I don't think disney is the 'bad guy' in neverafter. I think disney's method of retelling fairytales is correlated to the supposed happiness of the versions of characters in Mother Goose's book. In his conversation with the goose, she said that the people in his book are happy and comfortable but that they can be removed and returned to a darker reality, and it's up for him to decide whether the characters staying happy and safe is the best thing to do.
The disney fairytales are heavily sanitised; everyone is far happier and better off than in most other versions. That would all be fine - except that disney is a capitalist nightmare powerhouse, and their versions of fairytales have become the predominant versions. The question which arises is whether or not these sanitised versions should be so dominant.
On one hand: don't these characters, and the people who identify and love them, deserve to be happy and comfortable? But so much of Neverafter is explicitly about how these characters are just that - characters. They are elements of a story. And more specifically, they are fairytale characters - characters of stories so old and so fundamental that we tell them over and over again in ways which reflect how society has changed. When only the happy versions of the stories are told, there is, in a way, permission given to look away from and diminish the history of awful things we used to do and say and justify. The terrible, violent versions of sleeping beauty are just as much a valid version of that fairytale as the disney one. Do we have a right to look away? Do we have a right to write a softer, lighter story where all the elements of patriarchy and oppression remain but the violence which highlighted those elements are absent?
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