the Disney Studio in the 1990s: Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin. Zipes claims that these highly successful productions hold a particularly American vision of the classical works of literature. The scholar considers a fairy tale as an institution with well-defined middle-class values, and therefore he sees in popular Disney animations an attempt to reconfirm the nostalgic longing for “neatly ordered patriarchal realm”.   Keywords: fairy tale animations by Disney, popular culture