Disney’s animated book-to-film adaptations, ranked by faithfulness to the source
Right from the beginning, Walt Disney Animation Studios leaned heavily on existing books and stories for inspiration, starting with its first feature, 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. While this has resulted in some truly wonderful movies, the studio’s tendency to make major changes to its source material — toning down the original stories’ dark or violent content, and generally softening the edges — has also been apparent from the start.
A Century of Disney
It’s such a predictable part of the Disney process that the neologism “Disneyfication” has become a generic term for bowdlerizing a story into a tame kid-friendly version. Here’s a comprehensive rundown of Disney’s animated movies that are based on existing stories, noting the often surprising differences between the two, and ranking them in order from most faithful to least faithful.
Based on: Eve Titus and Paul Galdone’s series Basil of Baker Street (1958-1982)
The Great Mouse Detective is an underrated gem that appears to have grown in both popularity and stature over the years, and it’s one of a few instances of Disney adapting material from a series of books, mixing storylines together. (In live action, you can see this clearly in movies like Mary Poppins, which is drawn from a series of eight books by P.L. Travers.) There aren’t many major differences between the books and the movie, save that the main character — Basil, essentially a mouse version of Sherlock Holmes — is a little less temperamental in the books. And curiously, unlike his inspiration, he plays the flute. Given that Basil actually lives in the same house as Holmes, who plays violin, this seems like an odd alteration.
Based on: Felix Salten’s novel Bambi, a Life in the Woods (1923)
Read more on polygon.com
