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