Brother Grimm Cartoon

[Gerald Weiß]

TheBig Bad Wolf attacks Little Red Riding Hood. A murderous old lady in a cottage menaces a couple lost in the woods. A beautiful teenager is cruelly abused by her wicked stepmother. It's just another day on Supernatural (Thursdays, 9 pm/ET, CW).

In keeping with the show's dark mythology, when these familiar fairy tales surface in the Nov. 1 episode, "Bedtime Stories," it's no Disney cartoon. These twisted fables are grim. Brothers Grimm, to be exact. "When I went back and read the original stories, they were creepy and freaky," says Jared Padalecki, who plays Sam, the younger of the two demon-hunting Winchester brothers. "I was actually a little spooked. I grew up on the Disney movies, and I'm going, 'Oh, my god, this is what it came from?'"

That reaction pleases executive producer Eric Kripke. "The Grimm Brothers' fairy tales are coming to life in all their bloody, homicidal, cannibalistic glory. The monsters and ghosts the boys are up against are always based on folklore or modern urban legends, and we realized that the folklore most people know best had never been on the show: fairy tales."

Sam and his brother, Dean (Jensen Ackles), arrive in the fictional town of Maple Springs to investigate what seems to be a savage werewolf attack on three chubby construction foremen (think the Three Little Pigs). As the crimes continue, the boys discover an ethereal young girl with pale skin and dark hair who's watching each gruesome bloodletting with an eerie calm. "We need to figure out which fairy tales are about to come true, where they'll come true and how we will hopefully stop it," Padalecki explains.

That's not all Sam is trying to stop. In a continuing storyline, he's searching for a way to break the bargain his older brother made with the Crossroads Demon. Dean agreed to go to Hell in one year in exchange for Sam's being brought back from the dead. But is the resurrected Sam the real Sam? Or is he, as some who know him suspect, an berdemon?

"Keep an eye on him and notice the difference between Season 1 and what he does now, and it might be hinting toward something," reveals Padalecki, who admits he had a particularly good time with this incarnation of the Crossroads Demon. The shape-shifter is played by his real-life girlfriend, Sandra McCoy. (They met while making the horror flick Cry Wolf three years ago.) "The producers have been trying to find a role for her for a while. She was awesome."

By the episode's end, Sam makes a shocking discovery. Without spoiling too much, it's safe to say Dean's situation will get worse before it gets better. "I'm getting more and more nervous with each script," Ackles says. "Please write to Kripke. Tell him not to kill me."

On October 16, 1923, Walter Elias, a young man of twenty-one, founded an animation studio in Los Angeles with his older brother, Roy. Perhaps, lacking better ideas or more probably with the ambition that one day the name would resonate in every corner of the planet, he decided to call it "Disney Brothers Cartoons Studio".

It began with the short cartoons of a mischievous girl traveling in search of adventure. After Alice in Cartoonland, came the short films of Oswald the cat and, later, one of his most emblematic characters: Mickey Mouse. His unmistakable silhouette, the work of his close friend and animator Ub Iwerks, has become the emblem of business.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfsbased on a fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm, became the first full-length color animated film. A feat that would consecrate the young Walt as a prestigious creator and pioneer. From that moment on, all subsequent animated films would be marked by this feature film, either trying to imitate its successful formula or, on the contrary, trying to transgress it.

Disney resorted to the fairy tale as the film's original source because it saw in these narratives the opportunity to develop through animation something that live-action cinema did not allow. Thus, the studio's colorful universe was able to transport the viewer, child or adult, to a world full of supernatural elements with fairies, witches and dwarfs, where love and good prevailed over evil.

Shortly after came Pinocchioand years later Cinderella y Sleeping Beauty. The characters in these films remind the viewer that, despite the evils of the world, good triumphs over evil. That, in the face of dark forces, as Dostoevsky says in The Idiot, "beauty will save the world."

Walt Disney died in 1966. By that time, his studio had released eighteen animated feature films. In the following twenty years, only nine animated projects were released. As Jordi Snchez-Navarro tells us, many of the classic animators began to retire and the company was losing ground to the new entertainment wizards, such as Steven Spielberg or George Lucas. In the 1980s, the studio was totally disoriented.

They did not manage to refloat the ship until the end of that decade, when Michael Eisner took the helm and refounded the studio. To do so, they took a trip back to their founding identity. They dusted off old fairy tales and brought to light stories that Walt had dreamed about for years but that had been abandoned since his death.

First came The Little Mermaidthen Beauty and the Beast y Aladdinwith which they returned to cima on the movie scene. In the new films, some of the female protagonists -especially in Beauty and the Beast-gained more weight in the story, with a more active personality than their predecessors.

Today Disney is an empire. Its various subsidiaries (Pixar, Marvel, National Geographic, Fox...) are part of a media conglomerate with the capacity to greatly influence the configuration of audiences' imagination from childhood.

Aware of this reality, also the stories of Disney's animated programs of study have echoed new lifestyles, trends or norms of behavior. As the company itself announces, with its films "they are committed to creating stories with inspiring and motivating themes that reflect the great diversity of the human experience around the world." test of this is the significant change of Ariel, the protagonist of The Mermaid, who in the 2023 version is a dark-skinned character. Or the ethnic diversity that makes up the Kingdom of Roses, the setting of WishDisney's latest animated release.

In this attempt to adapt to current times, an unprecedented process of retelling has been carried out. By this term we mean the act of retelling old stories. The motivation behind it is a commercial reason, since the re-release of a classic film ensures a nostalgic audience. Since its beginnings, Disney has been accustomed to re-releasing its classic films every few years. But in recent years, retelling has become an opportunity to offer a contemporary reading of classic films and to try to modify past behavior.

A clear example can be seen in the statements of Rachel Zegler, the actress who will play Snow White in the live-action version of the classic that is currently in production. According to her, the new film will not be about a girl saved by a prince, but rather the protagonistwill"dream of becoming the leader she knows she can be and that her late father told her she could be if she was fearless, fair, brave and faithful."

More than a decade ago, with Tiana and the Frog, Tangled and, of course, Frozen in 2013, the animation studio began an era of glory. Since then, it has released original stories set in different corners of the world, such as the Colombia of Encantothe Hawaiian-inspired Moana and the Japan of Big Hero 6. This was a way to show "the great diversity of the human experience".

But, currently, despite its power, Disney seems to be in a great crisis. Its latest productions, with few exceptions, have been a failure in locker and critics. The new versions of its classics fail to convince viewers. The last three live-action remakes, Pinocchio, Peter Pan & Wendy y The Little Mermaidhave not been as well received as expected, nor have they achieved the fame of their original versions.

The studio, with all its properties, is stringing together several failures that are causing losses in the millions of dollars. For the first time since 2014, in 2023 it has not released any film that exceeds $1 billion in box office.

Strange Worldthe penultimate animated film to see the light of day, has been one of the biggest failures in recent years. Bob Iger himself, CEO of Disney, recently accepted that there has been a loss of quality in its productions.

refund Perhaps the solution to the present crisis lies in returning to the company's founding elements, to those fairy tale-inspired films that, each in its own time(Snow White in the 1930s, The Little Mermaid in the 1980s, Frozen in the 2010s), paved the way for many other original stories that not only saved the studio in difficult times but also managed to bring audiences to the cinema to enjoy multiple worlds of fantasy.

Iwerks grew up in Kansas City, Missouri, as did Walt Disney, and they both started careers there, working in commercial art. Disney started the Laugh-O-Gram studio in 1922 with Iwerks as the head animator. The studio went bankrupt, and Disney decided to move to California, where much of the production of live action cinema had migrated.

The live action film industry was firmly established in California by the late 1920s. New York remained the center for animation film production until the 1930s. Disney and many of his team had not been focused in New York, as he and many of his initial staff including Iwerks were from Kansas City, where Disney had created his early studio Laugh-O-Gram. After the bankruptcy of Laugh-O-Gram, Disney moved to California in 1923 with his brother Roy and started Disney Brothers Studio, changed to Walt Disney Studio in 1926, when a new studio was completed on Hyperion Street in Los Angeles.

Though it may seem like Mickey Mouse has always been with us, this most well-known of cartoon characters sprang to animated life on November 18, 1928. The high-spirited, mischievous mouse debuted in Steamboat Willie, a short film designed and animated by Ub Iwerks, the chief animator with the then-nascent Walt Disney Company, with direction from Walt Disney. They cast Mickey Mouse as a shipmate on a steamboat captained by a surly cat. Scheduled to be the opening for a feature-length film, Steamboat Willie was given an initial modest run at the Colony Theater in New York. But audiences and critics went wild for the impish, round-bellied mouse and for the premiere of the first cartoon with synchronized sound. Two weeks later, Steamboat Willie was re-released at the Roxy, also in New York, and the largest theater in the world at the time. It made silent animation obsolete and launched the Disney empire.

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