Much more than Cinderella

Do you like fairytales? Do you used to watch/read them when you were a child?

The other day we were talking about Cinderella in class. At the beginning Raquel asked us to join groups of 2 or 3 people and reconstruct, with as many details as we could, the plot of the story. We had to remember the main characters, events, objects and so on. Then, she divided the class in two groups and each of us had to read a different version of the same story. 

                              

 My group had to read Grimms’ version “Ascenputtel”.

 

The other group had to read Perrault’s version “Cinderella/The Little Glass Slipper”. 

 

Raquel gave us 10 minutes to read individually the story. Then, we had to find someone from the other group and exchange information about the characteristics of the stories. I was very surprised when we put in common both versions.  We discovered how many differences they had. What shock me the most was that they were not just fairytales, they had much more transcendence in the background.  

We were discussing about how Disney had manipulate the stories in order to “send” some messages to children. 

We said some ideas such us:

1. The girl is always passive and needs the help of other characters in order to do something. 
2. The importance of the beauty in a female.
3. Triunph is related with beauty and money.

What do you think about this?  Do you think children realize this while they are watching a movie? Do you think adults sometimes try to go too deeper while analyzing infant movies?

I really recommend you to read each version of Cinderella, and then watch the Disney movie in order to see the differences. I attach here the links where you can find the stories and also the trailer of the Disney movie.

• Ascenputtel by Grimms: http://stenzel.ucdavis.edu/180/anthology/aschenputtel.html 
• The little Glass Slipper by Perrault: http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/perrault06.html 
• Trailes of the Disney movie: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Qzj4jjC2gw