1928 The third to feature Mickey Mouse, Steamboat Willie was the first Disney cartoon with a soundtrack synchronised to its action. Setting a long precedent for the animated cartoon to be shown before the newsreel and main feature, the sound linked to the action favoured music over words, since elaborate dialogue would detract from the slapstick humour.
Mickey is a junior officer on a river steamer, bullied by a bruising cat of a captain. Minnie Mouse comes aboard, with a guitar and the sheet music of ‘Turkey in the Straw’, both of which are swallowed by a goat. No problem. Minnie produces the tune by turning the goat’s tail like the crank of a hurdy-gurdy, while Mickey ‘plays’ (in turn) a row of suckling pigs, the sow’s teats and even a goose as a bagpipe. (Some of this was later cut out on a cruelty-to-animals basis; if you Google it, make sure to watch the eight-minute version.)
In less than a decade Disney had taken a step change in animation, producing ambitious feature-length literary adaptations in full colour. These started with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), and by the 21st century had morphed into computer-generated films like Finding Nemo (2004) and WALL-E (2008). With Snow White they could hardly dispense with words, yet the intended audience forced certain simplicities on the originals.
The Brothers Grimm Snow White, with the heroine’s three ‘deaths’ and ‘rebirths’ and the wicked stepmother’s three symbolic gifts of girdle, comb and apple, is a tale of initiation. Central to Snow White’s dilemma is the contrast between her natural mother and stepmother, who is finally punished by being forced to walk in hot shoes to her death. Disney deletes the natural mother, gives the seven dwarfs childlike names and temperaments, invents forest creatures to minister to Snow White, and blunts the moral logic of the tale by having the wicked stepmother killed through a natural accident – a lightning strike – not through human agency.
Disney’s Bambi (1942) burnished even more hard edges. The original, Felix Salten’s Bambi: A Life in the Woods (1926), traces the life of a deer from childhood to old age as he escapes the threat of hunters and finally learns, when he comes across a dead human body, that his persecutors can turn against themselves, and are not omnipotent. The Nazis burned the book in 1936 as an allegory of anti-Semitism. Salten, whose real name was Siegmund Salzmann, fled to Hollywood, where Disney bought the rights for the knock-down price (measly even in the late 1930s) of $5,000, then set about changing both tone and content.
Though in the film the hunters still threaten, out goes the grim lesson in man’s fallibility. Bambi gets a chum in the woods, a rabbit called Thumper. The movie ends happily ever after, with Bambi and his sweetheart Faline starting a family, whereas in the book he leaves Faline to manage her fawns, just as his father did his mother. It all comes down to audience. Target just the adults, and you exclude the children. But adjust the approach to the young, and you get both.