Disney and the Promise of Happily Ever After
“When You Wish Upon a Star” is arguably the most well-known song to come out of the Walt Disney Studio. Written by Leigh Harline and Ned Washington, the song was written to accompany Disney’s adaptation of the Italian fairy tale Pinocchio (Sharpsteen and Luske 1940). Now, the song accompanies the opening to every Disney film. It plays as a shooting star arches over the iconic ‘Disney’ castle: the site of the fairy tale ‘happily ever after’ most associated with the company’s brand of family-friendly entertainment fare. Its lyrics contain a promise to the films’ global audience: if people’s hearts are pure, then all of their dreams will come true. It is the assurance of a satisfying happy ending: both in the movie they are about to watch and in their own lives. However, more importantly, the song is a prime example of the ways in which elements of the American Dream—America’s cultural promise—were worked into the movies by filmmakers (Samuel 2012). The opportunities of consumerism and capitalism, heavily associated with the American economy are addressed as Jiminy Cricket sings that “anything your heart desires will come to you”. Moreover, the apparent equality of opportunity is also emphasised in the song’s lyrics through the words: “makes no difference who you are”. Wills (2017) has argued that discarding Disney’s narratives is even “tantamount to shedding the American Dream” (2017, 132). Indeed, these two stories are fundamentally analogous. As well as the universal values of happiness and love that one associates with a fairy tale ending, the song isolates elements associated with America’s national myth and binds them to Disney’s fairy tale notions of magic and the fantastic.
The name Disney has always been indelibly associated with fairy tales. From the studio’s humble beginnings in the 1920s, Walt Disney and his then partner Ub Iwerks transformed fairy tales such as ‘Puss in Boots’ and ‘Cinderella’ into short animated productions. Throughout the twentieth century and early twenty-first century, the studio has released countless animated adaptations of fairy tales and children’s stories, including but not limited to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (Hand et al. 1937), Cinderella (Geronimi, et al. 1950), Sleeping Beauty (Geronimi 1959), The Little Mermaid (Clements and Musker 1989), Beauty and the Beast (Trousdale and Wise 1991) and The Princess and the Frog (Clements and Musker 2009). Tangled (Greno and Howard 2010) was chosen for the studio’s seminal 50th animated feature and constitutes a very loose retelling of the Grimms’ version of ‘Rapunzel’ and their most successful outing, Frozen (Buck and Lee 2013) has become nothing short of a worldwide phenomenon and has spawned Broadway productions, theme park rides and a cinematically released sequel, Frozen II (Buck and Lee 2019).
Furthermore, beginning with the heavily hybridised tale, Enchanted (Lima 2007), the Walt Disney Studio has also branched out into the production of live action fairy tale feature films and television series. In these adaptations, they seamlessly blend the ‘original’ stories with the characters and songs from their earlier animated versions of these fairy tale narratives. Such is the essence of the ABC series Once Upon a Time (Horowitz and Kitsis 2011–2018). The studio’s recent decision to reboot its most successful animated productions as live action features has triggered further change in the shape of the Disney fairy tale. The studio has begun a process of retelling its earlier narratives in accordance with the cultural contexts of their contemporary audiences, for example, Maleficent (Stromberg 2014), Cinderella (Branagh 2015) and Beauty and the Beast (Condon 2017).
Much scholarly work has been carried out on the narratives of Disney’s productions. Fairy tale scholars have focused solely on the studio’s ‘sanitisation’ of the European fairy tale (Schickel 1986; Zipes 1995; Bacchilega 1997; Zipes 2011; Pugh and Aronstein 2012; Bacchilega 2013), while others have charted the studio’s intrinsic connection to popular and political culture (Smoodin 1994; Bell et al. 1995; Byrne and McQuillan 1999; Giroux 2000; Shortsleeve 2004; Sammond 2005; Mollet 2017; Rodosthenous 2017; Davis 2020). Due to Disney’s unquestionable dominance on the global entertainment landscape, its positioning within the media industry has also been analysed in some depth (Wasko 2001; Wasko et al. 2006), as have changes in the company’s business strategy and animation techniques (Maltin 1980; Cavalier and Chomet 2011; Pallant 2011; Furniss 2016). Studies of Disney’s fairy tale narratives, however, are often confined to changing representations of gender roles (Jeffords 1995; Downey 1996; Do Rozario 2004; Brode 2005; Davis 2006, 2013; Whelan 2014). While each of these scholars agrees that Disney’s productions are immensely important to America’s history, popular culture and ideology, an area that has not been explored in any depth is the relationship between Disney’s productions and America’s own fairy tale ideology: the American Dream. Such an exploration can draw wider connections between the narratives of Disney’s fairy tales and America’s exceptional cultural history. This book will chart the complex history of this relationship, demonstrating the ways in which the Disney fairy tale has been reconstructed and renegotiated alongside, and in response to important changes in America’s socio-cultural fabric.
Disney, the American Dream and the 1930s
The Walt Disney Company, undisputedly, is a dominant feature on the contemporary entertainment landscape. It should be recognised that the shape of the business has transformed significantly over time, changing in response to significant upheavals in political, economic and social contexts, as well as evolutions in market trends and tastes. It is at once an animation studio, a holiday destination and a company name (Davis 2020). In short, there is no ‘one’ Disney but a range of inter-connected meanings centred on and around the company’s “wholesome, high quality, family-friendly entertainment” (Davis 2020, 1). With theme parks, hotels, cruise ships, Broadway musicals, retail outlets and the acquisition of further influential companies such as Marvel, Lucasfilm and 20th Century Fox, the company is now almost unrecognisable from its roots in the Golden Age of Hollywood. And yet, the 1930s holds an incredible significance for Disney, its formulation of fairy tale narratives and its historical connection to American identity.
Both the American Dream and the Disney fairy tale were born in the 1930s. The term, ‘The American Dream’ was first coined in 1931 by James Truslow Adams in his work The Epic of America . Its essence was a “dream of a social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable […] regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position” (Adams 1931, 214–215). It established success as the ultimate goal of American culture (Van Elteren 2006). During the 1930s, however, during a time of high unemployment, breadlines and foreclosures, the distance between the Dream and the reality was particularly marked, displaying a substantial discrepancy between the promise of America and the dismal reality of the Depression. During this time, the myth acted as a comforting fairy tale for the American people, allowing them to explain away their ‘temporary’ poverty, “making the world seem simpler and more comfortable to inhabit” (Campbell and Kean 1997, 9). This was even at the heart of the popular board game ‘Monopoly’, itself founded during the Depression. As Samuel (2012) contends, “all players started off equal […] and players seemed to relish the ethos of the game”: to make as much money as possible (18).
Nowhere was the myth more durable than in Hollywood. Americans flocked to the movies to escape into upbeat and optimistic narratives, seemingly offering the security of a happily ever after. Musicals of the early 1930s such as 42nd Street (Bacon 1933a) and Footlight Parade (Bacon 1933b) embraced the Horatio Alger inspired ‘rags to riches’ fairy tale of the American Dream. Hollywood itself, as an institution, perpetuated...