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seventeenlovesthree · 2 months ago

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Digimon and Fairy Tales - an ongoing thought experiment

This will just be a draft, because @jamesthedigidestined and I have been discussing the idea that... Digimon's creators may or may not have been inspired by Fairy Tales a LOT while writing their plot and characters.

(As mentioned, this will be an ongoing analysis, because I am pretty sure I haven't even grasped all of it yet.)

Let's begin with the most obvious ones:

Kizuna / Peter Pan

This one is pretty on the nose, because the term "Neverland" is quite literally used within the movie - and the analogy makes perfect sense. Peter Pan is described as a "free-spirited and mischievous young boy who can fly and never grows up, Peter Pan spends his never-ending childhood having adventures on the mythical island of Neverland as the leader of the Lost Boys, interacting with fairies, pirates, mermaids, and occasionally ordinary children from the world outside Neverland".

Menoa's plan is to lure all Chosen Children to Neverland, righteously convinced to fulfill their dream of never wanting to become adults and spend the rest of eternity with their Digimon partners... To her, this is an ideal world, an island of bliss and without pain - when in reality, it's nothing but escapism, unable to face reality and pain, forgetting about everything else and thus dooming them all to be lost in a world without change forever... Which is a fate almost as cruel as "death" itself.

On a different note, the Digital World itself - or at least File Island - may be compared to Neverland as well, as it allows the Chosen Children (= Lost Boys) to interact with all sorts of outlandish creatures as well.

Also, it may not be a coincidence that Menoa and Disney's depiction of Peter Pan share red hair...

Ken Ichijouji / The Snow Queen

Unfortunately, I couldn't find the screenshot of Ken getting "hit" by the Dark Spore, but... For the purpose of this comparison, this shall still do. In the fairytale "The Snow Queen" it is said that "the devil, in the form of a troll, has made a magic mirror that distorts the appearance of everything that it reflects. The mirror does not reflect the good and beautiful aspects of people and things but magnifies their bad and ugly aspects. The troll's minions take the mirror all over the world to distort everything, then carry it up to heaven to mock God and the angels. As they approach heaven, the mirror trembles and falls, shattering into billions of pieces. Some become windowpanes, some spectacles, and some get stuck in people's hearts and eyes, giving them a cold and bitter disposition."

A boy named Kai gets one of these shards stuck in his eye and turns, as mentioned, cold and bitter - and only his childhood friend, Gerda, after going out on a journey to find and bring him back from The Snow Queen, is capable of thawing the cold that has engulfed him.

"Ken" is already pretty close to "Kai" - and while he is somewhat becoming the Snow Queen himself by turning into the Digimon Kaiser, there are higher forces that influence him into taking on a completely different personality; namely, the Dark Spore (= the mirror shards) in his body that turns him vile and cruel in opposition to his naturally kind attitude. (One might also call Daisuke his personal Gerda in this context.)

Koushirou Izumi / The Little Mermaid

If you know my blog, you know I've been having fun with this comparison before, but let's start with the story. I'll try to summarize just the most important points:

"The Little Mermaid lives in a Utopian underwater kingdom with her widowed father, the Sea King, her paternal grandmother, and her five older sisters (...). The Little Mermaid is fascinated by the world above the sea, and human beings (...). Lonely and feeling isolated from her family, she yearns to explore the world above, and constantly asks her grandmother to tell her stories of humans. (...) The Little Mermaid, longing for the prince and an eternal soul, visits the Sea Witch who lives in a dangerous part of the ocean, surrounded by a forest of polyps, mud, and whirlpools. Although the witch warns the Little Mermaid that her attempts to win the love of the prince are doomed, she willingly helps her by selling her a potion that gives her legs in exchange for her voice (her tongue)."

Thus, we have a young, curious soul that not only feels isolated from their family, but also longs to learn more about another world... This already does sound familiar, doesn't it? In episode 24 of Adventure, Koushirou is caught by Vademon and told that his "desire" will lead him straight to hell - similarly to how the Sea With tells The Little Mermaid that her own desire is doomed. Granted, Koushirou's desire mainly refers to his endless curiosity, his "inquisite heart"... However, he IS also searching for a person (and depending on your interpretation of his urgency, him looking for Gennai indirectly also means that he's looking for Taichi, who had gone lost). In the Digimon Adventure novels, Koushirou isn't just throwing away his inquisite heart for the sake of achieving blissful ignorance and not getting drawn into hell - he loses the alphabet and thus, the ability to talk. The similarities are pretty striking there...

Additionally (similarly to Menoa), most people might be familiar with Disney's redheaded version of The Little Mermaid anyway, so I feel like the comparison fits even better.

The Seven Chosen Children (Plus One) / The Seven Ravens

While trying to research whether or not "Jack and the Beanstalk" has comparable elements to The Beginning, I stumbled over this one by chance - and was absolutely flabbergasted at the fact that it actually kinda works:

"A peasant has seven sons and no daughter. Finally a daughter is born, but is sickly. The father sends his sons to fetch water for her to be baptized. In their haste, they drop the jug in the well. When they do not return, their father thinks that they have gone off to play and curses them and so they turn into ravens.

When the sister is grown, she sets out in search of her brothers. She attempts to get help first from the sun, which is too hot, then the moon, which craves human flesh, and then the morning star. The star helps her by giving her a chicken bone and tells her she will need it to save her brothers. She finds them on the Glass Mountain but has lost the bone, and chops off a finger to use as a key. She goes into the mountain, where a dwarf tells her that her brothers will return. She takes some of their food and drink and leaves, in the last cup, a ring from home.

When her brothers return, she hides. They turn back into human form and ask who has been at their food. The youngest brother finds the ring, and hopes it is their sister, in which case they are saved. She emerges, and they return home."

Granted, we are talking about Seven Sons and not Seven Children in general - but the fact that the eighth sibling is a daughter and sickly already stuck out to me. Then of course there is the fact that the seven brothers disappear - and get turned into ravens, the equivalent of getting sent into another world, a MOUNTAIN (Infinity Mountain? Spiral Mountain???) of all places... And instead of them looking for the eighth child, the sister - our resident Hikari - is the one looking for them, with a ring being a key to finding them. (Also, the youngest brother HOPING to be found by the sister? Takeru? Is that you???)

The Beginning / Jack and the Beanstalk

I initally came up with this idea even before the movie came out - simply by looking at the poster and the giant golden tentacles that kinda reminded me of a beanstalk... Especially because eggs seemed to play a role again. The story itself doesn't share that many similarities, however, one could loosely relate them to one another:

Both Jack and Rui come from a - assumably - poor family and gain the chagrin of their respective mothers. Some magic beans that Jack received turned into a giant beanstalk - similar to how Rui's wish towards Ukkomon caused it to turn into a giant version of itself, containing thousands if not millions of digieggs.

Jack climbing up the beanstalk and turning towards an unfriendly giant's wife to wish for food is also reminiscent of the wish fulfillment aspect - his continuous wishing does get him in trouble with the unfriendly giant though, ending in a fight... But eventually, he gets a golden egg (!!!), gets out of trouble thanks to his wits, defeats the giant and will live happily ever after.

... Like I said, it's very loose, but I couldn't help but think about this.

Mimi Tachikawa / The Princess and the Pea

This one is also very loose in comparison to the previous ones - but the theme still fits: "The story tells of a prince who wants to marry a princess but is having difficulty finding a suitable wife. He meets many princesses, but is never sure that they are real princesses—until one stormy night, when a mysterious young woman drenched with rain seeks shelter in the prince's castle. She claims to be a princess, but the prince's mother, the queen, has doubts. She decides to test their unexpected guest by placing a hard uncooked pea in the bed she is offered for the night, covered by twenty mattresses and twenty featherbeds. In the morning, the mysterious woman tells her hosts that she endured a rather restless night, kept awake by something in the bed that made her feel uncomfortable. The prince's family realizes that she is a princess after all, since only a true princess could be so delicate."

Episode 25 of Adventure tells the story of Mimi getting welcomed into ShogunGekomon's castle, getting treated "like a princess" by the Gekomon and Otamamon, as they hope that her singing will wake their lord from his slumber. However, all the luxury is getting to Mimi's head, so she actually acts like a spoilt princess to the point of even throwing her friends into jail - until Sora reminds her of what's right and that she's actually a good, pure and delicate girl. Realizing her wrongdoings, Mimi's Crest of Sincerity (!) finally starts to glow. However, instead of marrying a prince, Mimi has to fight against ShogunGekkomon alongside Taichi and Jyou in the end...

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