Were the early Disney movies Like Cinderella and Snow White based off of previous fairy tales or were they original works?
Oddly enough a Rammstein video made me think of this question.
Cinderella is based on based on a story from China circa ad 840, the current version comes from a french story written in 1697.
Snow White was a european fairy tale popularized by the Brothers Grimm.
Cinderella and Snow White were both pre-existing fairy tales before Disney made them their own. Cinderella (and Sleeping Beauty) were both Perrault stories, many of which were pre-existing folk tales. Snow White was another very old story collected by the Brothers Grimm.
I was going to make my own list, but here’s a decent (but incomplete) wikipedia list of source material.
Here’s the Disney animated canon.
Lady and the Tramp was the ‘most’ original of the early works, but it, too had an original short story basis.
Thanks for the wikipedia link. Much enjoyed, except much puzzeled over something else. The Lion King, it says, was partially inspired by Bambi? I don’t see the connection.
Just as a WAG: baby animal loses a parent, befriends amusing animal companions, and must eventually face a coming-of-age trial.
I studied a bit of fairytales in one of my classes, and the interesting thing about Cinderella is that it’s difficult to pinpoint where it actually begin. Every culture, it seems, has some version of the story. While Perrault’s version is obviously the source from which our moderning understanding of the tale comes from, it’s impossible to trace the origins of the story itself. Our professor speculated that it might be some human meme that sprung up independently in various cultures rather than all versions sharing a single source.
(Sorry, no cite for this, unless you want me to show you my notes from the class. 
)
Could be that, or it could be a mistake on the part of the anonymous Wiki author regarding the controversy over whether Disney stole The Lion King from Kimba, the White Lion.
There was a controversy in Wikipedia on this issue (to which I was a party). The consensus was that the article should only reflect the sources that Disney acknowleged.
Whether or not The Lion King took from Kimba the White Lion (heck, I grew up with Kimba, and was convinced that there was some ionfluence there. How could there not be?), TLK certain took major plot elements from Hamlet (as all the critics noted) and Henry IV (which, for some reason, they didn’t, evenm with the clear Falstaffian characters in place).
Ah, Wikipedia, my old nemesis… once again, I find you spewing misinformation.
HazelNutCoffee has already said some of this, but overkill never hurts, does it? “Cinderella” is shorthand for what is known as a “Tale Type,” (specifically # 510A) a complex of folk motifs arranged in a certain order. The earliest (well-)known version is a story from China circa AD 860. The Chinese version is not the source of all other versions. This idea is based on ignorance of oral tradition. Of the many hundreds of versions of Cinderella collected from oral tradition worldwide, none shows a clear literary debt to the Chinese version. We have no idea how old the story is, but best guesses all put it much earlier than 840 AD. At the very least, Wikipedia ought to consider the story of Rhodopis, a Cinderella-like tale mentioned as earliy as Herodotus, which predates the Chinese story by a thousand years. (Nothing against Chinese folk literature, but I’m just tired of this factoid being promulgated as truth). Perrault’s immediate source was evidently French oral tradition, but his was a highly literary version, and he himself seems to have invented a number of the familiar details.
With all the fairy-tale movies, Disney changed a lot. D’s *Snow White * was based on the English translation of, as far as I can tell, the 1823 version of the Grimms’ tale, which in turn is based on German oral sources (with some influence from French oral tradition). The good anthologies of Grimms’ Fairy Tales you find now are usually based on the 1857 edition of the tales, which were first published in 1812. (Over the years they took out a lot of the sex and added some violence.)
Obligatory “the Master speaks” link.
Well, I thought scotanderson’s link above covered this, and threw my own 2 cents in.
And I notice Uncle Cec still didn’t have anything to say about Henry IV.