Starting with snow white

Snow White 
tale is concerned. There are a few reasons for this.
First, there are the literary/folkloric debates adamantly opposed to Disney’s animation.
In 
The Enchanted Screen: The Unknown History of Fairy-Tale Films
, Zipes continues to 
argue, “Walt Disney sought to monopolize fairy-tale films so he would be recognized as 
a kind of master storyteller,” and in so doing “has banalized the fairy tale with empty 
conventions” (12, 15).
3
Connected closely with these disputes are those from librarians 
and educators. Immediately following Disney’s production, in 1938 (librarian) Anne 
Carroll Moore “actively sought a correct version of the fairy tale for children” (by which 
she meant one reflecting the Grimms’ tale), as book-based versions had seemingly 
become “Disney books” (Hoyle qtd. in 
Sticks and Stones
92). Nearly twenty years later, 
in “Walt Disney Accused” (1965), Frances Clarke Sayers similarly contested Disney’s 
“[mis]treatment of folklore” (
The Horn Book Magazine
). Because of critics’ disdain for 
Disney’s adaptation based on his ill-use of folklore as well as their (frequent) veneration 
of the Grimms’ collection, further exploration into an American 
Snow White 
tradition 
leading toward Disney’s supposed misappropriation has either been countered or denied. 
3
Zipes criticism bears a history of rejecting Disney’s fairy tale films on these grounds. See an earlier 
version of this argument in 
Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion
. 

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Similarly, theories of folklore in their distinction of “oral” origins contest 
Disney’s usage of the form. For American folklorists, such as Alan Dundes, even the 
Grimms’ collections were inauthentic “‘fakelore’”
4
(Stone 53). Dundes understood 
folklore as a form “passed on by means of person to person contact” and representing that 
“oral style” of transmission (58). Therefore, written or other forms, utilizing alternate 
modes of communication, sacrificed both the performance of the story, as well as the 
possibilities for varied performances, naturally providing opportunities for moments of 
improvisation or alteration (59). Although Mikel J. Koven speaks more specifically on 
filmic representations of folklore in “Folklore Studies and Popular Film and Television:
A Necessary Critical Survey,” the underlying critique remains the same. Koven gestures 
toward the “perception” of many folklorists or advocates of folklore that “the movies 
[(Disney’s versions)] fix traditional narratives into single ‘definitive’ texts, which replace 
the more fluid oral variants” (177). Koven goes on to discuss the “devolutionary 
influence of the mass media,” in which Elizabeth Tucker also finds that “‘mass-mediated 
versions of narratives [are viewed] as replacing the oral variants previously in 
circulation’” (177). Despite the survey’s suggestion that “fixed” filmic texts can be 
“varied via editing and/or subsequently altered and reproduced versions,” Koven 
ultimately finds that “folklore studies 
is not 
film studies, and while relevant for folklorists 
to discuss, […] popular cinema remains tangential and adjunct to the main tenants of 
folkloristics” (185, 190). In other words, its departure from the “oral” form divides a 
film’s value (in some measure) from the field of folklore altogether. These literary and 
4
Early American folklorist Richard M. Dorson used this term to describe “material falsely claiming origins 
in genuine folk tradition” (Stone 53). 

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folkloric discussions largely function to shut down the possibilities for understanding a 
preceding American folkloric