To analyse the creative process and the decisions made by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm I take the example of the legacy of their work: Disney.
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There are eras that can be marked in Disney’s storytelling style based on the plot and character design of the movie and its protagonists, and my example is the story of the Florida studio. It did the backup animation since the primary Disney studios in Burbank dealt with ‘safer’ more established stories rather than entertain eccentric ideas. It was these conventional stories, most of them based on Grimm fairy tales, that created the strong foundation of the Disney empire.
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In 1996, Disney wanted to transition to 3D animation technology, and with the acquisition of Pixar, was working on A Bug’s Life in Burbank. This left Florida studio a free reign over 2D animation, and they produced feature films such as Mulan (1998), Tarzan (1999), John Henry (2000), The Emperor’s New Groove (2001), Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001), Lilo & Stitch (2002) and Brother Bear (2003). Florida Studio was closed in 2004 and 2D feature films ended, with the animators heading to Dreamworks.
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This phase in the early 2000’s saw stories that were focussed on non-Eurocentric cultures and characters. From China to Hawaii to Africa and Aztec Empire, even ancient Greece, these movies could be described as ‘random’ as per the typical Disney algorithm, which was mostly the Grimm’s tales, and they deviated from white Christian image reinforcement more towards what is today called ‘representation’. What this does is antithetical to Jacob Grimm’s motive for a region specific unity based on the notion of ‘volk’, but ironically, foreign representation is the reason why Disney started seeing global audiences, whose childhood was linked through the Disney platform.​
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​To phrase it in another manner, Grimm brothers wished that the notion of folk or Kultur would unite the German populace with the help of shared memories through stories, stories that represented certain people and were hallmark of their childhood. Jack Zipes in the Introduction of The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm called “Once There Were Two Brothers Named Grimm”, told us that both Jacob and Wilhelm died with the knowledge that Germany would not yet unite. And yet their work was used by Nazi Germany to unite and divide, and later by Disney to connect to children all over the world. The process described by Jack Zipes is the same that Disney employed to edit the Grimm tales to make them child friendly in the recent decades, as well as the shift made by the Grimm brothers from oral to text, and then by Disney from text to visual. In that sense, the stories still reach those they were meant to reach, just on a scale and through a method that the Grimm brothers probably never imagined.
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As for the other part, the 20th century has created a globalised world, especially towards the latter half when children all around the world have seen Disney movies. Disney is a common attribute of many childhoods, again, uniting people in a way. This globalised childhood that came during the peak and fall of white supremacy that hallmarked the 20th century left many third world countries internalising Eurocentric behaviour, almost like children, a parallel between era of post-colonialism and growing up of infants.
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Coming back to my original point of Florida studios, we see a deviation from the trend of using Grimm tales and instead a time of brainstorming and era-appropriate story creation, which was also a nostalgic process for the artists, who knew that 2D technology was coming to an end. Even though this appears to be unrelated to the Grimm’s tales because the Florida studio abandoned the Grimm plotlines, Jack Zipes, through comparing earlier and later excerpts of the same stories, has explained that for the Grimm brothers, documenting the folk tales was then followed by a creative process of rewriting and restructuring, introducing modern changes that reflected the sensibility of the times. The Florida studios also brought this strange new stylization that many avid Disney fans recognize and reflect upon, and recognize to be the unique style of the Florida studio they grew up watching.
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In other words, the Grimm brothers were fascinated with the notion of the glorious past but took creative liberties and left a legacy that explains to us the folk culture of the time they were writing in as well. In the same way, by deviating from retelling the Grimm stories, the Florida studio was able to depict the folk culture of the late 20th century, which we remark upon in hindsight while discussing the obsolete 2D technology. Dundes would call this understanding modern folk culture, which is the same process as performed by the Grimm brothers. History repeats itself, then it is interesting to think, how does folk?
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