"Everyone working on the film has the same goal in mind--to tell a wonderful story for the ages, filled with heart and humor, about something that is important to us." --Osnat Shurer Producer, Raya and the Last Dragon and Moana CHAPTER 3: WHERE DO THE STORIES COME FROM? THE POWER OF SEVEN From the beginning, almost every Disney creation has been grounded in storytelling--and for good reason: Walt was himself a uniquely gifted storyteller who could hold a roomful of people spellbound for hours as he narrated and acted out his detailed visions. Spirited story-pitch meetings became a routine at the studio, but nobody could do it quite like Walt. Yet even more critical to his success was his innate ability to recognize a strong story that would resonate with people. His story-mindedness led him to revolutionize early animation by shifting away from merely presenting a series of stand-alone sight gags toward in-depth storytelling that established an emotional connection with audiences. The gags would remain, but in the service of the story. As a storyteller, Walt Disney was drawn to material that had already demonstrated its broad appeal, like popular fairy tales, folklore, mythology, and fables--literary forms that were the direct descendants of the oral tradition dating back to the Bronze Age (and possibly even earlier). It reflected a common need to define, explain, and appreciate the moral dimensions of the human experience.

Over the years Walt had adapted a number of fairy tales and fables for his Laugh-O-gram, Silly Symphony, and character-based short cartoons, and when it came time to take on the enormous artistic and financial challenge of producing the first-ever feature-length animated film, he decided to use the Brothers Grimm classic "Snow White." But why did he choose the story "Snow White" in particular as the basis for the riskiest creative endeavor of his career? According to Disney biographer Bob Thomas, as a teenager in Kansas City, Missouri, Walt saw a silent film version of the story starring Marguerite Clark, and it formed "the most vivid memory of his moviegoing childhood." Both the story and the storytelling power of film as he experienced it that day resonated deeply with Walt, and twenty years later, he had positioned himself and his studio to do for "Snow White" what he had done for the fledgling animation industry and what he would later do for the amusement park: take a good thing and make it exponentially better through superior storytelling. The standard running time of a cartoon short was eight to nine minutes, and thus audiences had been conditioned to see animation as diverting filler before the main event of the live-action feature. The idea of paying to see a feature-length cartoon struck critics and potential distributors as absurd. As Walt''s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was being prepared to roll out to various markets, Central Press staff writer Obera H. Rawles noted in a January 12, 1938, article that industry professionals were referring to the seven-reel animated project as "Disney''s Folly." The anecdote was later widely picked up by newspapers across the country.

But Walt had pushed ahead undaunted because he had the vision and resources to create something that he knew would forever change animation as an art form. He had built a stunningly detailed and layered animated world requiring the talents of the best artists and animators in the business and the illusion of three-dimensional depth afforded by the Disneys'' new multiplane camera. Still, none of that would matter without a strong story capable of engaging the sympathies of an audience for over an hour. It also meant populating the story with characters that audiences could identify with--something that was in short supply in the original "Snow White" tale. Although all the characters are crucial to the plot, in terms of relatability, the story needed that Disney touch. Snow White is too innocent, the Queen is too villainous, and the Prince is too noble, plus absent for most of the action. That leaves the Dwarfs, who, in the Brothers Grimm version, are just a monolithic group with no names and no distinguishing personalities. But Walt saw their potential right away.

"The figures of the Dwarfs intrigued me," he later recalled. He tasked the Story Department with creating seven distinct character types that audiences would recognize from real life and giving them names descriptive of their personalities. Among the dozens of monikers considered and rejected early on were Scrappy, Weepy, Shifty, Jumpy, Blabby, and even Snoopy. In the finished film, the individuality of each Dwarf is encapsulated in his name and constantly reinforced, and their charm and humanity ultimately constitute the entertainment core of the story. To this day, it''s a point of honor among Disney fans that they can rattle off those seven names without pause: Sneezy, Sleepy, Bashful, Happy, Grumpy, Doc and, of course, Dopey. The eventual inclusion of some memorable musical numbers also added to the movie''s storytelling heft, partly because they helped portray a character''s inner thoughts and deepest desires and partly because the songs themselves were good enough to stay with audiences long after they left the theater. In fact "Whistle While You Work," "Heigh-Ho," and several other songs from the soundtrack became top ten hits, inaugurating a tradition of Disney animated films yielding music that has become a fixture in the collective cultural memory. In addition to expanding the action of the relatively brief story to accommodate the feature-length format, Walt and his writers made other critical adjustments to the original fairy tale that maximized the story''s emotive weight, like building up the relationship between Snow White and the Prince.

In the Brothers Grimm story, they meet only after she has been poisoned and revived, whereas in the Disney version, the entire plot is driven by their having met and fallen in love early on. The audience''s warm reception was a triumphant moment for Walt, who had successfully created an entirely new long-form storytelling vehicle capable of connecting with moviegoers on a much deeper level than anyone had thought possible for animation. It was both a vindication of Walt''s grand vision for the medium and proof that he could breathe spectacular new life into an old story. UNTANGLING OLD STORIES Walt''s insistence on strong storytelling became part of the company''s DNA from the early 1930s on, and it is hard to imagine Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) or any subsequent Disney film without the significant story alterations from the original source that transformed the material into a recognizably Disney product. As an admirer of Aesop, the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, Charles Perrault, and Jean de La Fontaine, Walt considered all fables, fairy tales, folklore, myths, and even classic literature as a starting point for story development. A good illustration of Walt''s vision is the way he adapted the original story of The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi. In Collodi''s tale, the title character is thoroughly unlikable from the start, such as kicking Geppetto as soon as his feet are carved and running away. Walt understood that his audience needed to be able to sympathize with the protagonist, and Collodi''s puppet is obnoxious and cruel until his redemption near the end of the book.

So Walt changed the story, getting rid of Pinocchio''s more violent and depraved behavior and making his mistakes seem less the result of a character flaw and more the product of his inexperience and innocent lack of understanding of good and evil. It also makes more sense for a sentient puppet that has just come into being to be naïve about the world than it is to have him pop into existence as a reprobate in need of a lesson. However, as Disney historian J. B. Kaufman observes, Walt also decided to make the world that Pinocchio is born into even more fraught with evil than in the Collodi tale. "In some ways," says Kaufman, "Disney''s Pinocchio (1940) is much darker and more sophisticated than the original book. So for example, in the novel, Pleasure Island is relatively benign, and you can see in the concept drawings that the artists were inclined to picture it as this sunny land of candy and carnival rides, and it was Walt who pulled them back and said, ''No, this is a bad place.'' And so in the end, it was depicted as being really dark and sinister.

" Walt also had the animators and Story Department turn Mangiafuoco, the puppet master character in the book, into the much more terrifying Stromboli. As with making the Pinocchio character more likable, the net effect of enhancing the wickedness of the world he inhabits was a dramatic increase in audience sympathy. The notion of treating existing source material as a foundation on which to build and reimagine has been around since the earliest days of storytelling. Thus the Disney version of a classic tale is a single point in a continuum of adaptation that may be hundreds or even thousands of years in the making. Take, for example, "The Little Mermaid." The concept of mermaids can be found in the folklore of cultures around the world, and the Hans Christian Andersen story is itself an adaptation of Undine by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué. Fouqué, in turn, was inspired by the story of Mélusine, an ancient French folk tale likely borrowed from even earlier Greek mythology. Therefore, the tale Disney adapted for the feature The Little Mermaid