Category Archives: 20th century

Disney’s Snow White: Thinking about the Brand

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Disney released Snow White, the latest live-action remake of one of the studio’s classic animated films last weekend, with the controversy about the leading ladies’ political differences  still simmering.  (Rachel Zegler [Snow White] and Gal Gadot [Queen] appear in civilian clothes on the right.)  The flurry of commentaries seemed more or less agreed that the House of Mouse was trying to force a poison apple down the public’s throat. The likelihood of successfully updating this particular fairy tale for the 21st century seemed doubtful because it has as many problems as Sleeping Beauty, with a passive princess awakened with a nonconsensual kiss after a century of slumber. The box office take last weekend dropped significantly.

Zegler as Snow White and the dwarves, who were not played by actors with the syndrome but created by through a combination of techniques including C. G. I.

For Disney, the top priority has to be sustaining the brand with periodical reinvention of its classics.  Reviewers who are under the spell of Disney magic point out that the studio must create for a new generation the experience of seeing the original in new dress because of its investment in theme parks, merchandise, etc.  The business logic is impeccable, but the strategy never would have been possible if Disney had not availed itself of stories in the public domain and then taken their commodification to  new levels.

Adriana Caselotti, the voice of Snow White, posing with the book that figures in the opening sequence. She was not credited in the film.

Watch the 1937 original Snow White and it’s clear as the nose on a dwarf’s face that transforming a sparely worded 10-page story into an 84-minute film requires sacrificing good scenes,expanding the action and elaborating details out of whole cloth.   Adding and subtracting has always central to the Disney approach to adaptation and sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s mixed.  Hard to argue with eliminating Grimm’s quiet opening of the queen embroidering during a snowfall and beginning with the brooding spirit in the magic mirror telling the stunning evil queen what she never expected to hear.   A few details in Grimm allowed Disney to spin the vertiginous scene of Snow White running through the dark woods.  Grimm briefly describes how the queen crossed the mountains to find her stepdaughter at the dwarves’ cottage, while in the film the crone punts down the misty river with the vultures watching overhead.  Probably few people would object to the last change.

The ”liberties” the Disney team took in the famous scenes that frightened children work brilliantly because they are true to the story’s spirit and structure; the ones in the scenes with Snow White haven’t aged as well, because of the way the nonhuman is domesticated by sentimentality and physical humor.  (That’s my take).
The superfluity of birds and mammals Disney added  have rounded, juvenile features that make their faces sweeter than they would be in nature.  At Snow White’s bidding they wash the dishes and do the laundry and no one thinks of biting anyone else.  Grimm’s “good little dwarves’” are transformed into a band of comically dim, bearded sidekicks in need of civilizing by the good little mother and housewife Snow White.  These miners couldn’t hold their own in Middle Earth or Discworld because their dwarvishness has dwindled away to next to nothing.The collection has a nice selection of merchandise for the original animated film, marked in prominent places that it is authorized merchandise. All of them except one appeared in 1938 on the wake of the film’s release.

Whitman Publishing Company issued a 280-page retelling of the fairy tale by the “Staff of the Walt Disney Studios based on the Walt Disney Motion Picture” in the Big Little Book series (Cotsen 87872).  Printed on acid paper that is brown and brittle, the  illustrations were printed with such a coarse screen that the dots are quite visible.  The quality of the cover art on the binding is much better, and the Queen is featured on the spine and the back board.

The Story of Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Racine, Wis.: Whitman Pub. Co., c1938. (Cotsen 87872)

(Cotsen 87872)

The dwarves were featured on a get-well-soon card published by White and Wycoff.  Cotsen’s  copy is annotated by “B. W.” (presumably the giver) and Snow White has been identified over her head as “Teacher” (Cotsen 37944).   On the inside, Snow White is sitting in bed underneath a patchwork quilt with the dwarves lined up at the foot of the bed.  Could the art have been adapted from the scene where the dwarves build her a bed that was cut in the final version?

[Snow White Get Well Card]. Walt Disney Enterprises, 1938. (Cotsen 37944)

Carrochio the Italian publisher in Milan produced an activity book,”Biancaneve ei sette nani,” complete with a detailed backdrop, props, and multiple figures with stands (Cotsen 40143). Snow White’s iconic gown on the cover is blue, when it should have a yellow skirt and a blue bodice.  The Queen isn’t anywhere in the sheets of cut-outs, which means it is impossible to tell the entire story.  Little dramatists would have to cut directly from the merrymaking after dinner to the arrival of the prince on horseback.

Biancaneve ei Setti Nani. [Milan]: Carroccio, [ca 1938]. (Cotsen 40143)

If Snow White were not such a good little housekeeper, there would have been no Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs Recipe Book  (Cotsen 15526), courtesy of Armour, who sold canned ox tongue, boiled beef, corned beef, and ham under its “Veribest label.”  The back story is Snow White discovers a large supply of corned beef in the cupboard and promises to show the dwarves all the ways she can prepare it if they will teach her how to make their favorite dishes (mostly versions of hash).  Some fresh vegetables besides potatoes are used in some of the recipes.  Sneezy has to be reminded of the principles of good hygiene in the kitchen and Grumpy has to turn it into a contest of who is the best cook–him  or the princess.

Armour’s Present Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs Recipe Book. [England?: Armour?, not before 1937]. (Cotsen 15526)

(Cotsen 15526)

Disney could not resist promoting the art of the film in the Sketch Book published by Collins dedicated to the “eternal spirit of childhood in all of us” (Cotsen 4999).  For each character, the color plate tipped onto thick brown paper is followed by three to four pages of reproductions of original sketches, with brief descriptions of the leading characteristics.

“Sketch Book“. London: Collins, 1938. (Cotsen 4999)

One of the surprises in the stacks was a set of Snow White cards published in China (Cotsen 94564).  The illustrations are redrawn from the studio renderings and must be an unauthorized use.  Sometimes the mighty Disney lawyers are caught napping.

[Gong he xin xi. China, not after 1950?]. (Cotsen 94564)

Disney’s stream of live-action remakes of its classic animated films demonstrates that  truly great tales can’t be obliterated by heel and toe chopping, the addition of all kinds of business to the script, or a stream of products children never knew they needed until…   All the relentless activity of the last 84 years might suggest a quiet read of the Grimms to reacquaint ourselves with the story that started it all.  It has to be an improvement over the project Disney abandoned to make Kung Fu version…

 

“Death from Starvation Threatens every working Man”: A 1932 Soviet Book about Famine in the Ukraine

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Today is the third anniversary of the Ukraine War.  To mark the occasion, here is Polina Popova’s sobering 2022 post about  how the Stalin’s government tried to justify in a children’s book the terrible food shortages in the Ukraine, known as Holodomor.

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In the year 1929, massive collectivization campaigns began all over the USSR. It was also the second year of the first Five Year Plan, when forced grain procurements were introduced. Despite the brutal enforcement of the regime, many peasants still resisted grain requisitions and refused to join collective farms. Acts of active and passive resistance from the peasants led to more repression from the government; the collectivization campaign went slowly and inefficiently. Despite the “voluntarily character” of the collective-farm movement affirmed by Stalin in his “Dizzy with Success” article on March 2, 1930, during the spring of that year, around 180,000 militant young activists were sent to the villages to enforce the campaign was followed through.[1]

Since Ukraine was the USSR’s primary grain supplying region, it suffered the most from mass collectivization. Serious food shortages in this region started as early as 1929.[2] By March of 1930 more than 60% of the Ukrainian peasants were collectivized.[3] 1931 became a turning point for many Ukrainians, because crop requisitions remained constant while the harvest was 20 per cent lower than in 1930.[4] Hunger had always been present in the Soviet countryside and small cities since the beginning of the 1920s, but 1932 would mark the beginning of the first man-made famine in Ukraine called, later, the Holodomor.[5] Famine brought not only disease, death, and despair to Ukrainian peasants, but also new abuses of power: people were punished for not meeting grain quotas and were arrested. Worse, on the basis of a law instituted on August 7, 1932, criminalizing “theft of socialist property,” many were sent to labor camps for stealing even a small amount of grain. [6] Yet, the government (or Stalin himself?) refused to make any concessions to grain quotas that would have prevented mass starvation. Thus, at the beginning of 1933, famine spread all over Ukraine, and death on a mass scale occurred in every small city or village in the region.[7] Famine also spread to other regions such as Kazakhstan, the Don and Kuban, the North Caucuses, and the Volga region.[8] The peak of the famine lasted through the whole of 1933 through the winter of 1934.[9] During 1933 at least 3.5 million people died of famine in Ukraine alone.[10]

With this sobering context in mind, we can examine one of the treasures of the Cotsen collection – Za Vladu, Rabotu, Khlib (Kyiv: Dvoy Molodai Bol’shevik, 1932), which can be translated “For power, for work, for bread”. The book is short but attractive and full of illustrations; with concise, clearly written paragraphs, it was probably intended for young schoolchildren (illustrated by E. Rachova, and written by I. Broĭde). Two pages slightly resemble modern-day graphic novels, with small illustrations one after another, creating a plot that follows the short story. Laconic, straightforward, and avant-garde in illustration style, the book was, perhaps surprisingly, expensively produced.

Front wrapper, Za Vladu Robotu Khlīb. [Kiev: Dvoy Molodai Bol’shevik, 1932].(Cotsen 38417)

Was it accidental that a children’s book about bread – and a rather expensive edition of such – was published in Ukrainian and not in Russia, the language that most Soviet children’s books were published in? Not at all. Obviously, its target audience was the children of Ukraine in 1932 and after. To put it bluntly, this beautiful book is a perfect example of Stalinist propaganda, which had two goals (and as is often the case for totalitarian regimes – the goals contradict each other). [11] On the one hand, the book normalized hunger for Ukrainian children. It argues that everyone, even people in capitalist states such as Germany, face extreme hunger. Though true to a certain extent, this claim is highly exaggerated in the book. On the other hand, the book demonstrates that the communist Soviet Union does not face this problem (a complete and utter hypocritical lie).

Illustrations on page 1 of the book are very telling: we see a family of four with no food at the table and hungry small children clutching their mom, seeking support. The father of the family is helpless in the ugly face of starvation. But the following image shows two “rich people” sitting at a restaurant ordering food (presumably, judging by the sizes of the two capitalists’ bodies, they are ordering in abundance). The text says that workers in Germany and other capitalist countries do not have work and bread, while capitalists use working peoples’ money “to build tanks and cannons.” Here, the book has another propogandist message, typical for 1930s Soviet children’s books – that enemy capitalist countries are inherently militaristic and war hungry; unlike the peaceful Soviet Union. On that same page, there is a vivid description of how workers are forced to stand in long lines to get “a [single] piece of bread” and even end up sleeping “in gardens and under fences.” Reading this, another graphic image comes to mind – an image common in the memoirs of people living in Kharkiv, Kyiv, Dnipro, and Uman’ during the 1932-1933 famine. Ukrainians in big cities of the time really witnessed starving people (most of them – fleeing from the countryside) standing in long lines at bread stores, begging for food in the streets, or lying in the streets (quite literally “under fences”), often with bloated stomachs, many of them dead.[12]

Page [1] vignettes, (Cotsen 38417)

The book describes how capitalists deliberately dump flour and grain in the sea to drive up food prices. Ironically, one can think of parallels with Bolshevik policies and inefficiencies. For example, grain was often lost due to poor storage capacities which lead peasants to starve. At the end of the first page, in bold, we see the statement “ГОЛОДНА СМЕРТЬ ЗАГРОЖУЄ КОЖНIЙ РОБIТНИЧIЙ (Sic!) РОДИНI” (“Death from starvation threatens every working [man] of [his] homeland”). How ironic that these words were applied to foreigners and not Ukrainians or other Soviet citizens. Although the famine was most severe in Ukraine, peasants were starving all around the USSR. One wonders how many Ukrainians understood this false rhetoric of the time presented by this book and by the Soviet authorities.

Page [1] bottom, (Cotsen 38417)

Other descriptions of the supposed brutalities of the Germany state against its starving and jobless workers, on page 3, depict policemen on the streets of Berlin looking for signs of discontent and riots. In response, children had to save the day, or better to say – “save the night,” as they secretly glued leaflets calling for a strike.

Page [3] vignette, (Cotsen 38417)

The book has an open ending in which workers are still striking in the factories. The goal of this kind of story was not to have a happy ending, but rather to present an impressionistic bricolage of hunger, children begging for food, helpless parents who are unable to provide it to the little ones, long lines for bread, homelessness, and the politicization of children. Soviet Ukrainian children were already too familiar with these realities, yet were supposedly spared from them by the Communist government.

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[1] Joseph Stalin, “Dizzy with Success” (Pravda, No. 60, March 2, 1930), https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1930/03/02.htm (accessed March 24, 2022).

[2]Investigation of the Ukrainian Famine 1932-1933. Report to Congress. Commission on the Ukraine Famine. (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1988), 191.

[3]Ivnitskiĭ, Sud’ba raskulachennikh v SSSR (Moskva: Sobranie, 2004), 19.

[4]Bohdan Krawchenko, “The Man-Made Famine of 1932-1933” from Famine in Ukraine, 1932-1933, ed. by Bohdan Krawchenko and Roman Serbyn (Alberta: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1986), 20.

[5]Nikolai Ivnitskii, Golod 1932-1933 godov v SSSR: Ukraina, Kazakhstan, SeverniyKavkaz, Povolzh’e, Tsentral’no-Chernozemnaia oblast’ (Moskva: Sobranie, 2009), 192.

[6]Krawchenko, “The Man-Made Famine of 1932-1933,” 21. Sergei Maksudov, “Victory Over the Peasantry,” in Hunger by Design: The Great Ukrainian Famine and Its Soviet Context, ed. Halyna Hryn (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2008), 54.

[7] Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 243.

[8]Investigation of the Ukrainian Famine 1932-1933, 135.

[9]Krawchenko, “The Man-Made Famine of 1932-1933,” 21.

[10]Ivnitskiĭ, Golod 1932-1933 Godov v SSSR, 209.

[11] Something that was noticed by Umberto Eco in his famous list of fourteen features of “Eternal” Fascist regimes was the controversial, often illogical dichotomies that the oppressive totalitarian regimes operate within. One of the examples is an imaginary enemy who is strong and weak at the same time. Umberto Eco. “Ur Fascism,” https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/06/22/ur-fascism/ (accessed April 13th, 2022).

[12] Robert Kusznierz, “The Impact of the Great Famine on Ukrainian Cities: Evidence from the Polish Archives,” in After the Holodomor: The Enduring Impact of the Great Famine in Ukraine, ed. Andrea Graziosi (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2013), 16.