(no subject)

[alexseanchai]

Does anyone else find the thing where everybody's visual headcanon of certain fairytale protagonists (to say nothing of certain historical-people-or-historical-fiction-protagonists!) comes from Disney movies...distressing?

Comments

[summerstorm]

Not really? I mean, they're the most high-profile retellings, and the style is easier to parse and remember than old illustrations.

[sylvanwitch]

*Waves hands wildly* Me! Me! I do! Lol!

I'm an early Americanist who specialized in first encounter texts (eg. white people writing about their experiences with the "savages" of North America). NEVER ask me what I think of Pocahontas. I might tell you. ;-)

Seriously, though, a thousand times YES to this.

ETA: I should specify that I am a white person. I don't mean to imply that I'm Native American.

[pauamma]

I specifically feel that way about The Jungle Book. (Although getting your headcanon from Kipling itself may come with its own set of problems.)

[silveradept]

Certainly so, especially where Disney has also changed the stories to suit their own narratives. The problem is that most people lack another bvisual reference to counteract that, unless you enjoy fairy tale graphic novels or such. What we need is another wildly popular story that's not Disney.

[aris_tgd]

I kind of do, but for a different reason?

I don't necessarily find it annoying that the biggest or most popular/enduring media version of a thing is the one that people think of first, I'm most annoyed when people don't think of anything else second, or reject new portrayals because they don't match what they already have in their head.

(Insert here: Sherlock Holmes never wore a deerstalker, Dorothy Gale wore silver slippers, Henry VIII was hot before he turned into Charles Laughton, everything in Peter Jackson's Hobbit movies, Robin Hood was a peasant, etc.)

Obviously Disney gets in on this more than others because our generation grew up during the Disney renaissance and there was a previous generation that grew up during classic Disney (and we had that on video), but I dunno, I think of Disney movies as being separate canon from the original fairy tales and I bet many other people do too. Like, my visual headcanon of the mermaid from the original Little Mermaid story is, uh, not Ariel. But if you say, "How about the protagonist of The Little Mermaid?" I'll think Ariel first because the Disney movie is closer to mind than Hans Christian Anderson.