Snow White and the Prince

DESCRIPTIONS

The story is written by Miyawaki Norio and illustrated by Tezuka Osamu. The proud stepmother in the original story is replaced by a witch so that the story is easier to understand. Was the intention to prevent children from having the image of stepmothers as bad persons? Again, in the original story, Snow White gets into the dwarves' house and sleeps on their bed while they are away. Some people might have frowned at the idea of an uninvited intrusion, and here Snow White enters the house as a proper guest, after the dwarves ask her to, "Please come in". She is almost killed three times by her persistent stepmother in the original story, however, only one incident with the poisoned apple is mentioned here. Moreover, the original story tells us that the dead princess can only be brought back to life by the magical kiss of a prince. Here, the story is altered so that the princess wakes up to the thump when her glass coffin mistakenly hits a tree stump. Someone seems to have considered kissing immodest particularly for a children's books, though altering the original story seems far more immoderate. We can say that this piece is a product of the days when people wanted to keep their children uncontaminated.