Primary Sources

I believe Jack Zipes' main argument was that Disney used the medium of animation to convey his own personal personal ambitions, and because Disney was meticulous in making sure that his productions did not have any other competitors, the American culture (and other Americanized cultures) accepted the elements of his fairy tales as being the primary source for fairy tales.

Zipes used two lines of supporting arguments that buttressed his claims well. First, his discussion of fairy tales evolving as concrete literary structures from the free-form story-telling strengthened his view that animated movies restricted the meaning of the fairy tale further than just written tales. Like Zipes says, the development of the literary fairy tale in the seventeenth century was aimed at the social elite that could afford books. The plot and symbols of the fairy tale were refined in such a manner that was appropriate for parlors of the court and the growing bourgeois class (in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.) In particular with the Grimms brothers, their attempts to clean up some of the fairy tales' illogical and/or inappropriate plots stripped the fairy tale of some of its fantastic elements. Just so, Disney's attempts to portray the fairy tales in animation demanded that he take even more of the fantastical elements out of the fairy tale. His artistic vision of the fantasy world became the audience's view: where once the power of the imagination had to draw the pictures of the obsurd, the artist's pen replaced the imagination. And because Disney was very good at making sure that he had no competitors, his artistic view dominated what audiences saw and captured their imaginations.

As Disney held his audience captive, Zipes argued that Disney was able to twist the plot of the fairy tale to show what he believed was a good story. The element of Disney's stories that I do not particularly care for, and that Zipes calls out, is that Disney believes that women should be domestic and that they should wait to be rescued by their prince on a white horse. Disney perpetuates the patriarchal stereotypes that many of the literary fairy tales' authors use, and it seems silly when the social norms of gender relations were changing dramatically during Disney's lifetime. He uses the patriarchal stereotypes to strengthen his ideal of the entrepreneurial young man (the prince) that can save the day as long as the princess sticks to the patriarchal plan.

I think Zipes thesis works well, but for a reason that he did not explicitly state. The art of animation was coming into full swing as Disney started his career in the field, and because of his predatory business skills, he was successfully able to dominate the animation business. This was important as American audiences started to fully embrace the technology of full length movies and the advent of technicolor television. Audiences accepted all of Disney's interpretations of the fairy tale as they were finally able to afford to watch the features at a movie theater (and because he was the main one producing the fairy tale features, Disney's movies were the ones audiences saw.) When the Grimms Brothers published their books, middle class people were finally able to afford the Kinder- und Hausmarchen that was (unintentionally) written for children. And because of their publishing success with the new technology of mass printing, the Grimms Brother's versions of the fairy tales became standard among many households. Disney's success happened for about the same reason: the rise (but not the beginning) of a new technology made that artform accessible to the masses for the first time, and because of its novelty, the popular culture quickly took that version to be the primary source of the fairy tale.