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Chronicling history behind the musical success of the 1989 animated masterpiece.

Children’s literature has long been a favorite source of inspiration for the creative inventiveness of the Disney artists. Fables and fairy tales have been used for the storylines of countless shorts and feature films since the earliest days of Walt Disney Animation Studios. One of the earliest was Little Red Riding Hood, which Walt Disney created in 1922 in Kansas City, Missouri. Beginning with this effort, he produced a series of seven “Laugh-O—grams”—all based on fairy tales—before moving to Los Angeles. The Disney animated classic Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) was based on a story best known from the folk tales collected by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, popularly called Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Walt Disney remembered the story from his own childhood as well as the 1916 silent film version starring Marguerite Clark, and felt it had the classic elements of good vs. evil that he wanted for his first feature animated film. Cinderella was another story with elements of rags to riches that resonated with general audiences and also was a personal favorite of Walt Disney’s because it was reminiscent of his own humble beginnings. The universal theme in Sleeping Beauty (1959), that love conquers all, is another favorite fairy tale that has fit well into the Disney animation canon.

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