Beauty and the Beast

This is my favorite Disney fairytale movie.  It is about a girl named Belle who doesn’t feel like she fits in anywhere.  Eventually, she ends up trading her life to save her father who was captured by a hideous beast.  She is forced to live in a creepy castle with an angry beast.  The Beast falls in love with her and she also falls in love with him.  Belle ends up saving the Beast’s life and ending the curse on the whole castle.  They live happily ever after, of course.

Another version, by Villeneuve, has a lot more heartbreak, murder, and sexual parts to it.  The Beast, a prince, lost his father and never saw his mother since she was defending their kingdom in a war.  The Beast was left under the care of a fairy that turned out to be evil.  When the Beast became an adult, the fairy tried to seduce him.  He refused and was turned into a beast. 

Belle was the daughter of a King and a good fairy.  The evil fairy attempted to murder Belle in order to marry her father, the King.  To protect Belle, she was put in the place of a merchant’s dead daughter.  This way, no one would be able to question her existence and past.

In the end, Belle falls in love with the Beast.  Even though the story line is a bit crazy and wrong in many ways, the ending is as romantic as the Disney version.

Snow White

Disney’s version of Snow White is so romantic.  A prince hears Snow White singing and he falls madly in love with her right away.  When the queen gets jealous of Snow White, she orders her to be killed. Snow White is able to get away and takes refuge with seven dwarfs.  The queen finds out where she is hiding.  She disguises herself as an old lady and presents Snow White a poisoned apple. Snow White eats it and falls into a deep sleep.  The queen is chased by the dwarfs and falls backwards off of a cliff.  The prince eventually finds Snow White in a clear casket.  He wakes her up with a kiss and they live happily ever after.

The Grimm’s version is not so much romantic as it is creepy.  First of all, the queen attempts to kill Snow White in a lot more ways.   She uses lace, a poisoned comb, and a poisoned apple.  The poisoned apple made Snow White stop breathing and the dwarfs thought she was dead.  The prince shows up in the story for the first time when he comes across the dead body in a glass casket.  He insists on taking the girl home with him.  He feels as though he cannot live without her.  As his men carry the casket, they stumble over a tree stump and the apple is lodged out of Snow White’s throat.  She awakens and marries the prince.  The queen is punished in the end by being forced to dance in heated iron shoes.

I do not understand why the prince wanted a dead girl’s body.  Even if she was the prettiest girl he had ever seen, it is extremely disturbing!

Cinderella

Cinderella loses her beloved father and becomes a slave to her evil stepmother.  She is forced to do all the chores for her stepmother and two stepsisters.  Eventually, she is visited by her fairy godmother and is able to attend the Prince’s Ball.  There, she dances with the prince and falls in love.  At midnight, she is forced to run away, leaving only a shoe behind.  The prince, who is madly in love, sends his messenger to go door to door in order to find Cinderella.  The glass slipper fits her foot and they are married at once.  Of course, they live happily ever after.

In the Grimm’s version of this fairytale, Cinderella still has a happy ending, but the stepsisters pay for the harsh things they have done to Cinderella.  During the time that the prince’s messenger was trying to find the mystery woman, the stepsisters devised a plan.  The first one cut off her heel in order to fit into the shoe.  Following shortly after, the second one cut off her toe.  A bird saw the blood coming from the glass slippers and revealed the truth about the stepsisters.  Cinderella is discovered to be the true mystery woman and she happily marries the prince.  The stepsisters, who did attend the wedding, had their eyes pecked out by birds.  They were forever punished by blindness.

The stepsisters had it coming to them!

The Little Mermaid

The Little Mermaid, Ariel, trades her voice to an evil witch, Ursula, in order to acquire legs.  She then proceeds to woo the random prince she just happens to spot and fall in love with.  Ariel fails to fulfill the requirements of the contract with Ursula and therefore Ursula begins to attack everyone.  In the end, Ariel and Prince Eric are able to defeat the evil witch and get approval from King Neptune.  The two lovebirds get married and live happily ever after.

This is not the way the writer, Hans Christian Andersen, intended the ending to be.  He originally wrote two endings to the famous story.

In one version, Ariel sees her beloved prince marry a princess.  She is offered a knife to kill the prince, but refuses.  She then jumps into the water and dies by turning into froth.

Hans decided to modify the ending to make it more enjoyable.  Instead of killing Ariel, he makes her a “daughter of the air” who is waiting to go to Heaven.  Either way she dies, but in this version, she dies in a nicer way.

For once, the original fairytale was not bloody or disturbing like the other fairytales previously discussed.