Same "happy ending" treatment for the Pied Piper story. Those children were never seen again.
If I reread the story of the Little Mermaid today, I would probably like it a lot better than I did when I was a kid. I saw Walt Disney's Bambi when I was around six and enjoyed it. But when I saw it again as an adult, it made me angry that Disney had made hash of Felix Salten's classic book Bambi: A Life in the Forest.
Agreed. Saw the Disney film when I was small, read the book later. An entirely different story.
I’ve actually read and reread multiple times HCA’s Little Mermaid, up to a few years back. Quite frankly, no matter how much time passed, I still thought it was a bad story, period. Even if I had never so much as even HEARD of the Disney version, I STILL would have thought it was a bad story. It effectively implied God screwed up with his own creation by neglecting to give merpeople a soul despite showing about as much sapience as humans, for starters. Not to mention the mermaid character quite frankly wasn’t even likeable, especially when even during her last moments, she effectively screwed over a whole lot of people like her sisters, her dad, her grandma, even the Prince was left heartbroken at her death (and unlike Ariel, the mermaid never even cleaned up her mess before going out). She shouldn’t have been allowed into even purgatory after what she did. If anything, I considered the Disney version a massive improvement overall. At least with Ariel, the ending actually DID seem earned overall, had to clean up her mess before actually being allowed to become human, broke a curse on merfolk, redeem herself, all of that. All in the original 1989 film, BTW.
Now, want a film Disney DID end up ruining? Try Beauty and the Beast. Now THAT was a story Disney DID turn into hash thanks largely to Katzenberg and Woolverton deciding to push a feminist message over the actual moral of true beauty coming from within, including forgetting to actually give BELLE foils befitting that moral (no, the triplets were WAY too nice to truly qualify as foils). And that was a story that DID retain its happy ending.