Snow Queen
Reprinted here for the first time since the 19th century, these color illustrations by T. Pym make the classic Andersen fairy tale even more magical. One of Andersen's best-beloved tales, The Snow Queenis a story about the strength and endurance of childhood friendship. Gerda's search for her playmate Kay-who was abducted by the Snow Queen and taken to her frozen palace-is brought to life in delicate and evocative illustrations.
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What Hacker News says
- I think that I couldn't disagree more with this point. Riffing and building on existing cultural artifacts does not erase them. Nobody's telling Hans Christian Andersen to shut up, and nobody's telling publishers to stop publishing him, and readership of The Snow Queen - the original version - is presumably much greater now than it was in 2012. My kids have specifically asked for it, while I wasn't even aware it existed as a child.
On the other hand, the implied message of people who complain about modern retellings is that they should not exist. (What else can it be?) And if they have their way, something absolutely would be lost: the ability of these stories to continue to participate in living culture.
- On the other hand, Disney itself is a talented and successful practitioner of building upon the public domain. In fact, the public domain is Disney’s bread and butter. Frozen was inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen. The Lion King draws from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Biblical stories, and possibly an epic poem about the founder of the Mali Empire.[3] Fantasia showcases public domain classical music, and “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” segment comes from a poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Alice in Wonderland, Snow White, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, The Little Mermaid, and Pinocchio came from stories by Lewis Carroll, The Brothers Grimm, Victor Hugo, Charles Perrault, Hans Christian Anderson, and Carlo Collodi.
- Your examples of public domain movies take a rather flexible view of the source material.
Frozen is a long way from The Snow Queen. A queen had powers over ice there where trolls and someone was saved by a kiss, but in the Snow Queen it was a guy saved by the kiss and the trolls where evil etc. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone at Disney read it, but I wouldn’t count on it.
Peter Pan, Little Mermaid, etc adaptations at least share some basic elements of the story though their at most fanfics and really that’s all I am advocating.
Nobody is going to pay for the rights to the Hitman video game franchise and create The Professional. Because if you mutate the story that much you’re legally in the clear.
- Well, it’s very loosely based on the Hans Christian Anderson story about an evil Ice Queen, so it makes sense that the early iterations had a fairly sinister Elsa.
According to Wikipedia:
> The 2013 Walt Disney Animation Studios film Frozen was inspired by "The Snow Queen", and closely followed the original Andersen story early in the film's development.
- The Little Mermaid is not a Disney creation, it is a story by Hans Christian Andersen, as is The Snow Queen which Frozen is (very loosely) based on.
You can't trademark a story or idea, but you can trademark a particular character design. You can make your own Cinderella interpretation as long as you don't copy the exact art and design made by someone else.
- Purchased.
It occurs to me that the opposite category is also quite interesting. Books like Hammerfall and Snow Queen by Joan Vinge are fantasy with scifi elements that are hard to dismiss.
