The talk turns back to animation once more, and I would like to look at Disney’s works. Among the features are “Snow White,” “Cinderella,” “Sleeping Beauty,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “The Little Mermaid,” “Rapunzel,” and so on. Of course, the number of titles is far greater than that.
Many of Disney’s works take their material from the collections of fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm and by Perrault, who gathered folk tales from Germany and, beyond it, from around Italy and France. The contents of the Grimms’ book are quite cruel; in the second edition some revision was made to the treatment of the mother, and it is said that with every edition after that, revisions here and there were unavoidable. And one often hears that when these became Disney animation, a great many more revisions were made on top of that.
In the early 2000s there was even a time when a book called “Hontō wa Osoroshii Grimm Dōwa” (“The Grimms’ Fairy Tales Are Actually Terrifying,” Wani Bunko) was all the rage. So let us look at the original source of “Snow White,” the first work with which Disney Productions stepped up.
To begin with, one of the great differences from the original is the treatment of the queen — that is, Snow White’s mother. Not only in Snow White: in stories where a stepmother appears, it is said that in the originals she was often the real mother. Then why was the real mother turned into a stepmother? That in itself is a question.
We hold the notion that a mother possesses something innate called maternal love, and that jealousy toward one’s own child, let alone killing one’s child, is unthinkable. That is why, it is said, from the time of publication in Germany there was strong public opinion that the plot in which a mother is jealous of her own child and harbors murderous intent ought to be cut or changed.
But is that so? In the daily news, reports of parents killing children and children killing parents are by no means rare. How do we explain that? Looking back over history, too, there are no few records showing that in times of great famine, the killing of newborns and infants was widely practiced. It is said this was not a problem of Japan alone but existed everywhere in the world, and judging from the fact that nearly every religion forbids it, it must have been something universal.
Isn’t the very concept of maternal love something that was born within the modern age (Élisabeth Badinter’s “The Myth of Motherhood,” among others)? The mothers who appear in old folk tales and fables were, I suppose, realistically portraying that shadow side of human beings.
The mother of Snow White in the original sets the story in motion through her jealousy toward a daughter who, as she grows, becomes more beautiful than herself. Her own child, grown into a celebrated beauty, became the seed of her envy.
The queen, the real mother, orders her retainer the hunter to kill her daughter. The hunter, taking pity on Snow White, lets her escape, and brings back a boar’s lungs and liver as proof. The queen boils them in salt and eats them. Having failed in her first attempt at murder, the queen now tries again, this time with a poisoned apple.
Snow White, put into a death-like state by the poisoned apple, is laid in a glass coffin; but a prince who happens by offers the seven dwarfs a great sum of money and takes the coffin away. About the prince there hangs an air of necrophilia — a doting love for the dead.
The punishment handed down to the queen at the end was a ghastly one: she is made to put on iron shoes heated red-hot and to dance, smoke rising from her feet, until she dies. Should we see in this a strong expression of the very idea of punishment?
And then — what is all this trying to say? Is it teaching us that jealousy is a thing strong enough to overcome maternity, or love? It is throwing out the question of what maternity is in the first place.
Sleeping Beauty
There is “Cinderella” too, but this time let us look also at “Sleeping Beauty,” Disney’s first 70mm big-screen film. Among the older versions, beginning with “Sun, Moon, and Talia” in the Italian “Pentamerone” (“The Tale of the Five Days”), there are all sorts of variants, but Disney is said to have used the Perrault and Grimm versions.
Talia, having touched a cursed splinter of flax, falls into an eternal sleep. The king of a neighboring country, entranced by Talia as she lies asleep, goes so far as to violate her. Talia, still asleep, gives birth to twin babies. The infants, wanting milk, touch the splinter stuck in Talia’s finger and by chance dislodge it, and Talia awakens.
The queen, learning of the king’s infidelity, is enraged; while the king is away she takes the babies and orders the cook to make them into a soup. But the cook, taking pity on them just as Snow White’s hunter had, hides the babies in his own house and makes the soup with goat meat. The queen has the king eat that soup, yet still her anger will not subside, and she orders her men to burn Talia at the stake.
Just as Talia, weeping, is about to step into the fire, the king returns. Aghast and furious at the sight, he has the queen thrown into the fire and executed. The cook is rewarded for saving the children, and Talia is taken as queen and finds happiness. Such was the plot.
Compared with Disney’s “Sleeping Beauty,” apart from the premise of falling asleep after being pricked, it has been remade into what seems an entirely different story. With this “Sleeping Beauty in the Wood,” the older the version, the more scenes so cruel they make you go, “Hey, hey, come on!” Put the other way around, the closer we come to the present, the milder it becomes.
The Little Mermaid
Let us look at one more Disney picture: Andersen’s mermaid princess, the one who sings so beautifully. There was a mermaid who fell in love at first sight with a young prince sailing on a ship. A storm wrecks the ship, and the unconscious prince is rescued by the mermaid. In love with the prince, the mermaid begs the witch who rules the sea to let her become human too — and here she is presented with very harsh conditions.
This is the same motif as “Hakujaden” (“The Tale of the White Serpent”), Toei Doga’s first feature. The white snake maiden who has fallen in love with a human man begs the moral leader of her tribe to let her become human. Here too she is not forbidden outright, but she is presented with harsh conditions. In Chinese tales of the strange, it is not only snakes. There are many stories of a fox turning human and becoming the lover of a human, but there too the hurdles are high, and most of these stories end in tragedy.
What does this tell us? Perhaps it depicts the unwritten rules — rules, perceptions, and ethics that are never put into words — that stand in the way when a man and a woman of different peoples are joined. China is a gathering of some fifty peoples, and the difficulty of uniting those who are different must have been spoken of since ancient times. It is interesting that Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid,” though an original work, shares something with the stories of marriage between different kinds in both East and West.
Here I will stray a little from the path, but Japan too had something that can be called one of the roots of animation: “utsushi-e,” a kind of magic-lantern show that was popular in the late Edo period. Its glass slides survive in Chōfu City, Tokyo, and I have seen the actual objects. It is the story of a woman who turns into a serpent and a man, treating the same Dōjōji legend as the kabuki piece famous as “Musume Dōjōji.” Among works on the Dōjōji legend, “Hidakagawa Iriai Zakura,” staged in Osaka puppet theater around 1759, is well known, and the legend itself is said to go back to the “Dainihonkoku Hokke Genki” of the mid-Heian period. Further, “The Lust of the White Serpent” in Ueda Akinari’s (born 1734) “Ugetsu Monogatari” also belongs to this lineage.
Toei Doga’s “Hakujaden” is also said to be a mixture of the Chinese white snake tales and “The Lust of the White Serpent,” but Mr. Akira Daikubara, who drew the storyboards, has already passed away, so there is no way to confirm it. Incidentally, I have a copy of those storyboards, given to me by Mr. Daikubara himself. But let us return to “The Little Mermaid.”
The conditions for Andersen’s Little Mermaid to become human are harsh.
- The first is that she will no longer be able to sing.
- The second is that her tongue will be cut out at the root with a knife.
- The third is harsher still: that along with receiving legs, she must accept a pain, with every step she takes, like being stabbed by a sword.
① Individuality (one’s strong point), ② the ability to communicate, ③ whether one can live accepting everyday pain. Is this a metaphor telling us to take things on only with that much resolve?
The mermaid, now with legs, meets the prince again but cannot speak. The prince, not knowing that the mermaid saved his life, sets his heart on another princess and in the end marries her. The mermaid’s sisters appear and give her a knife: if she stabs the prince through the heart, she can return to being a mermaid. But the mermaid could not do it. She throws herself into the sea and vanishes as foam.
It is a story with almost no salvation — but what of the Disney version? The mermaid and the prince fall in love, the two fight the witch and win, and it is a simple story that rushes straight to a happy wedding.
Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid” has a clearly identified author. That shows it is a work close to modern times, yet it still has cruel elements, such as cutting the tongue out at the root. Still, because it was a contract, there was a right to choose, and so the sense of cruelty softens a little. In the old stories, you rarely see anything like a barter. Why is it that the old stories depict human jealousy, desire, sex, cruelty, revenge, and the like in such naked form?
Narrative Presents Ethics
As we approach the modern age, the tendency to strip expression of cruelty and ethical deviation and to smooth it into something milder may be accelerating. Behind it, I think, lies the premise — a belief in the innate goodness of human nature — that humans, unlike beasts, possess “reason” and “humanity.”
But bring out ethics and humanity, and everyone is satisfied by that alone; yet if asked, “What is reason, what is humanity?” no one can answer. Ethics, morality, humanity — these are not things we are born with. They are the wisdom of “restraint” against human impulse, and so they are acquired after birth, things that cannot be had without learning. Then from whom do we learn?? I think you will have noticed that the message of this blog is that they can be learned only from stories. What do you say?
The cruelty of humankind, growing without limit as it binds itself to tools and institutions, ideals, nations, and religions, is, regrettably, something the territorial fights of animals cannot come anywhere near. The people of the 21st century live in an age that gathers the finest fruits of science to head for the moon, yet the only creature on earth that calmly brings about genocide is surely the human being — Homo sapiens. However much you cover that up and sophisticate it, the great shadow within human beings does not change; if anything, it even shows signs of swelling.
What old myths, folk tales, and fables have carried is precisely the role of showing that shadow. A mother mad with jealousy, a man who gives in to desire and brings others down, the cruelty of repaying kindness with harm — by showing the ugly true nature that nests deep inside human beings within the safe vessel of a story, people have looked straight at “the darkness that lurks within themselves too” and taken it as a warning, have they not?
If we take out the poison and come to consume only over-sophisticated, sterile-room stories, won’t human beings lose the wisdom to understand their own weakness? At the slightest expression that strays outside the frame of ethics, people immediately brandish laws and morals and denounce it. I cannot help but see the backlash of that stifling fastidiousness erupting as the abuse and invective on social media these days.
Without depicting the poison, one cannot depict the essence of human beings. For those of us involved in creative expression, how to face this “bleaching of stories” is, I think, a great question that cannot be avoided.
And yet there is a hint. It is something I thought the other day while watching the DVD of “Hakujaden.” The white snake legend has various versions in China; compared with Western tales they are less cruel, but many end in tragedy. Like the mermaid’s story, they are saying that marriage between different kinds is no good. Toei Doga’s animated version has a happy ending. What’s more, it leaves you with a warm feeling after you have watched it.
That is probably because all the animals cheering the couple on supported them, and because even the monk Fahai, the moral leader who had fiercely opposed the union of the white snake and Xu Xian throughout, was celebrating them at the end. By contrast, the Disney version goes straight down the line: happiness is something you win for yourself — self-establishment, self-responsibility. “Isn’t that pretty tough on them, though?”
In the animated “Hakujaden,” together with this, the characters, the animals, the scenery, the humor, the music, even the very air of the frame are all a happy ending. This too, I think, may owe something to the sense of valuing community (communitarianism) that farming peoples have.
One thing I especially cannot forget is the music. Mr. Chūji Kinoshita was a composer who worked mainly in film music and created a great deal of it, but I know of no film score that used the erhu so effectively. I do not have an ear that can tell the sound of the erhu from that of the kokyū, but the melody that erhu played was exquisitely beautiful and has stayed in my memory. I think it is music to rival Ennio Morricone’s “Cinema Paradiso.”
The Movie Theater as a Festive Stage
Both Disney and Toei Doga began with screening in movie theaters as their main purpose. Television broadcasting and data streaming as we have them now were not even imagined. Meanwhile, those who go to see an animated film head to the theater, I suspect, with somewhat greater expectations and a festive feeling. In America especially, besides the custom of the whole family going to the movies together, there was even the ritual of singing the national anthem before the screening.
When I was young and watched an animated film at a movie theater in America, before the screening began everyone around me stood up and began to sing the national anthem. I stayed seated, bewildered, but the audience around me would not allow it, and sent me body language that said, “Stand up, stand up.” I was astonished that even watching a movie involved such a ritual. Years later, when I told an American about this, they said it might differ from state to state, and that they themselves had never seen it. That must be so; American movies these days are mostly roller-coaster movies of chasing or being chased, and if you stood up and sang the national anthem every time for those, it would be a gag. Still, the sight of the crowd rising as one to sing the national anthem at every stage of baseball, at championship games and the like, is familiar on television — very much the national character.
All the more, then, the audience may come layering some kind of enjoyment, solemnity, and meaning onto the occasion. And yet if there were horribly cruel scenes, or if the ending were a great tragedy, the whole audience would have to go home together in a dark mood. The wish to avoid that surely exists, both as a feeling and as a matter of business.
Thinking from the standpoint of making animation, too, I have great hesitation about visualizing old folk tales and fables without any discretion. The power of a picture is not to be compared with that of words. With text, things can stay within the range of each reader’s imagination, but with visuals it is a different dimension. Of course, even among visuals there is a world of difference depending on the design, but considered in general terms, I think it wise to keep such things at the level of text.
I know I will be told that, having objected in the first half to sophisticating stories, I am now contradicting myself. It is a vexation I agonize over.