so what do you mean by 'stealing folklore'.....if they make a feature with tales from another culture, how is that stealing anything? explain, please!!
They aren't (as far as I know!) "stealing" in the copyright law sense, but in the sense of taking folklore and indeed literature by known authors, re-writing it or adding extra stories or characters - sometimes to travesty level - and selling the result in a way that suggests the stories were entirely the Disney Corp.'s own creations.
For example, how many children, and their parents for that matter, know who really wrote The Jungle Book or Winnie The Pooh? Let alone know that most of the more familiar fairy-stories came from European folk-lore?
His feature-lenght cartoons have brought the stories of other countries to our children.........and to me that's not stealing anything....just sharing.
and of course there's money involved.......he WAS a businessman, after all!!!
When Disney planned to make a film version of Mary Poppins, originally an English children's novel, it author Mary Travers insisted Disney treating the Banks father character in the film treated fairly and sympathetically because she had based him closely on her beloved father. I don't know if Disney did so or not: all I know of the film are from the odd TV clip and recordings of the dreadful songs, including the vague attempt by Dick van Dyke to sound like a Cockney in a character not in the original book.
I don't think you can accuse anyone of "stealing" a folk story of unknown real origins, but you can accuse them if warp the original of either a folk-tale or a specific story by a known author, into a new, down-market version. Also, irrespective of source, it is dishonest to manipulate audiences into believing a story is the studio's own creation from new.
To be fair to Disney, even historical or biographical films based on real-life, and made by other Hollywood studios, rarely manage more than about 50% accuracy, and in some cases, the central points are downright lies.
Transquesta 