Week 13: Essay- Disney: The Modern Brothers Grimm

While I was reading the stories from this unit on the Brothers Grimm. I was thinking about just how important children's stories are in terms of teaching a child invaluable life lessons. When I look at my own childhood, I can definitely tell that I learned some important things on what it means to be a hero, or the be courageous, or virtuous from children's stories. I think the children who heard these stories by the Brothers Grimm were supposed to learn lessons from them too. They would have their mother or father read them the story, and I'm sure that they would learn something from it. I'm sure that having those stories read to them was one of the most entertaining parts of their childhoods. However, I didn't read most of my children's stories, and I didn't even have them read to me. In fact, I learned about my fairy tales in the way of Disney movies. Disney is really adept at taking stories like those in the Brothers Grimm, and adapting them to animated movies. Cinderella, Snow White, and many other Disney movies are based on short stories from years and years ago. The principle behind the movies is the same as the stories. Cinderella is a story about not judging someone based on their appearance, and it shows little girls that anyone can be a princess. This lesson is the same in a movie as it is in a short story. So, I think it is really interesting that, despite all of our technology and animation, people still use the same stories to teach their children the same lessons. Disney is just a more advanced and entertaining form of the Brothers Grimm. I'm sure that fifty years from now, kids will be seeing the same stories that I grew up watching, but they just might be watching a hologram, and not a screen.

Cinderella, source: flickr