I love movies and I love folktales. I even love the Disney versions of folktales. There! I said it. I know it is heresy, but the Disney versions of Cinderella, Snow White, Beauty and the Beast, or Aladdin – they all make me smile and sing along. All of life should come with music scores like that!  And I am not bothered in the least by all the changes the Disney studio makes to the so-called “originals” because there really is no such thing as an original version of these tales (exception noted: The Little Mermaid, an original by H.C. Andersen). They were all born in the oral tradition, told and retold to countless generations of listeners and survived because they adapted to new times and new people while retaining their core elements.

In fact, it was their being collected and written down that nearly killed them. Transcribed from the spoken word and put down onto the printed page, they became arrested in time, frozen in print so to speak. Somehow the idea was born that these particular versions were the original versions of the stories and no change was allowed. They lost all their dynamism. The language quickly became archaic, the content dated. It wasn’t until intrepid picture book illustrators and the people at Disney took on the genre that it got new life. And these new versions are doing just what storytellers have always done—changing the stories just enough to make them speak to a new generation, but not so much that the core elements of the stories are lost.

So thank goodness for Disney, I say, because without Disney many children would know no folktales at all.

I do have one concern, however. One of the biggest differences between seeing a movie and reading a story is that the moviemakers set a story in a distinctive landscape and use actors (or draw characters) who speak with their unique voices and play particular roles. In the movie, every visual detail has been imagined for us so that once we have seen a movie we no longer create unique pictures in our own heads, but instead remember what we watched. We admire the skill of someone else instead of enjoying our own imaginative powers.

In the written or orally transmitted story words describe characters, landscapes, and events. But, even in picture books, so many of the exact details are left out that the listener has to fill in the rest herself out of her own creative imagination. No two children will have made the same picture in their minds’ eye, but whatever they have imagined, it will be just right. That’s why, I think, every time a favorite book is turned into a movie, it is rarely as satisfying as the experience we had as we read it.

To me this shows that each and every one of us actually has a creative imagination as great as, or greater than, a professional moviemaker’s. But we need to nurture it by complementing our visual world with storytelling, reading out loud, and just plain quietly reading to ourselves.

So grab a book, curl up, and see if you can’t make a hero handsomer than George Clooney or prettier than Julia Roberts!