Starting with snow white

animative
model 
not 
a 
story
model. Thus, insofar as Disney can be seen through 
Clampett’s animated scenes, this director’s self-interest is prioritized, remaking 
Snow 
White 
to showcase African American music and entertainment. Although lively and 
jocular in its use of music, the short cartoon also features the racial prejudices and other 
American cultural politics of the WWII era. The core elements of the 
Snow White 
tale, 
therefore, have been displaced by attention directed toward culturally prominent 
entertainments and values. Where both versions (each with its own motives) aimed to 
revise or potentially replace Disney’s influential filmic fairy tale, they instead did more to 
highlight and respond to that American 
Snow White 
“classic.” Disney’s “folkloric” 
footprint is stamped upon each, and together these literary and animated responses 
display the influence of his version, the new foundation for revisions and adaptations. 
The Conclusion to this study, “Transforming Disney: Recuperative Power and 
Possibilities in Postmodern, Contemporary, and Future 
Snow White 
Adaptations,” aims to 
provide an opening for further contemporary discourse concerning folkloric influence.
Here, I offer a brief account of the most recent adaptations reflecting the continued 
American lineage of the 
Snow White 
tale. By marking a few further transformations, I 
suggest the potential for a new pattern of influence.

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When initially discussing variants representative of the postmodern “unmakings” 
of Walt Disney’s “classic” and its conventions, I gesture toward the deconstructive 
endeavors of Donald Barthelme’s 
Snow White
(1965), Anne Sexton’s “Snow White and 
the Seven Dwarfs” (1971), Robert Coover’s “The Dead Queen,” (1973), and Michael 
Cohn’s film, 
Snow White: A Tale of Terror 
(1997). Specifically, I highlight their 
revisionary narrative construction, character development, sexuality, violence, 
consumerism, and/or female recuperation, which aim to potentially reform earlier 
conceptions of the 
Snow White 
tradition. As with Disney’s immediate successors, I do 
not mean to suggest that these versions were solely generated to respond to Walt Disney; 
however, they necessarily recall in a reader’s imagination the influential makings of that 
animated “classic.” 
 
That said, these more recent versions, in their progressive values and 
means for “contest[ing]” the conservative attributes of the traditional tale seem to serve 
another, more contemporary function, as well (Shippey 258-259).
In the remainder of my conclusion and examination of a range of twenty-first 
century 
Snow White 
adaptations, I suggest that by means of film, children’s and young 
adult/adult literature, television, and animated cartoon, innovative values presented 
through 
Snow White
’s postmodern American inversions replay themselves with new 
and/or more focalized meaning and also speak more broadly to the changing dominant 
values of culture at large. Many of these new representations geared toward value re-
setting frequently
 
revise the characterization of the female heroine and/or villain, 
complicating her representation. However, others represent narrative breaks, in the now 
popular usage of the “fractured” fairy tale form. Yet still other twenty-first century 

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adaptations indicate future areas for contemporary revision, revaluing: treatments of 
disability, religion, or sexuality. Significantly, the current trend in which postmodern 
themes and issues appear to be redeployed through contemporary