Disney and the Grasshopper

So, who here loves Disney movies? This is obviously a rhetorical question because, lets face it, we were all a fan of Disney movies at at least one point in our lives. Whether we only watched them as small children or we still hope to be Disney Princesses at heart (I happen to fall into the latter), we all fell into the trap of falling in love with these classic movies of fairy tales and fantasies.

One thing that always amused me was the names that they gave to the characters in all of the movies. Although some of the names were already chosen for them because they were based off of classic tales that originated way before movies were even invented, the labels they give the supporting characters always turn out being extremely obvious. Take the seven dwarves from Snow White for example, all of them are purposefully named to display the characteristic that they embody. Dopey is dopey, sleepy is sleepy, etc. They also do this for a number of the bad guys and evil villains in the movies. Giving them names like Scar and Hades helps to make them easily identifiable as the characters we are supposed to hate.

Can you name all 7? They are easy to remember if you look at their personalities.

While reading "The Death of the Grasshopper" by Benard Suits, I thought it was interesting that he did the same thing with his supporting characters as well. Although he did not have much room for creative license with the main character (changing the name of the grasshopper would have been just as significant as changing the name of Cinderella), he chose to give the other characters names such as Prudence and Skeptikus. As their names suggest, these characters display a certain trait throughout the story. Prudence, a word closely related to forethought and sensibility, spends the whole story believing what the grasshopper has to say, but not seeing the practicality of it.She believes that this is not the best option for the grasshopper and encourages him to look at other options instead of choosing the extreme. Skeptikus (which happens to sound a whole lot like skepticism), in contrast, is doubtful of the grasshoppers reasoning and continually questions his actions. Both of these characters spend the entire story only displaying the one trait that they are named for, similar to a typical Disney supporting character.

Another similarity between Suits' writings and Disney movies is that they both took traditional children's stories and added their own spin onto them. I hope that by now you all know the original Aesop's fable of the  Ant and the Grasshopper. If not, I believe that Ryan Lee does and excellent job in summarizing it in the first paragraph of his post. While Suits' version still has the same ending and the same main character, he chooses to go into much deeper detail on the death of this character and his reasoning behind it. Disney has a similar tendency to take what was originally usually one of the Brothers Grimm stories, and romanticizing them and turning them into something much more detailed. I believe that they add all of the background and romantic ideas to make it more appealing to the general audience. But is it possible that in their hope to please the public they loose the real meaning of the stories in the first place? 

Here is a clip of Disney's version of the Grasshopper and the Ant. 

Although this is a cute and entertaining short film, do you believe that their alternate ending has taken away from the original story and the lesson that it is supposed to teach? I understand that the people at Disney wanted to avoid traumatizing the children with the death of such a lovable littler character as a fiddling grasshopper, but his death was in turn supposed to teach the children the value of hard work and how dangerous it is to waste precious time. On the other hand, Suits chooses to keep the same ending, but adds in his own deeper meanings and themes. He has the Grasshopper take on a very Socratic point of view and goes on to analyze the meaning of life and why it is even worth living in the first place. Do you think that these alterations of the stoy add more or take away from the original meaning of the story? Was it right of them to change it in the first place? And if so, which new version do you prefer?