Disney is lying to your kids

At the 11th Academy Awards in 1939, Shirley Temple presented Walt Disney with an honorary Oscar — a statuette accompanied by seven miniatures. It was, of course, a nod to his animation Snow White, which the Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein had called “the greatest film ever made”.

As with all of his adaptations, Disney had reworked the original Brothers Grimm fairytale to remove its more gruesome and confusing elements. Intricate subplots involving not one but three deceptions by the jealous queen — a corset, a comb and then the apple — were whittled down; Snow White is revived not by the dropping of her glass coffin, dislodging said poisoned pomme from her throat, but by “true love’s kiss”. Most significantly, in the Disney version, the queen — a vain stepmother threatened by Snow White’s pubescent “fairness” — falls off a cliff. The original is more Grimm indeed: she is made to wear red-hot shoes of iron and dance until she dies, a morbid mockery of her desire for admiration.