Is it just me or are most Disney movies based off of books?

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Bambi,Little Mermaid,101 Dalmatians ALL based on an already written book!! From what I've looked for on Wikipedia (and how I understood it) Fantasia and The Great Mouse Detective and Aristocats are actual Disney properties (I'm talking classic Walt era NOT the more current stuff)

Its been part of the grand Disney tradition since the release of the very first full-length (as opposed to animated short cartoons) Disney feature Snow White & the Seven Dwarfs. They steal from the best in world literature and dumb it down for children. Jungle Book (Rudyard Kipling classic), Sword in the Stone (Taken from The Once & Future King), Lion King (Hamlet), Mulan (based on the Legend of Hua Mulan), 101 Dalmations (a 1956 children's novel by Dodie Smith), 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (Jules Verne), Swiss Family Robinson (Johann Rudolph Wyss 1812), The Parent Trap ( on a book by Erich Kastner based on yet another film), Pinnochio (based on Tale of a Puppet by Carlo Collodi)...Very little to come out of Disney Studios has ever been entirely original...they like to stick with things with an already proven track record, like all corporate thinkers...why strain your brain coming up with a great idea when you can steal one that's already been working?

Ya I was reading the plot synopsis of Bambi in the woods (the actual book) and Bambi had brothers etc. a whole family!! !!

Not just Disney. After all, there's a whole Academy Award (tm) category dedicated to screenplays adapted from another medium.

And not just film, either. Almost every great musical has its book adapted from previously published source material. The first Tony (tm) winner for Best Musical that was not directly adapted was Damn Yankees which is, nonetheless, a pretty free adaptation of Faust. Of 61 winners, no more than 17 were truly original works (and that includes revue shows like Ain't Misbehavin' and Jerome Robbins' Broadway and shows inspired by historical events, like 1776 and Titanic.)

Simple fact of the matter is that to make the investment in a film, or stage production, you have to be sure that you have a viable vehicle, and often that means source material that already has a track record.

Granted, a lot of the classic Disney animated films are based on stories in the public domain, though we do get the occasional bestseller adaptation (the original poster for Bambi made a big deal about how Felix Salten's original book was a "famous book-of-the month").

I heard that Walt Disney never intended his movies to be for children. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs reportedly frightened a lot of children.

Descartes, nearly all animation has a something for everyone approach to it.

Even Shakespeare plagiarized most of his work.
Isn't The Great Mouse Detective a mouse-based carbon copy of something by Doyle?

And Fantasia is based on classical music.

Disney is great because of the animation, the music and the way these two things tell the story. Without this unique approach to storytelling, Disney would be nothing.

P.S. Walt Disney died in 1966. Basil the Great Mouse Detective (1986) and The Aristocats (1970) were made after his death. The last one made in his lifetime was The Sword in the Stone (1963).

Last edited by EnglishInvader on 15 Jan 2010, 7:11 am, edited 1 time in total.

Actually, it's based off of a children's book by Eve Titus (who also wrote Anatole).

I forgot that tidbit of information. Thanks for the heads up. Have you ever thought what he'd think of the Pixar and computer stuff of today? Rolling in his grave? Or praising it?

They don't just adapt books. They bastardize and bowdlerize them.

I think Disney would have embraced the technological advances, but we probably wouldn't have seen films like Toy Story and Monsters Inc.

Some of my favourites were made in the nineties (Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King), but I haven't really caught on to the CGI era. The CGI films I like are all non-Disney; Happy Feet, The Polar Express, Shrek and TMNT.

Anyone else looking forward to the new Alice in Wonderland that's coming out?

Yes, most Disney films are based upon stories/novels.

Looking forward to it and dreading it.
The Disney version has it's moments. Notably the tea party sequence. Walt didn't like the book and wanted the White Knight to keep showing up and rescuing Alice. Somehow that got voted down. I think this was the first Disney animation to use well known vocal talents. It stayed in the vaults for years and years. I remember reading in the 70's that the studio had no plans to ever re-release it because people would think there were drug references throughout.