Abstract
Disney’s live-action movie The Nutcracker and the Four Realms (2018) is a twenty-first century iteration of a story that has enjoyed a successful international reception history ever since its inception in the nineteenth century as a Kunstmärchen by E.T.A. Hoffmann, The Nutcracker and the Mouse King (1816). This paper discusses Disney’s version in the context of the transcultural and transmedial adaptation and popularisation of the Hoffmann tale. Disney’s remediatisation of the fairy tale displays influences from current fantasy film conventions, but that is not all. Thematically, the film is particularly interesting in the way it handles gender constructions: Disney turns the children’s fairy tale into a coming-of-age drama. This recoding will be considered in the context of Disney’s efforts to re-stage femininity in recent years. An analysis of the seemingly progressive representation of gender and diversity in this film, a response to the criticism that has been formulated against Disney's productions, will be presented.
This article is partly based on Dettmar 2020a but has been fundamentally revised and extended.
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Notes
- 1.
Disney had already used fairy tale material in the Laugh-O-Grams and Silly Symphonies in the 1920s and 1930s, cf. Tomkowiak 2017.
- 2.
- 3.
Cf. Hutcheon/O’Flynn 2013.
- 4.
Referring to cinematic adaptations of fairy tales, Zipes points out: “Whatever the case may be, there is no authoritative hypotext or Urtext upon which a filmmaker does or can rely, and this is because literary fairy tales stem from oral folk tales and have a long history of variation and dissemination in an oral tradition up through the present. Many literary fairy tales are already adaptations because they are translations that comprise some kind of adaptation in language and references to different social context. […] Numerous classic fairy tales and popular folk tales from the oral tradition have been translated, illustrated, and spread in diverse ways, but when published, they become so-called fixed texts—but only seemingly” (2011, 8).
- 5.
Regarding the concept and theory of the palimpsest, see Genette 1993.
- 6.
Marie is hence not a girl in puberty, despite the claim by Neumann (1997, 154), who interprets Marie’s story as that of the maturation of a girl into a woman (ibid., 142). Mediated through her godfather Droßelmeier, and embodied in the vivified figure of the nutcracker as an object of love and transition (ibid., 150), the complex constellations play out into childhood—or rather into the childish fantasies of the latency stage. Kümmerling-Meibauer (2012, 87–89) therefore sees in the change of Marie’s world of play and fantasy a genuine development from symbolic play to role play typical of childhood.
- 7.
Neumann (1997, 149–151) also points to allusions to Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship), the myth of Pygmalion, Gozzi’s play Turandot (itself based on a Persian fairy tale) and Fouqué’s Undine.
- 8.
Disney also drew on the nutcracker material in the animated short The Nutcracker (Mickey Mouse Works 1999).
- 9.
According to Wikipedia, the film’s budget exceeded $120 million: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nutcracker_and_the_Four_Realms. Accessed November 23, 2020.
- 10.
Cf. Goldhammer (2018): https://www.br-klassik.de/aktuell/br-klassik-empfiehlt/film/der-nussknacker-und-die-vier-reiche-film-kritik-100.html. Accessed November 23, 2020.
- 11.
The Guardian’s cinema reviewer Cath Clark wrote: “With this sumptuous ballet-lite live action retelling of The Nutcracker, Disney is having its feminist mince pie and eating it. The heroine here, fiercely independent and brave, follows the Disney-princess-gone-rogue template set by Emma Watson in Beauty and the Beast.” https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/nov/01/the-nutcracker-and-the-four-realms-review-keira-knightley. Accessed: 23. November 2020.
- 12.
Regarding this narrative pattern of the Backfischroman (teenage girl novel), see in a historical context Wilkending 1990.
- 13.
By using the term postfeminist, Macaluso is referring to Judith Butler. Regarding its differentiation and for a discussion of the term, see Gill 2017.
- 14.
Regarding criticism of this figure in youth literature and especially in speculative fiction, cf. Kalbermatten 2020.
- 15.
Comparable tendencies can also be found in Disney’s remake of Beauty and the Beast (2017).
- 16.
A comparable approach is taken by the film The Princess and the Frog (2009), cf. Tomkowiak 2017, 134–135.
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Dettmar, U. (2022). From E.T.A. Hoffmann to Disney. In: Dettmar, U., Tomkowiak, I. (eds) On Disney. Studien zu Kinder- und Jugendliteratur und -medien, vol 9. J.B. Metzler, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-64625-0_7
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