In 1965, Frances Clarke Sayers wrote the following with reference to Walt Disney and the way he treated his film material:
I call him to account for his debasement of the traditional literature of childhood, in films and in the books he publishes: He shows scant respect for the integrity of the original creations of authors, manipulating and vulgarizing everything for his own ends. His treatment of folklore is without regard for its anthropological, spiritual, or psychological truths. Every story is sacrificed to the "gimmick". . . of animation. . . Not content with the films, he fixes these mutilated versions in books which are cut to a fraction of their original forms, illustrates them with garish pictures, in which every prince looks like a badly drawn portrait of Cary Grant, every princess a sex symbol (Hearne, 1997, 137).
Walt Disney himself is long gone, but the company he founded continues and follows the same path. The recent film Beauty and the Beast (1992) is an example in which the true beauty of the original story is lost in a sea of garish imagery, childish characterizations, and the perpetuation of certain media stereotypes about love, beauty, and social acceptance. Critics find that the Disneyfication of popular culture extends beyond Disney and reflects a pattern of treating the audience as mindless. In time, these critics charge, the audience does indeed become mindless after exposure to this constant dumbing-down of culture.
The story of Beauty and the Beast is well-known, and what this film needs to do is not convey the story in its bare essentials so much as shape the way the viewer responds to this particular version of the story. Many of the images constitute what might be called aspects of the iconography of the fairy tale--the castle, the simple village, the creature, the enchantress who casts a spell, the beauty who can take the spell away, the enchanted mirror, and so on. These are ima...