Fairies, Folklore and Forteana

SIMON YOUNG FILES A NEW REPORT FROM THE INTERFACE OF STRANGE PHENOMENA AND FOLK BELIEF

DISNEY’S FAIRY FAITH

Every researcher has a file of mysteries – questions that, despite years of work, they simply cannot answer. In a decade of studying fairylore I’ve amassed quite a few. When did Europeans start painting fairies with wings? What was Yeats’s fairy secret? Why do English fairies like oaks above all other trees?

In this list of fairy problems, the ‘did-Walt-Disney-believein-fairies?’ mystery is a nut

I’ve spent a long time trying to crack. Looked at one way, the evidence suggests that Disney had a secret life in which he communed with fairies; looked at another way, we have some kind of misunderstanding. First, a little background, though.

Disney put fairies in his animations from 1922. They were frequent guests in his Silly Symphonies in the late 1920s and the 1930s (about 10 per cent have fairies). Then we have the first 20 years of feature-length films: Snow White, Fantasia, Pinocchio, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Darby O’ Gill and the Little People (and the Gremlin film he considered making with Roald Dahl). Of course, you can write fairy books, compose fairy symphonies and draw fairy cartoons without believing. But in the mid late 1950s Walt Disney of ‘USA’ appeared in the membership list of the Fairy Investigation Society (FIS), a British society dedicated to, well, fairies (see FT321:30-37, 38-45). There were about 100 members, including several famous individuals, and the organisation was Theosophical in outlook. Members believed, in other words, that fairies were ‘elementals’, cogs within the natural world, and that different natural objects (trees, rose bushes, lakes) each had their own fairy. I used to think that Disney accidentally got his name put down: perhaps reaching out to the organisation in 1955 when there was a lot of FIS publicity in newspapers and while he was revving up to produce Darby O’Gill.

But having spent much of the lockdown re-watching old Disney movies – there is a book coming out on fairy films and I’m excited to be a contributor – I am starting to change my mind. Particularly in the Silly Symphonies and Fantasia there are Theosophical-style fairies: the kind of fairy you would expect from an FIS sympathiser. Early Disney fairies are frequently, in fact, shown to be natural forces, moving and sometimes dancing in harmony with the seasons. Today, the Theosophical fairy is standard cinematic fare – Fern Gully, Epic, Tinkerbell and so on. But Disney was a pioneer in giving us natural guardian fairies in the pre-war period. A strong sense of natural process permeates several later Disney films, too, even those without fairies: think of Bambi.

So did Disney believe in fairies? Before I would have answered ‘probably not’. Now I’m a definite ‘maybe’.

Simon Young’s new book Magical Folk: British and Irish Fairies is out now from Gibson Square.

DISNEY WAS A PIONEER IN GIVING US NATURAL GUARDIAN FAIRIES