I’ll give you Beauty and the Beast (most of the Disney version, with the exception of the curse as well as Belle taking the place of her father, wasn’t even similar at all to the original tale), but the others definitely don’t deserve that much of a rap. Besides, a lot of the stuff in the fairy tales quite frankly isn’t suitable for children, like for example having the Evil Queen dance in red hot shoes or the fact that Aurora was raped by the prince (who, BTW, was the offspring of an ogre) during her century coma. I mean, what, are you going to show your three year old Senator Kelly’s liquification from X-Men? Because that’s what showing all the details from the Grimm fairy tales in animated form is going to result in if Disney does exactly what you suggested. We’ve already got a hint of that with Hunchback of Notre Dame where they had the villagers torment Quasimodo just for the sake of it instead of out of corporal punishment or how they included a Gypsy genocide plot by Frollo that wasn’t even in the original book at all.
Snow White is terrible, and frankly so is Cinderella which ever version they went after. And of course fairy tales are suitable for children, that’s who they were written for. One of the big lessons of fairy tales is that life is rough. I’m not saying they should show all of the details, I’m saying they should burn half the story. They did the same thing with Alice in Wonderland. They take everything that’s interesting in the story, decide it’s too mean or whatever, and make saccharine crap out o the story. What you’d get if they actually RESPECTED the story is good versions that are truthful and interesting, but of course that would keep the original alive, and Disney doesn’t want that. The real reason they sanitize them is for ownership, Disney wants the real versions of the stories to seem foreign and odd, they want you to think exclusively of the Disney version, and pass it on to your kids, because that passes your money, and eventually your kids’ money, to them. There’s a reason why Travers hated the Mary Poppins movie, but of course Disney being Disney they even found a way to sanitize that hatred (Saving Mr Banks has her learning to love the movie, she didn’t).
Disney is actually kind of frightening when you think about they way they take over intellectual property and culture.