The Value Of A Fairy Tale

Fairy tales are usually stories, which tell us about values of life or lessons about life. They can occur as stories in a book, or movies. Most of movies about fairy tales come from Walt Disney, one of the famous movie companies. Children are the favorite viewers of this kind of movies, and they also learn a lot from these stories. It’s said that fairy tales help create our sense of ourselves and the world as well as telling us about gender roles. Movies such as “Aladdin”, “Sleeping Beauty”, and “Pocahontas” are the obvious examples. However, I think that “Beauty and the Beast” is one of the best ones in term of creating “our sense of ourselves” and transferring the values, concepts about gender, especially about men. Throughout the movie “Beauty and the Beast”, the values and concepts about men are defined in different ways: good and evil.

In a fairy tale, male characters can be either good characters or evil characters. Actually, in “Beauty and the Beast”, we can easily realize that the Beast acts as a representative of good characteristic. Children whose mind is very sensitive can feel scared or even hatred about the Beast. However, in the movie, Disney wants to show children that a beast doesn’t have to be a devil as his horrible countenance. For example, in the movie, despite of his monster body, he always tried to make the Beauty be comfortable as he could. What he did gradually emphasized the Beauty, and she became his guest instead of a prisoner. In viewers’ point of view, we see that Disney is a really good producer when Disney could create a sense about a cold blood monster, but inside there is a kind and pathetic heart. A monster can be a bloody monster if he doesn’t have kind heart, but he can also be a friendly beast if his heart was created by a pure spirit! Actually, what is the real value here? As I said above, fairy tales contains a lot of lesson about life. In this fairy tale, children can learn about the value of a real man, the concept about a good and kind person. By watching the movie, children at least can understand that a man’s outfit cannot evaluate him in a fairy world as well as a real world. No one can jump to a conclusion about a man without knowing his characteristic. A good characteristic comes from a kind heart. Of course, there are just only good people who have that kind of characteristic. That can be a pattern or a formula for children to recognize whether a man is good or not when they watch other movies or when they encounter some people. In fact, Disney was very successful when transforming a fairy tale as “Beauty and the Beast” into a lively animation movie, which comes along with a concept of a good man in life.

Life will be so perfect when there are just only good and gentle men existing, evil men also play a role in fairy tales, and also in real life. The character Gaston in “Beauty and the Beast” is one of them. Perhaps this character was very attractive at the first time appearing in the movie. However, it was just a small part of a second to show that he is a monster in human outfit. When I was a child, at the first time watching “Beauty and the Beast”, my mom used to ask me that “Who is your favorite character in this cartoon, son?” I immediately said that I like Gaston! The reason is he is strong,