Once Upon a Source · Behind the Writing · All 24 Chapters
Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.
Twenty-four Disney films. Twenty-five original books, poems, plays, and myths standing behind them. None of them are the movie you already know.
Every chapter of Once Upon a Source starts the same way: watch the film, then go find the thing it actually came from. Sometimes that’s a two-hundred-year-old fairy tale. Sometimes it’s Shakespeare. Once, memorably, it’s thirty-one lines of Classical Chinese poetry stretched into an eighty-eight-minute feature. This blog post attempts to pull them all together in one place.
VOLUME ONE: THE ORIGINALS WERE NEVER SOFT
Snow White is seven years old in the original Grimms’ version, and the dwarfs don’t have names. Cinderella’s stepsisters cut off parts of their own feet to force the glass slipper to fit. This is the volume that sets the tone for the whole project: what Disney softened and why it mattered.
– The Complete Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault
VOLUME TWO: BARRIE’S PETER PAN WILL WRECK YOU
In J.M. Barrie’s original, Peter comes back for Wendy years later—and he’s forgotten her completely. So he takes her daughter instead. Then her granddaughter. He never changes. He never remembers. It’s the single darkest thing in this entire reading list, and it’s the “family classic” everyone thinks they already know.
– Hans Christian Andersen, Complete Fairy Tales
VOLUME THREE: MYTH, LEGEND, AND A MAP DRAWN ON A RAINY AFTERNOON
Robert Louis Stevenson wrote Treasure Island while bedridden, at a rate of a chapter a day, working backward from a treasure map he’d drawn with his stepson for fun. The map came first. The book was written to explain it. That kind of origin story is exactly why this project exists.
– The Snow Queen (the real story behind Frozen)
VOLUME FOUR: KIPLING, CARROLL, AND A BOOK THE NAZIS BURNED
Felix Salten’s Bambi isn’t really a children’s book—it’s a meditation on mortality and predators, and it was banned and burned in Nazi Germany before Salten fled the country. Disney kept the tragedy. It softened almost everything around it.
– Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
VOLUME FIVE: SHAKESPEARE IS SIMBA’S REAL SCREENWRITER
Line up The Lion King next to Hamlet, and it holds up scene for scene—murdered father, usurping uncle, prince in exile. The one real difference: in Shakespeare’s version, almost everybody dies. Simba got off easy.
– Hamlet
VOLUME SIX: THE AUTHOR WHO CRIED AT HER OWN PREMIERE
P.L. Travers held Disney off for twenty years before finally selling the rights to Mary Poppins — and wept at the premiere, not from joy. She spent the rest of her life objecting to what had been done to her character. Reading the original is the closest you’ll get to her side of the story.
– The Book of Three (Chronicles of Prydain, Bk. 1)
“Twenty-four movies you’ve seen a hundred times. Twenty-five books most people have never opened. That gap is the whole reason this project exists.”
What’s above is a starting point, not the whole shelf. Every chapter—all 24 films, every original source, with a direct link to find each one—lives on the full reading list page.