By Jess McDonnell and Matthew Scherger
Peer Reviewed by Megan Frech and Abigail Strickler
What is Disneyfication? We all know Disney takes pre-existing stories and “cleans them up” in order to sell their movies and products to children, but what does that process actually look like? It is common knowledge that the Disney version of fairy tales is often presented as more glamorous, the love story more romantic, and the ending happier, but does Disney do more than that. Using the concept of distant reading has the potential to discover some of the “tricks” Disney uses to make their stories more appealing to the masses, especially their audiences in the United States. According to Burdick, distant reading allows researchers to “detect large-scale trends, patterns and relationships that are not discernible from a single text or detailed analysis” (Burdick, 39). This is exactly what we want to use the concept of distant reading for, to look past the surface level of both the original fairy tales and the Disney movies to discover other trends that might not be obvious.
The first thing distant reading revealed was Disney’s inclination to name their characters. While in the original texts the main characters are often referred to as “Princess,” “Mermaid,” or even just “Beauty,” Disney replaces those with names: “Aurora,” “Ariel,” and “Belle.” While unsurprising from Disney’s end, because giving their main characters a name makes it easier for people to talk about them and sell products, it was more surprising that the old fairy tales neglected to name their characters. One theory for why this discrepancy exists is because in the past people told fairy tales to warn children about certain behaviors and as such would have no need to name their characters because they aren’t people that children should identify with. On the other hand, that’s exactly what Disney wants its audience to do. They create movies with the goal of audiences spending a few hours to escape the “real world” and imagine living in a fantasy land for a while. Disney’s characters are easier to identify with, partly because we can name them and see them.
Another trend that was revealed was that Disney often includes an entire cast of original characters not seen at all in the original text. In The Little Mermaid, Ariel has a pair of sidekicks, Flounder and Sebastian, that appear on the word cloud as highly significant words that appear often throughout the film. In the original Little Mermaid however, not only do they not exist, but there isn’t any substitution for them either. Across films and tales, distant reading revealed that the original fairy tales focused heavily on two characters at the most, the hero and heroine. The rest of the words in the word clouds were either attributes or adjectives, as would be expected of a written text. In the Disney movies, there is a greater number of nouns, proper nouns in particular, that highlight that in the movie format we are often more concerned with the characters themselves, and let the medium of the movie do most of the work of adjectives. The greater cast of characters also makes sense for a movie, as they would often be boring with only two characters present in the film.
A third trend is that the villains of the stories appear in the word clouds of the Disney films, but don’t make an appearance in the original texts. That’s not to say that they didn’t exist in the older version, but Disney brings them deeper into the story in order to create a more engaging tale. For example, the evil fairy in the original Sleeping Beauty is only mentioned five times, while Maleficent in Disney’s Sleeping Beauty is mentioned fifty times. Disney drives the conflict of the plot through its villains, which isn’t true for the older versions of the tales.
Although these discoveries would have been discoverable without the use of distant reading, using distant reading, and the word clouds in particular, was illustrative and highlighted trends that might have gone unnoticed. It is obvious perhaps that Disney creates characters and focuses on the conflict between the main heroine and the villain in order to create a more dramatic movie, but the very fact that it’s so obvious can make them invisible to our eyes when examining the texts. The clear representation of the word clouds removes this blindness and allows us to see exactly what Disney does to make their films successful. Distant reading can be very useful in discovering trends that we take for granted and as such wouldn’t even consider studying. Although these insights wouldn’t constitute research itself, it makes for a good starting point. However, once it is shown that Disney does certain things to make their films successful, it makes it easier to study those particular things in future studies to figure out how to replicate or increase their success. Distant reading thus seems as a good way to hone in on what to research, not necessarily as research itself.
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