As I was rating all of the potential first year seminar classes, I stumbled upon “From Brothers Grimm to Disney.” When I first saw it, I was interested primarily in the Disney aspect of the class. I figured I would be able to watch Disney movies and look at them from different perspectives, and see how they pertain to my life and culture. After considering this section of the class, I then focused on the stories of the Brothers Grimm. This past Christmas, I had been gifted a book of the Brothers’ complete fairy tales that enamored me. For months, I had been reading at least a story a day. I even brought the book to school whenever I knew I would have downtime to read. I then thought about how odd yet exciting it would be to compare Disney stories to Grimm tales. Through this class, I would be able to bridge the gap between the innocence of my childhood and the more informed time of my young adult life. After mulling this over, I rated “Grimm to Disney” a 9, and thus was thrilled when I discovered that I would be able to reread these Grimm fairy tales and reevaluate my childhood in terms of my newfound adulthood.
In this seminar, I hope to analyze the differences between Disney and Grimm fairy tales in order to construct a cohesive idea of why each party wrote their stories the way they did. Personally, I love the story just as much as the reason behind it. For example, when I first read “Hamlet,” I was fascinated by how each critic viewed Hamlet’s insanity and his struggle for closure from his father’s death. I am similarly interested in seeing how culture and the writers’ opinions influenced their work.
My favorite fairytale is “Beauty and the Beast” due to the fact that, when the movie came out, Belle was the only Disney princess that was like me. She was a brunette, like me. That was the initial connection because up until seeing that movie, I believed that only blonde girls were pretty or were able to be princesses. In addition to similar looks, she loved books. That stunned me. No other princess I had seen before then had any sense of the world around her or any deep character traits. Belle was the fictional character who encouraged me to delve further into the world of books and I thank her for that to this day.
Image Reference
blogs.disney.com/oh-my-disney/2014/04/02/prince-spotlight-series-beast/
From Grimm To Disney: comparisons and applications 