Imprints from Book Illustration and Advertisement: Eco-Sources in Walt Disney's Sleeping Heroine Films

Abstract:While Disney's sleeping heroine films—Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and Sleeping Beauty 1959)—are often dismissed as repeating a capitalistic narrative, the rapid acceleration of environmental degradation across the globe is grounds enough to reexamine both films with an ecocritical lens. Using an interpictorial approach, this article offers a new way of viewing how nature was constructed in the films' storyboards while tracing connections with period-specific advertisements. Illustrations of wild nature expand the possibilities for troubling Disney's brand of villainized wilderness. But period advertisements implicate humankind's growing responsibility for the harm done to the planet.