Dark Disney: The Real And Horrifying Stories Behind The Classics

By All That's Interesting

Published November 27, 2017

Updated February 9, 2018

From Cinderella to the Little Mermaid, the origins behind your favorite secretly dark Disney movies are
more shocking and violent than you could imagine.

Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs

Disney is an industry built on magic and happily ever after. For kids around the world, Disney movies are
what dreams are made of. The stories have been
inspiring and exciting children since the first animated
Disney film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, came
out in 1937.

Parents and grandparents share their favorite Disney

movies with children and grandchildren. Every little girl
has a role model Disney princess and little boys proudly
wear Cars or Toy Story PJs. The films are wholesome and
positive, loved by parents and children and everyone in
between.

When it comes to many of Disney’s classic films, however, the polished happy endings are often a long
way off from the original fairytales that inspired them. Torture, hanging, burning feet – these are just a
few of the things Disney cuts out when rewriting century-old fairytales for the screen.

Dark Disney: Pinocchio

Pinocchio

Culture Club/Getty Images

The Tale of a Puppet by C.Collodi. Illustrations by Charles Folkard. 1914.

When people visualize Pinocchio, they see the sweet young puppet with a desire to be a real boy. The
Disney movie tells the tale of his adventures with his friend and advisor, Jiminy Cricket, and how they
ultimately lead him to his dream of becoming a human.

The original creator of Pinocchio, Carlo Collodi, was hoping for a different image. Collodi createdsleep
the character for a serial story in Italian newspapers with the goal of showing kids the consequences of
being bad. Collodi’s Pinocchio was cruel and mischievous. His Jiminy Cricket was only referred to as
“Talking Cricket,” and when the cricket tried to give Pinocchio some good advice, the puppet-boy killed
him with a mallet.

Pinocchio Gets Hanged Wikimedia Commons The Fox and the Cat, dressed as bandits, hang Pinocchio.
1901.

Pinocchio is constantly tortured in different ways throughout the story, all punishment for bad behavior.
Collodi initially ended the tale with Pinocchio’s death by hanging, but because of an outcry from fans,
Collodi was forced to continue. So he decided
Pinocchio’s life would be spared in exchange for even
more gruesome punishments from that point forward.

Sleeping Beauty

Disney’s Sleeping Beauty is a classic tale of a princess in

distress and the prince who comes gallantly to her
rescue. The original 17th-century Italian tale has similar
beginnings: the princess, named Talia, pricked her finger
on a spindle and was sent into a deep sleep, fulfilling an
earlier prophecy. The rest of Talia’s story is too gruesome
to be a children’s tale.

The man who came to Talia’s “rescue” is a king, not a prince. The king’s kiss did not awake Talia. He
instead “gathers the fruits of her love,” which is a nicer way of saying he raped her while she slept.

Nine months later, she gave birth to twins, and one of them sucked the splinter from her finger, waking
her up. Talia and the king fall in love, but the king is still married. His queen orders the twins to be
kidnapped, cooked, and fed to the unknowing king.
 Luckily, she fails. The moral of this story was: “Lucky people, so ’tis
said, Are blessed by Fortune whilst in bed.”

Cinderella

When Disney’s Cinderella II came out in 2002, it turned out that

Cinderella’s evil stepsisters weren’t as evil as they were shown in the first movie. One of them, Anastasia,
was even featured having her own love interest with a baker, a relationship encouraged by Cinderella.

The fate given to the stepsisters by the Brothers Grimm was not so forgiving. In that fairytale, the two
girls cut off different parts of their feet in an attempt to fit into the slipper.

Some doves swooped in to show the prince the blood on the shoe, so he would not be fooled. At the
end of the story, the stepsisters attend Cinderella’s wedding, only to have their eyes pecked out by the
doves who had betrayed them earlier.

Dark Disney: The Little Mermaid

Dark Disney: The Real And Horrifying Stories Behind The Classics

By All That's Interesting

Published November 27, 2017

Updated February 9, 2018

Dark Disney: The Little Mermaid

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Little Mermaid

Wikimedia Commons
The Little Mermaid

In Hans Christian Andersen’s version of the tale, Ariel makes a deal with the sea witch in order to
become a human and pursue the prince she saved in a shipwreck. She gets a pair of legs in exchange for
her tongue.

However, part of the deal is that every step she takes with this new pair of legs will feel like walking on
shattered glass. If Ariel gets her true love’s kiss, she can remain a human, but if she fails, she will die.

The prince never actually saw Ariel’s face when she saved him, so he ends up marrying someone else.
The sea witch tells Ariel she can just turn back into a mermaid instead of dying if she kills the prince.

Of course, Ariel cannot bring herself to do that. Instead, in dark Disney fashion, she throws herself into
the ocean and dissolves into sea foam.

Bambi

Bambi, a Life in the Woods is a novel following a deer

through his life growing up in the woods. Though Disney
took this adult novel and turned it into a heartwarming
Disney movie, the book touches on the circle of life,
survival, man vs. nature, etc.

The book is also very violent. On Bambi’s first walk into

the woods, he witnessed a mouse get killed and heard
creatures threatening each other with death.

Later, after a hunter shoots Bambi and another deer, “The Great/Old Prince,” teaches him to walk in
circles and spread the blood so that the hunter gets confused. The Great Prince also showed Bambi the
body of the dead hunter at the end of the story, to prove that man is not all-powerful.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame

The Hunchback of Notre Dame is one of Disney’s darker films. Like the novel it’s based off of, the movie
is about a hunchback named Quasimodo, who grew up in Notre Dame Cathedral, raised by an
archdeacon named Frollo.

Quasimodo and Frollo both fell in love with the same woman, Esmeralda. At the end of the film,
Quasimodo pushed Frollo, the villain, off the roof of the cathedral, killing him.

It’s already uncharacteristically morbid for Disney, but the original novel by Victor Hugo has an even
worse ending for the protagonists. In Hugo’s story, Frollo framed Esmeralda for attempted murder, and
she was sentenced to be hanged.

Quasimodo still pushed Frollo off a roof, but it was because Frollo was laughing at Esmeralda’s hanging.
Quasi then goes to Esmeralda’s grave and refuses to leave her, so he ultimately dies of starvation there.
Hugo’s book did not end happily for anyone.

Snow White

Snow White still gets her happily ever after in the original Brothers Grimm fairytale. After the evil queen
failed two attempts to personally kill Snow White, she finally decided to try out the poison apple. It
seemed to work, but then the prince swooped in with his true love’s kiss to save her.

In the end of this dark Disney story, Snow White and the prince are still married. However, the evil queen
is at the wedding and her punishment is that she has to dance around in iron-hot shoes burning her feet
until she dies. Even princesses get their revenge.