What fairy tales/short stories would make for good Disney movies?
I’m surprised Disney hasn’t done a movie based on Jack and the Beanstalk, considering it’s one of the more well-known fairy tales. I know they were gonna do it with Gigantic, but that got canceled.
I wish they hadn’t made Robin Hood when they did, I think they could do a way better version if they’d done it now. I know it has its fans, but I really don’t like the original one at all.
Rumpelstiltskin is probably something they could turn into a weird little story, especially if they twisted it enough. It could even conceivably be a sequel to Tangled.
Well, if we are mining Disney Princesses, they could do the Old West, or perhaps Russia to open another market.
The success of Frozen–which started as an adaptation of Andersen’s The Snow Queen but morphed into what is pretty much an original fairy tale–gives me hope that Disney might adapt some lesser-known fairy tales now that they know they don’t have to depend on a well-known fairy tale to achieve success.
I’d KILL for an adaptation of East of the Sun, West of the Moon. It would provide a brave heroine, great visuals–the works! The main drawback is that it might be seen as being too close to both Beauty and the Beast (to which it’s a sort of first cousin) and Frozen.
Russian/Slavic fairy tales would be wonderful to adapt–the Russian animation studio Soyuzmultfilm, their answer to Disney (and who also made a popular adaptation of The Snow Queen) has been doing them for decades. Maybe Vasilissa the Beautiful?
The Wild Swans by Andersen (which also had a Grimm version, The Six Swans) might be good. It’d be great to see a Disney princess heroine wrestle with divided loyalties.
The Twelve Dancing Princesses is also a good candidate–or, even better, Jessica Day George’s take on it, Princess of the Silver Wood, or Heather Dixon’s version Entwined.
There’s a Finnish fairy tale, Adalmina’s Pearl, with an interesting plot.
Some Number of Chinese Brothers. When I was a kid, it was five, more recently it was seven, and originally it was ten. But something could be made from it.
Town Musicians of Bremen.
(And Disney has done Jack and the Beanstalk.)