“They were totally meant for kids. First Brothers Grimm story I ever read was Die Scherer, about a big scary guy with huge scissors who cut off the thumbs of kids who wouldn’t stop sucking them. It was a lesson for kids, targeted at kids. It was a different generation of kids, not coddled like ours, the folk tales existed to remind kids it was a dangerous world, and they needed to get their act together.”
“Coddled”? That’s what you describe what Disney films as doing? “Coddling” them? I could get Barney and Friends or even Teletubbies being described as “coddling” kids, but not Disney, because depicting familial abuse, a person outright trying to MURDER their child, not to mention making the wicked fairy actually attempt to MURDER a child rather than just leave them in a coma for not being invited is not exactly my idea of “coddling” kids, nor is films that show villains being outright killed (and not simply falling down a ravine, I mean. Actually, with Sleeping Beauty, Maleficent was actually KILLED by Prince Phillip by throwing the Sword of Truth straight into her heart, and in The Little Mermaid, Flotsam and Jetsam as well as Ursula were killed in such a manner that you almost thought you were watching Dragon Ball Z than a Disney film, and Dragon Ball Z was multiple-levels dark, and I doubt most people would think it “coddles” kids, especially when the original versions had them not dying at all, and in the case of Ursula wasn’t even a villain.). And for that matter, nor is entering a faustian deal with the villain and nearly losing your soul as a result. All of which, BTW, were actually IN Disney films. Maybe you should rewatch them with those specific things in mind.
And there is such a thing as giving people TOO much darkness in kids tales, and that will have kids growing up to be so cynical that they can’t even conceive of good. Like child soldiers in Africa, for example.
That’s what American society does. We hide reality from kids as long as possible, then we have the audacity to be shocked when kids finally get a taste of the real world and can’t handle it.
Depicting family abuse is real. That’s how things work in the real world, it’s terrible, but it’s real. And one of the things that allows it to continue is that we deny it. We hide from it, we pretend it doesn’t happen, we pretend there’s some other reason for those bruises, we add singing rats and make it all go away.
I’m not rewatching crappy saccharine movies to remind myself how crappy they are. The problem here is you know the story they’re HIDING and pretending they actually put it on the screen, I remember the story that’s on the screen where all that stuff is at best hinted at and quickly shunted aside for the happily ever after.
Kid soldiers in Africa aren’t getting any stories, they’re drafted, bad example.
Face it, we’ll never agree. I have loathed Disney movies for 40 years. You like them, good for you, I hate them and I hate the company that made them. Best plan here is for you to pretend you never saw this thread and go on enjoying those movies. While I will go on avoiding them like the diabetes causing plague they are. We disagree, we’ll never agree, I wish you good health.