Back in July, Disney’s live-action Moana opened in theaters, a full decade after the animated original and just two years after Moana 2 made over a billion dollars worldwide. Early reviews were not kind. One critic called it the most pointless of Disney’s live-action remakes. That’s saying something, considering last year’s live-action Snow White lost the studio well over a hundred million dollars and became something of a punchline before it even hit theaters.

I’ve been watching this remake cycle for a while now, and it’s fascinating in a way that has nothing to do with quality. Disney keeps returning to the same well, not because the stories need to be told again, but because the studio is chasing a specific kind of magic: the feeling of a familiar tale rendered new. Sometimes that works. The Lion King made over a billion and a half dollars. Sometimes it very much does not.

But here’s the question that’s been rattling around in my brain for weeks now, and it’s not really about remakes at all. It’s about what happens one adaptation earlier than that. Long before Disney was remaking its own animated classics in live action, it was doing something arguably more interesting: adapting centuries-old fairy tales into animation in the first place. And the choices the studio made in those original adaptations, what it kept, what it softened, what it threw out entirely, tell you a lot more about Disney’s storytelling philosophy than any CGI remake ever could.

So let’s go back to the actual source material. Not the original animated Snow White, but the Brothers Grimm. Not the 1989 Little Mermaid, but Hans Christian Andersen. I want to look at six films that each handle their fairy tale origins differently, and use them to trace how Disney’s relationship with its source material changed over eight decades.

Keeping the Magic, Losing the Horror

Let’s start where Disney started. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs premiered in 1937 as the studio’s first animated feature, and it drew from the Brothers Grimm’s version of the tale, published in their 1812 collection of German folktales. Disney kept the bones of the story: the jealous stepmother, the poisoned apple, the glass coffin, the prince’s kiss. What it didn’t keep was the Grimm version’s appetite for punishment. In the original tale, the Evil Queen doesn’t just lose. At Snow White’s wedding, she’s forced to put on a pair of red-hot iron shoes and dance in them until she drops dead. Disney’s queen falls off a cliff instead, which is bad enough, but it’s a PG kind of bad compared to what the Grimms had in mind.

That instinct, to keep a story’s shape while filing down its sharpest edges, became something like a house style. Nowhere is it clearer than in Cinderella, which Disney released in 1950. The version most people know today traces back to Charles Perrault, who published his Cendrillon in 1697, and Perrault’s telling already has the pumpkin, the fairy godmother, and the glass slipper that Disney used as its foundation.

But there’s another, much darker version. The Brothers Grimm published their own version, “Aschenputtel,” in that same 1812 collection, and it does not mess around. There’s no fairy godmother at all. Instead, Cinderella gets help from a hazel tree growing on her mother’s grave, watered with her own tears, and from a flock of birds who act less like Disney’s chirping mice and more like an avian enforcement squad. When the prince comes looking for the foot that fits the golden slipper, one stepsister slices off her toe and the other carves away part of her heel, and the birds tip him off both times by singing about the blood filling the shoe. At the wedding, those same birds peck out both stepsisters’ eyes as punishment for their cruelty. It is, genuinely, one of the more unhinged endings in the Grimm catalog.

Disney chose Perrault’s gentler version as its foundation, and that choice says something. The studio wasn’t interested in moral instruction through mutilation. It wanted hope. Cinderella’s virtue gets rewarded, not because her tormentors suffer, but because kindness wins out. That’s a real philosophical shift from the Grimm approach, and it set the tone for decades of Disney storytelling to follow: keep the wonder, lose the blood.

Changing the Ending

If Snow White and Cinderella show Disney softening violence while preserving plot, The Little Mermaid shows something more drastic: Disney rewriting the entire meaning of the story.

Hans Christian Andersen published “The Little Mermaid” in 1837, and it is not a romance in any conventional sense. Andersen’s mermaid trades her voice and endures agony with every step she takes on human legs, all so she can pursue a prince who never even considers loving her back. He marries someone else. Rather than kill him to save herself (his death is her only path back to her old life), she chooses to dissolve into sea foam at dawn. Andersen softens the ending slightly: she’s transformed into a spirit who can earn an immortal soul over three hundred years of good deeds. But there’s no wedding. There’s no reunion. The story is fundamentally about self-sacrifice and unrequited longing, wrapped in some fairly explicit Christian imagery about redemption through suffering.

Disney’s 1989 adaptation keeps the broad strokes: a mermaid, a voice traded away, legs that come at a cost. And then it changes the entire emotional argument of the story. Ariel gets her prince. She gets her happy ending. The tale stops being about accepting loss with grace and becomes a story about pursuing what you want and getting it.

This is worth sitting with for a second, because it’s a genuinely different move than what Disney did with Snow White or Cinderella. Those adaptations trimmed content. The Little Mermaid replaces the theme. Andersen was writing about the nobility of sacrifice. Disney was writing about the reward of self-determination. Same mermaid, same sea witch, almost opposite point.

Expanding the Characters

Not every Disney adaptation works by softening or rewriting. Sometimes the studio’s real innovation is just spending more time in a room.

Beauty and the Beast, released in 1991, draws from Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont’s 1756 version of the tale, itself a condensed retelling of a much longer 1740 story by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve. Beaumont’s version is the one most people recognize: a merchant’s daughter, a rose plucked from an enchanted garden, a beast who demands she stay in her father’s place. Disney doesn’t reinvent this story the way it reinvented The Little Mermaid. Belle still ends up at the castle, still grows to love the Beast despite his temper and his fangs, still breaks the curse with an act of genuine affection.

What Disney adds is interiority. The animated Beast gets a library, a temper he’s actively working to control, a servants’ staff transformed into household objects who each have their own comic personality. Belle gets intellectual curiosity and a hunger for something beyond her small town that goes well past “beautiful and kind,” which is basically the entirety of her characterization in the 1756 text. Disney isn’t rewriting the plot. It’s building out the emotional architecture around a story that was already solid, adding depth to characters who were, in the original, fairly thin archetypes doing exactly what the moral required of them.

You see the same instinct, cranked up considerably, in Tangled. The 2010 film draws from the Grimms’ “Rapunzel,” also published in 1812, and the source material is honestly pretty sparse: a girl locked in a tower, a prince who climbs her hair, a witch who enforces the imprisonment. Disney kept the tower and the hair. Everything else, Rapunzel’s personality, her competence with a frying pan, her actual name for the love interest (Flynn Rider doesn’t exist in the Grimm tale at all), the mystery of her royal identity, the entire kingdom around her, is new. Tangled takes a thin folk tale and builds a full adventure narrative on top of its skeleton. It’s Beauty and the Beast‘s expansion instinct taken to its logical extreme.

When Inspiration Becomes Reinvention

And then there’s Frozen, which barely qualifies as an adaptation at all.

The film is loosely based on Andersen’s 1844 tale “The Snow Queen,” which follows two children, Kai and Gerda, after an enchanted mirror shard lodges in Kai’s eye and heart and turns him cold and cruel. Gerda spends the rest of the story on a quest to find him and thaw his heart, encountering witches, robbers, and a talking reindeer along the way. It’s one of Andersen’s longest and most structurally complex fairy tales, built around platonic devotion rather than romance, with heavy Christian undertones about faith and childhood innocence.

Frozen keeps almost none of this directly. There’s ice, there’s a queen, and there’s a frozen heart that needs thawing through an act of love. Beyond that, the 2013 film goes its own way entirely. The Snow Queen splits into two characters, sisters Anna and Elsa, who didn’t exist in Andersen’s story at all. The villain isn’t an ice monarch but a scheming suitor. Kai and Gerda’s platonic quest becomes a story about sisterhood and self-acceptance. Disney’s own filmmakers have described the project as “inspired by” Andersen rather than adapted from him, and that distinction matters. This isn’t Disney trimming violence or expanding characters. It’s Disney using a two-hundred-year-old fairy tale as a jumping-off point for a story that has almost nothing to do with its supposed source beyond some shared vocabulary about ice and hearts.

The Arc

Line these six films up and you can watch Disney’s whole relationship with fairy tales evolve. Snow White and Cinderella stay close to their sources, mostly just editing out the parts likely to traumatize children. The Little Mermaid keeps the plot but swaps out the meaning entirely. Beauty and the Beast and Tangled keep both plot and meaning while building out the emotional world around them. And Frozen treats its fairy tale as raw material rather than a story to retell, something to be mined for imagery and mood rather than honored as a text.

That’s not really a story about Disney getting lazier or more reverent over time. It’s a story about a studio slowly realizing it doesn’t need permission from the original author to make something people will love. Perrault and the Grimms and Andersen gave Disney templates. What Disney did with those templates changed dramatically over eighty years, and I’d argue it changed for understandable reasons. Audiences in 1937 wanted a fairy tale told faithfully with the nightmares filed off. Audiences in 2013 wanted something that felt fresh, even if “inspired by” was doing an enormous amount of work in the marketing.

Which brings me back to where I started, skimming the headlines as people filed out of a live-action Moana that critics are calling a pointless retread of a story that’s barely a decade old. Maybe the lesson buried in all six of these older, stranger adaptations is that the successful ones weren’t successful because they were faithful or because they were bold. They were successful because they knew which kind of adaptation they were trying to be, and committed to it completely. Disney’s live-action era could stand to relearn that lesson from its own animated back catalog.

Which of these six adaptations do you think gets the balance right? I’d love to hear your take in the comments.