Bibbidi, Bobbidi, Bypassed: The Fairy Tales Disney Left on the Shelf
And why they could make “The Princess & the Frog”.
Disney has long enchanted us with magical animations and films, such as Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland, and Tangled (Rapunzel). Their back catalogue is extensive and includes familiar fairy tales, original stories, and stories born of historical events.
But I began to wonder why some of the more popular and well-known fairy tales were never given the “Disney treatment”. Stories such as Red Riding Hood, Goldilocks, and Hansel and Gretel. It turns out the answer is actually more surprising than you might think.
It’s not that Disney overlooked these stories; rather, they kept trying to make them, but kept failing to get them made.
My research found that Red Riding Hood, Goldilocks, and Hansel and Gretel had all been in development multiple times but were always cancelled.
Red Riding Hood:
According to Fairytalez, Walt Disney’s very first official animated storytelling project was actually a Little Red Riding Hood short film in 1922, made at the Laugh-O-Gram Studio in Kansas City. It was assumed lost for decades until it was rediscovered in 1998. So Red Riding Hood was arguably where Disney started.
ScreenRant also tells us that Disney considered making a full-length feature film of the story during the 1960s, but it never resulted in anything. The reason for cancellation remains unclear.
Hansel & Gretel:
The tale of Hansel and Gretel has an equally tangled history. Disney tackled the story in the 1932 Silly Symphony Babes in the Woods, where they significantly altered the original tale. It became the first attempt by Disney to do a “serious” adaptation of a classic fairy tale, according to Mouse Planet. Then, sometime in 1967, Walt Disney Productions was planning a full feature adaptation with songs written by the Sherman Brothers. But it was abandoned, and one of its songs, “Chin Up,” was later recycled for the 1973 adaptation of Charlotte’s Web.
So why does Disney struggle with these stories, and why do they keep getting shelved? A few theories worth considering:
The darkness problem. The Hansel and Gretel project was possibly abandoned due to its darker themes. A cannibalistic witch fattening up children for the oven is genuinely difficult to soften without gutting the story entirely, and Disney has historically struggled to find the right tonal balance for it.
Red Riding Hood’s ambiguity. The story is deceptively short and has very little in it. It is essentially a little girl, a wolf and her granny. There is no romantic arc, no transformation, no obvious “Disney formula” to hang a 90-minute film on. Its power lies in its menace and ambiguity, neither of which sits comfortably in the classic Disney mould.
Competition from other projects. Both stories kept losing out to whichever film was in active development. Disney’s pipeline is finite, and when a safer bet was on the table, these got shelved.
Fairytalez also provides us with an interesting footnote: in 1997, Disney produced a short called Redux Riding Hood. This was a comedic, adult-skewing reimagining of the story in which the wolf attempts to travel back in time to fix his earlier failure. It was nominated for an Academy Award. So, even in its most recent treatment, Disney turned Red Riding Hood into a meta-comedy rather than committing to a straight adaptation.
Goldilocks:
Goldilocks has actually had a remarkably similar fate to Red Riding Hood, in that Disney kept trying and kept failing to make it work.
Disney’s very first Goldilocks project dates back to 1922, when the Laugh-O-Gram Studio produced a short called Goldie Locks and the Three Bears. This was the same year they made their first Red Riding Hood. So both stories were there at the very beginning.
Disney then proposed Goldilocks as a Silly Symphony in 1936, at which point Goldie was designed as a caricature of child star Shirley Temple. After that version failed to materialise, they considered casting Mickey, Donald and Goofy as the Three Bears instead! That didn’t happen either.
Disney had been developing a Goldilocks story for most of the 1930s, but couldn’t find a satisfactory storyline, and eventually, they subcontracted it out. The resulting 1939 short was produced by MGM rather than Disney proper.
Then, in the 1960s, Disney considered making a full animated feature of Goldilocks, but it was permanently cancelled for unknown reasons. The closest Disney has come since is a Disney Junior children’s series called Goldie & Bear, which launched in 2015 and reimagines Goldilocks and the bear as best friends.
This pattern of failure and cancellation is bigger than you might think
The list of famous fairy tales that defeated Disney is actually quite long:
Rumpelstiltskin: Disney considered a twist on the story called Uncle Stiltskin, but nothing came of it. Why? Well, the problem is fairly obvious: the story revolves around a small, imp-like character, portrayed as villainous, who, in the end, tears himself in half in a rage after the queen correctly guesses his name. This is both politically fraught and tonally impossible to soften without gutting the story entirely.
The Nightingale (Hans Christian Andersen): Disney attempted an adaptation in 1960 with a distinctive paper cut-out animation style, then revisited it in the 1980s as part of what became Fantasia 2000. They then tried again in 2002 before cancelling it around a year later. In short, three separate attempts at the same story, across four decades.
Puss in Boots and The Bremen Town Musicians: both stories were discussed as possible projects but were ultimately abandoned, though DreamWorks eventually claimed Puss in Boots entirely.
What does the pattern tell us?
There seem to be a few recurring reasons why certain stories keep slipping through the net:
No obvious protagonist arc. Goldilocks breaks in, tries some things, then runs away. Red Riding Hood gets eaten (or rescued, depending on the version). Neither has the internal transformation that Disney’s formula needs.
Unresolvable darkness. Hansel and Gretel involves child abandonment and attempted cannibalism. Rumpelstiltskin ends in a small figure, literally destroying himself.
Too short and too simple. The stories that work as Disney features tend to have enough plot architecture to sustain 90 minutes. Goldilocks has three sequences of “too hot / too cold / just right” and then she legs it.
But What About “The Princess & the Frog”?
Disney’s 2009 adaptation of The Princess and the Frog is an interesting one. It doesn’t resemble the original fairytale; instead, they reimagined it as set in New Orleans, with an ordinary girl (not a princess) and several layers of Voodoo magic! If they could do this with a story like “The Princess and the Frog”, it begs the question, why did they find other, more familiar tales such a struggle?
What Disney actually did to The Frog Prince
The original Grimm tale is, frankly, a mess. The story goes: a princess loses a golden ball down a well, a frog retrieves it in exchange for her companionship, she abandons her promise, her father shames her into honouring it, and she eventually becomes so irritated by the frog that she throws him against a wall, and that is what breaks the curse. Not love, not a kiss, but instead a combination of exasperation and annoyance. The lesson, such as it is, dissolves entirely if you squint at it. There’s no transformation arc for the heroine, no real romance, and the moral is roughly “keep your promises, or failing that, throw things.”
Disney’s adaptation actually began as two completely separate projects, one based on E.D. Baker’s novel The Frog Princess, and another that was originally pitched as The Frog Prince set in gangster-era Chicago. Disney essentially merged them, relocated everything to 1920s New Orleans, replaced European fairy godmother magic with voodoo, and built an entirely new protagonist from scratch. The head of story described the result as “twisted enough that it seems new and fresh”, as it reimagined a modern city as the kingdom, a prince reimagined as a “knuckleheaded playboy”, and a voodoo priest standing in for the fairy godmother.
So why could they do this with The Princess and the Frog, but not with Red Riding Hood or Goldilocks?
Here’s the thing that makes this question so sharp: The Princess and the Frog succeeded precisely because it wasn’t beloved in the way the others are. Most people couldn’t tell you the actual plot of The Princess and the Frog. It exists in the cultural memory as a vague impression: frog, kiss, prince. This gave Disney enormous creative freedom. Nobody had strong feelings about what it was supposed to look like.
By contrast, Red Riding Hood, Goldilocks and Hansel and Gretel are a different matter entirely. Everyone knows them. Everyone loves them, or at least has an opinion! The wolf, the grandmother’s cottage, the red cloak, the basket; these images are so deeply embedded that any significant departure from them feels wrong. Yet staying faithful to them leaves you with a story that is either too short, too dark, or too structurally thin for a feature film.
There’s also a subtle but important point about what the story is for. The Princess and the Frog is about transformation and unexpected love, both of which work beautifully within the Disney formula. Red Riding Hood is about predation and danger. Goldilocks is about transgression and consequence. Hansel and Gretel is about child abandonment and survival. These themes resist the transformation-arc-plus-happy-ending structure at a fundamental level. You can’t really give Red Riding Hood a romantic subplot without it becoming deeply uncomfortable.
The irony
One of the film’s co-writers described it as “a princess movie for people who don’t like princess movies”, which is rather telling. Disney found its way into The Princess and the Frog by essentially leaving it behind and building something new on its foundations. The stories that remain stuck in the archive are the ones so iconic that Disney can’t abandon the original, but so structurally awkward that they can’t commit to it either. They’re caught between fidelity and reinvention, and that’s exactly where development goes to die.
The crux of it? The stories Disney couldn’t make are the ones that are too famous to ignore and too strange to fix.