I have learned a lot this semester in my Grimm to Disney class. I have always loved fairy tales ever since I was a child and finding out where they came from was very interesting. I learned a lot about the Grimm brothers for one. Growing up I had heard of them but I never knew much about them. I didn’t know that they wrote so many fairy tales or anything about their life story. It was very interesting finding out about how tough of a childhood they had and how they grew up.  I knew that Disney had based their fairy tales off of older fairy tales that were already written but I didn’t know that they changed them a lot. Throughout this class we read the original fairy tales by the Grimm Brothers and compared them to the Disney versions. This was one of the most interesting parts of the class for me. I know every fairy tale by heart because I watched them all the time when I was little and I still watch them today. When I read the Grimm versions I was surprised to see how different they were from the Disney versions. For example Cinderella was very very different than the Grimm version. There was no pumpkin or horse and carriage like the Disney version. In the end of the Grimm version the two evil stepsisters get their eyes plucked out by birds on the way to Cinderella’s wedding. That was very shocking to me because I feel like a Disney movie would never have that in it.

                Another thing I liked this semester in this class was looking at the hidden meaning behind fairy tales. This was fascinating to me. I had never heard of Bruno Bettelheim or any of the other people we studied this semester. It was fascinating to see different theories on the symbolism and meaning behind fairy tales. My favorite was the psychoanalytic view of fairy tales and how they represent woman growing up sexually and the oedipal conflict. Bruno Bettelheim thinks that “Snow White” is about a girl overcoming the oedipal conflict and struggling with becoming sexually mature before she is mentally ready. This was so weird and foreign to me when I first took this class because I never in a million years would have thought that that is what a fairy tale was about.

                After this semester I learned a lot about fairy tales and I found it very interesting. I learned things I never knew and never even thought of about fairy tales.  I would recommend this class to everyone!