In the world of Hollywood animation, Disney's pantheon of princess movies are the gold standard
of lighthearted family fun.
With singing animals, big-eyed heroines, guaranteed happily-ever-afters, and a nice, comfortable
G-rating across the board, there's nothing even remotely dark or disturbing about these
whimsical films … until you take a peek at the horrifying tales they're based on.
Here's a look at the creepy stories behind the Disney princess movies.
Frozen
Frozen broke major ground for Disney as a feel-good, feminist-friendly entry into its
canon of classic princess fare.
And to accomplish that, all they had to change about the source material was...well...everything.
Frozen is based on Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen, a lengthy meditation on the
nature of evil.
In the original story, the Snow Queen isn't a misunderstood teenager struggling to bear
the weight of her epic ice-making powers and the legacy of some seriously lousy parenting.
Instead, she's a cold, creepy, inhuman villainess who kidnaps a little boy named Kai, smooches
him to give him amnesia, and then forces him to do math puzzles all day and night in her
ice palace.
Talk about sadistic!
By the time Kai's sister finds him several years later, he's a frostbite ridden shadow
of his former self.
Good luck turning that into a cuddly action figure.
Cinderella
Like most of Disney's classic animated films, this dreamy old-school princess story was
a complete nightmare in its original incarnation.
For one thing, Cinderella's father is alive and well in the fairytale by the Brothers
Grimm.
He's not just there to see how badly she's being treated, he's complicit in it.
For another, Cinderella in her original incarnation isn't so much a hapless servant girl as a
powerful sorceress who inexplicably tolerates being treated like slime by her family even
though she can conjure magic with her tears.
"A dream, is a wish your heart makes."
And Cinderella's stepsisters?
They don't just embarrass themselves when they try to pretend they're the owners of
Cinderella's missing slipper — they literally dismember their feet to make the shoe fit.
One of the sisters chops off her big toe, and the other removes a piece of her heel.
In both cases, the prince only notices that something is wrong when a bunch of talking
birds point out to him that his bride's shoe is filling up with blood.
And that's not all!
At the very end of the story, the sisters show up at Cinderella's wedding and walk her
down the aisle in a shameless last-minute attempt to curry her favor — at which point
the talking birds, who have had just about enough of this social-climbing nonsense, fly
down and peck their eyes out.
The Little Mermaid
We all know the story of sweet Ariel, who fell in love with a human man and got a well-deserved
happy ending with a princely husband.
But while Disney's Little Mermaid lived happily ever after as a part of your world, the Hans
Christian Andersen story that the movie was based on is a much, much darker affair — full
of dismemberment, murder, existential crises, and exactly zero reggae jam musical numbers
composed by a crotchety talking crab.
"While we devotin', full time to floating under the sea."
In the original Little Mermaid, she has to sacrifice her ability to speak the old-fashioned
way — by letting the sea witch cut out her tongue.
And once on land, despite living in the prince's palace where she silently, perpetually pines
for him, the heroine never even comes close to getting her man.
Instead, he friend-zones her and marries somebody else.
That leaves her with two terrible choices: she can either stab the prince to death on
his wedding night — or she can kill herself.
Needless to say, she takes the noble option and throws herself into the sea … at which
point it turns out that her act of sacrifice has earned her a place in heaven.
But only after she's forced to spend 300 years in purgatory as an invisible wind spirit?
Even Ursula thinks that's going a bit too far.
Pocahontas
Much as we love the Disney take on this old-school American legend, the true story of Pocahontas
is mostly just kind of sad.
For one thing, she was just 11 years old when she saved Captain John Smith's life by convincing
her father not to execute him.
The two of them never had a romance.
Instead the teenage Pocahontas married a fellow Powhatan, but was taken captive in 1613 by
the English.
Although her father tried to negotiate and bring her back, Pocahontas quickly converted
to Christianity, changed her name to Rebecca, and married a tobacco farmer named John Rolfe.
She ultimately followed Rolfe to England and died there the following year, at age 20,
never having seen her father or family again.
Beauty and the Beast
Lovely, bookish Belle is one of the most memorable heroines in Disney history.
But in Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont's Beauty and the Beast, the original story on
which the movie was based, the circumstances that lead to her coming to stay with the transfigured
prince are a lot more questionable.
In the original Beauty and the Beast, Beauty's father gets on the Beast's bad side, and the
Beast decides that either dear ol' Dad, or one of his daughters must die as a punishment.
The father offers himself, but Belle volunteers instead.
But Beast can't bring himself to kill her on account of the butterflies in his stomach.
He proposes marriage to her every day for three months before letting her go back to
her dad's house for a visit.
Beauty returns to the castle to find the Beast near death — not at the hands of Gaston,
who doesn't even exist in this version, but because the Beast has been intentionally starving
himself as a twisted form of emotional manipulation.
It works, and Beauty agrees to marry him to stop him from killing himself.
Now if that isn't true love, I don't know what is.
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