J.R.R. Tolkien verses Disney on telling fairy tales
Posted by Christopher Blackwell on December 14, 2025, 5:35 pm
The Inspireist
J.R.R. Tolkien's dislike of Disney was not casual criticism from an old scholar resistant to new media. It was not professional jealousy or reflexive traditionalism. It was profound philosophical opposition rooted in fundamentally different understandings of what stories are for and what happens when you change them. The conflict began with an almost eerie coincidence of timing in 1937.
That year, Tolkien published The Hobbit, a deceptively simple children's book that was actually a carefully constructed mythology shaped by his expertise in linguistics, his immersion in ancient literature, and his convictions about how stories carry moral and spiritual weight. He had spent years crafting not just a plot but an entire world with languages, histories, and cultures that gave the narrative depth far beyond its surface adventure.
Just months after The Hobbit appeared in British bookstores, Disney released Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs on December 21, 1937. It was the first full-length animated feature film ever made—a technical marvel, a commercial gamble, and an immediate cultural phenomenon. When it reached British theaters in early 1938, it represented everything modern entertainment could achieve: mass appeal, technological innovation, and financial success on an unprecedented scale.
The timing was more than coincidental. It placed two radically different visions of fairy tales before the public simultaneously. One was a Oxford don's attempt to create new mythology using ancient storytelling traditions. The other was a Hollywood studio's attempt to transform old fairy tales into something that could fill movie theaters.
Tolkien and his close friend C.S. Lewis went to see Snow White together, likely curious about this groundbreaking film that everyone was discussing. Both men were scholars of medieval literature, both were deeply invested in fairy tales and mythology, and both took stories seriously as carriers of truth and meaning rather than mere entertainment.
Neither was impressed.
Lewis recorded in his diary that he found the film "sickly." Tolkien's reaction went deeper and lasted longer. What he saw on screen that day disturbed him in ways that would shape his thinking about adaptation and popular culture for the rest of his life.
The disturbance wasn't about technical execution. Tolkien recognized Disney's talent immediately—the animation was unprecedented, the artistry undeniable, the achievement remarkable. What troubled him was intent, was philosophy, was what Disney thought fairy tales were supposed to do.
In Tolkien's view, carefully articulated in his essay "On Fairy-Stories" and throughout his letters, fairy tales were not decorative entertainment for children. They were ancient tools with serious purposes: to confront fear, explore loss, acknowledge danger, and work through moral consequences in symbolic form. They were myth—narratives that carried truth about the human condition in ways that realistic fiction couldn't. Genuine fairy tales, Tolkien believed, maintained a quality he called "eucatastrophe"—a sudden joyous turn that felt miraculous precisely because the darkness preceding it was real and terrible. The happy ending meant something only if the danger, the fear, the genuine possibility of failure had been present. You couldn't manufacture that effect through sentiment alone.
Disney's approach, as Tolkien saw it, transformed those dangerous, morally complex narratives into something fundamentally different. The ancient elements were present—dwarfs, evil queens, enchanted forests—but they had been reshaped into sentiment, humor, and spectacle designed for universal consumption and commercial success.
The evil queen in Snow White was clearly evil, thoroughly defeated, and never morally complicated. The dwarfs were comic relief with distinct personalities marketed on merchandise. The darkness that appeared was always contained, always resolved neatly, always subordinate to the reassuring message that everything would be fine. The story's edges had been sanded smooth. That transformation felt like corruption to Tolkien. Not in the sense of deliberate malice, but in the sense of taking something with specific purpose and changing it into something else while keeping the surface appearance. Like translating poetry into prose—the words might be accurate, but the essential quality that made it poetry had been lost.
In a letter written in 1964 to a film producer interested in adapting his work, Tolkien stated his position plainly. He wrote that he had "a heartfelt loathing" of Disney's work, believing that Disney's talent—which he acknowledged—seemed "hopelessly corrupted." Any story Disney touched, Tolkien feared, risked being flattened into something that was moral but shallow, visually rich but spiritually thin.
This wasn't personal animosity. Tolkien never met Walt Disney. He didn't follow Disney's career or comment on his character. His opposition was entirely philosophical—a disagreement about what stories are, what they should do, and what happens when you change them to reach wider audiences.
The fundamental disagreement was this: Disney believed stories reached their highest purpose when simplified and clarified for mass audiences. Complex moral situations became clear good versus evil. Ambiguous characters became heroes or villains. Darkness became manageable, danger became surmountable, and endings became unambiguously happy. This accessibility was, in Disney's view, democratizing—bringing fairy tales to millions who might never read the originals.
Tolkien believed stories gained power precisely from retaining their shadows, complexity, and danger. The moral ambiguity of characters like Gollum, the genuine peril of Shelob's lair, the complexity of characters who could be heroic and petty, brave and cowardly—these elements weren't obstacles to understanding. They were the point. They were what made the stories true to human experience and capable of conveying real meaning.
One vision tried to modernize myth, to make it accessible and palatable to contemporary mass audiences. The other tried to protect myth from modernity, to preserve the qualities that made it mythological rather than merely entertaining.
This wasn't nostalgia for some imagined pure past. Tolkien understood that stories always change in retelling—that's how oral traditions work. But he distinguished between changes that emerged organically from new storytellers genuinely engaging with the material and changes imposed by commercial imperatives and mass market demands.
Disney's changes, in Tolkien's view, came from the latter category. They were driven not by deeper understanding of the stories but by the requirements of film as a medium, by the need to appeal to the broadest possible audience, by the commercial imperative to sell merchandise and create franchises.
This belief profoundly shaped Tolkien's resistance to film adaptation throughout his life. He was approached multiple times about adapting The Lord of the Rings to film. He consistently resisted, partly because he feared—with good reason, given the era—that any adaptation would "Disneyfy" his work.
He imagined, with horror, Sam Gamgee becoming comic relief, Gollum becoming a simple villain, the moral complexity of characters like Boromir or Denethor being simplified into clear categories, the darkness of Mordor being made manageable for family audiences, and eucatastrophic moments being manufactured through sentiment rather than earned through genuine peril.
These fears weren't paranoid. They were based on observing how Hollywood typically adapted literary works, and particularly on observing what Disney had done to traditional fairy tales. Tolkien had watched Snow White transform the Grimm brothers' dark tale into something brighter, simpler, and more commercially successful. He had no reason to believe his work would be treated differently. In his correspondence, Tolkien was explicit about this concern. He wrote that he would rather his work never be filmed than be subjected to the kind of treatment Disney gave fairy tales. He saw preservation of the work's integrity as more important than reaching larger audiences through adaptation.
For Tolkien, mythology was not meant to be improved, modernized, or made more accessible through simplification. It was meant to be preserved—its complexity, its darkness, its moral ambiguity, its genuine danger all intact. If that meant fewer people engaged with it, so be it. Better a smaller audience encountering the real thing than a mass audience consuming a commercialized substitute.
This position was, and remains, controversial. Critics argued then and now that Tolkien was elitist, that he wanted to keep stories locked away for educated audiences, that he failed to appreciate how Disney's work introduced millions of children to fairy tales who might never have encountered them otherwise.
But Tolkien's counterargument would have been: what exactly did Disney introduce them to? If the darkness is removed, if the moral complexity is simplified, if the genuine danger is replaced with manageable scares, are children actually encountering fairy tales? Or are they encountering something that looks like fairy tales but functions differently—as entertainment rather than myth?
The question isn't whether Disney's films are enjoyable or well-made. They clearly are. The question is whether they serve the same purpose as the stories they're based on, or whether the transformation into mass entertainment fundamentally changes what they can do and mean.
Tolkien believed that when stories lose their darkness, they lose their mythological function. They can still entertain, still delight, still teach simple moral lessons. But they can't do what genuine fairy tales do—confront the reality of evil, explore the complexity of moral choice, acknowledge that happy endings are miraculous precisely because disaster was genuinely possible.
This is why Tolkien's opposition to Disney wasn't about animation versus books, or film versus literature. It was about two incompatible philosophies of storytelling. Disney's commercial success proved his approach worked—billions of people have loved his films. But commercial success and mythological function are different measures of a story's value.
The irony, of course, is that Tolkien's work eventually was adapted to film—and achieved massive commercial success that would have horrified him. Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy grossed nearly $3 billion worldwide and won numerous Academy Awards. It brought Tolkien's work to hundreds of millions of people who would never have read the books.
But Jackson, whatever his changes and omissions, largely honored Tolkien's insistence on darkness, moral complexity, and genuine peril. The films aren't perfect Tolkien adaptations—no film could be—but they preserved enough of the mythological weight that they function differently than Disney fairy tale adaptations.
Whether Tolkien would have approved is impossible to know. He died in 1973, before the technology existed to attempt such an adaptation. But his letters suggest he might have been cautiously pleased that someone tried to preserve the darkness rather than sand it away.
The broader question Tolkien raised remains relevant: When stories are adapted for mass consumption, what gets lost? When edges are smoothed, when moral complexity is simplified, when darkness is made manageable, do we still have the same story? Or do we have something that looks similar but functions fundamentally differently? Disney would argue—and millions of satisfied viewers would agree—that making stories accessible is a worthy goal, that bringing fairy tales to broader audiences through film serves an important purpose, and that some necessary changes are worth the trade-offs.
Tolkien would argue—and those who value his work would agree—that some qualities of stories can't survive certain kinds of changes, that not everything should be adapted for mass consumption, and that protecting the integrity of mythology matters more than maximizing audience size.
Neither position is simply right or wrong. They represent different values, different priorities, different beliefs about what stories are for.
But Tolkien's position deserves serious consideration, especially in an era when virtually every story seems destined for adaptation, when intellectual properties become franchises, when narrative complexity often gets sacrificed for broad appeal, and when the pressure to reach maximum audiences drives creative decisions.
When stories lose their darkness—when genuine evil becomes cartoonish villainy, when moral complexity becomes clear right and wrong, when real danger becomes manageable adventure—do they still deserve to be called myth? Or have they become something else: entertainment that wears myth's clothing but can no longer do myth's work?
Tolkien spent his life arguing they become something else. Disney spent his life proving that something else could be wildly successful and beloved by millions.
The tension between those positions—between preservation and popularization, between mythological function and mass entertainment, between protecting stories and sharing them widely—remains unresolved. Perhaps it can't be resolved. Perhaps it's a tension we simply have to navigate, case by case, story by story.
But Tolkien's warning, born from watching Snow White in 1938 and articulated throughout his life, remains worth hearing: that not all changes are improvements, that commercial success doesn't guarantee mythological integrity, and that sometimes the price of reaching everyone is losing what made the story worth sharing in the first place.
Seventy years after his death, as virtually every story becomes content, as every myth becomes a property, as every tale gets adapted and rebooted and reimagined for maximum audience reach, perhaps Tolkien's philosophical opposition to Disney's approach deserves reconsideration.
Not as backward resistance to progress, but as a serious question about what we lose when we trade depth for breadth, complexity for clarity, and mythological function for mass appeal.
Tolkien wasn't against stories reaching people. He was against stories being changed so fundamentally in that reach that they stopped being what they were supposed to be.
Whether he was right is something each person must judge. But his opposition was neither casual nor petty. It was the considered position of someone who devoted his life to understanding how stories work, what they mean, and what happens when we change them.
And it began, remarkably, with two men walking out of a theater in 1938, having just watched Snow White, disturbed not by its failure but by its success at doing something neither of them believed fairy tales should do.
I've long been a fan of Tolkien and, increasingly, critical of Disney's approach to storytelling. It's good (and not surprising) to see that the old Professor saw this early on, and realized that the mass popularization of fairy stories, their candification if you will, would damage the messages they were trying to deliver.
Commercialization is another horror which unfortunately has been visited on Tolkiens' work after his death; born out of Hollyweird's obsession with 'creating a franchise.' Which has, perhaps, replaced 'creating a myth' and certainly has shoved aside any moral values involved (something Hollyweird knows absolutely nothing about)... RESIST!
on December 14, 2025, 5:35 pm
