In Search Of. . . Written Words: Not your typical Disney story

In Search Of. . . Written Words

"And they live happily ever after."

It's a typical ending to the romanticized fairy tales; especially the Disney sanitized fairy tales we gorge ourselves on.

Before Disney got a hold of them though, some of the fairy tales were ridiculously dark. Not to mention the skewed idea of love, but I will save that rant for another post. For now, I just want to compare/contrast a fairy tale and the Disney version.

For the Reading Challenge, I had to read, or rather re-read, three different fairy tales: "Rapunzel", "Snow White and Rose Red", and "The Little Match Girl". Since Disney, to my knowledge, has not done "Snow White and Rose Red" or the "Little Match Girl", I'll work with "Rapunzel" and Disney's Tangled.

All right, so Tangled. It's a perfect example of a modern Disney movie.

It has beautiful scenery. (I read somewhere that the designers wanted every scene to be picture perfect, and they achieved it.) It has an adorable story line, with a loveable, finally 18 year-old, plucky heroine and her foil anti-hero, who does turn out to be a good guy in the end, a sly villain, and humorous sidekicks.

Yep, typical Disney.

Returning to an original version by the Brothers Grim, we cancel all of that out. And, just so you know, Grimm sanitized their version too. The Italian version isn’t so . . . sweet.

So first major difference. Rapunzel isn’t a princess by birth. She just has a selfish mother who would rather put her family in danger then do without. Her prego mom sees some rampion, or Rapunzel plant, in a witch’s garden, and refuses to live basically, unless her husband gets her the plant.

Not exactly like the loving mother we see in the movie. I would suppose to make a clear villain, Disney had to make her mother a victim of a baby snatching rather than Rapunzel's father bartering her away for his and his wife's life.

So, that's really how Mother Gothel got the baby. It does take the creepiness out of a greedy, baby snatching woman. She was actually probably a better mother than Rapunzel's own mother would have been.

Mother Gothel raises Rapunzel like in the movie, but she only puts Rapunzel in the tower when she notices her daughter hits puberty. Oh, and just as a side note, the only magical thing about Rapunzel's hair is it's length. It doesn't heal.

So we fast forward a few years and Rapunzel's matured, but stuck in a tower. She's bored, lonely, and quite frankly, ready to get out of the tower. Enter a nameless handsome prince, not Flynn Ryder and his comic smolder or his thieving ways. He climbs up into the castle pretending to be Mother Gothel, and immediately asks Rapunzel to marry him. Rapunzel, never having seen a man freaks out, but in a Bella-esque move, reacts to his kind words and immediately agrees.

Personally, I'm all for the frying pan idea.

So that takes out the whole lantern thing, which is a sad element to loose since it adds so beautifully to the cinematography. It's also a lot creepier that she would just agree to marriage to an utter stranger, but it was 1889. Go figure.

Rapunzel opens her big mouth and tells the witch that she's met a Prince. Furious, the witch cuts off her hair, and hides her away in the desert, which eliminates the need for Flynn Ryder to allow himself to die to save Rapunzel. The Prince comes to get Rapunzel but instead finds the witch. Avoiding the witch's fury, he falls out the window and has his eyes put out, and then wanders around for years.

Somehow he finds Rapunzel, and like in the movie, her tears heal him, but just his eyes. Then they skip off to their happily ever after.

Or maybe there's a sequel where Mother Gothel, who doesn't die, comes back to exact revenge.

So that's a short comparison/contrast of The Brothers Grimm "Rapunzel" and Disney's Tangled.

As Always,