"Here's the book... don't read it!"

As the story goes, when Walt Disney hired the Sherman Brothers to write the songs for "Jungle Book" he asked them if they had read the Kipling original. When they replied they hadn't, he said,"Well, don't!"

This was because he wanted songs that fitted the film as it was developing in storyboard form, and to avoid anything that might pull the film back towards the book instead of supporting the "modern" direction that the film was taking.

But he did not tell storyman Bill Peet to ignore the book and just invent something modern - in fact initially he wanted the film to be as true as possible to Kipling, as much of the criticism of "Sword in the Stone" had centred on its lack of fidelity to H B White. So Peet's initial work on "Jungle Book" was quite dark.

After Walt and Peet fell out, and Peet quit, other storymen worked through the material (and this is the key bit) looking for the Disney Film hiding in the story. I figure a Disney Film is a film for all the family, and one that will play well in the mid-west. After "Sleeping Beauty" the Studio had been pursuing a lighter, more jokey post-modern approach to storytelling, more in keeping with the TV and movies of the late 50s & 60s, so the "Jungle Book" that emerged was light-hearted fun - but it was still clearly derived from the Kipling original. (And also still contained quite a few of Peet's original ideas!)

This is how the Studios had always adapted stories: they looked for the key, most dramatic moments (in terms of comedy, heroics or pathos), and, developing the personalities of the main characters as they went, built these up into entertaining sequences the best way they knew how; and so evolved the Disney version of the plot. It's most telling in what must have been their most daunting adaptation - when they turned the sprawling ramble of semi-repetitious wandering that is Collodi's Pinocchio into a wonderfully compelling movie with great development and a well-rounded story arc.

Of course they used familiar tropes and cliches from the culture that surrounded them - we are talking entertainment here, not high art, and the Disney studio was built on polishing the tricks and traits of familiar stage movie performances, caricatured for fine story-telling effect. But they did it to give their films added audience appeal - they knew the stories they were using were classics, with audience expectation built in, and they were trying to put those stories over using the same techniques that they had developed in their Silly Symphonies. The book was the source - it was just the Disney way of retelling it that moved it away from the original and changed it into a Disney movie.

Of course you have probably guessed what lies at the heart of this rant: "Frozen"! The Hans Christian Anderson "Snow Queen" has 'evolved' from a girl's loyal quest to find her lost playmate and bring him home, to
"When Anna is cursed by her estranged sister, the cold-hearted Snow Queen, Anna’s only hope of reversing the curse is to survive a perilous but thrilling journey across an icy and unforgiving landscape. Joined by a rugged, thrill-seeking outdoorsman, his one-antlered reindeer and a hapless snowman, Anna must race against time, conquer the elements and battle an army of menacing snowmen if she ever hopes to melt her frozen heart."

This is not "the Disney film hiding in the book" - it is a "we need a plot that kids can relate to" (kids who have only ever watched TV cartoon series, that is) executive driven non-creative cobbled-on plot.

I do not believe Walt would have approved.