The Disturbing Ways Disney Characters Die In The Original Stories

The 1837 Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale ends with Prince Eric married to another woman, which leaves Ariel stuck as a human, unable to return to her family at sea. Her sisters bring her a dagger from the Sea Witch that will allow her to become a mermaid again. All she has to do is kill Eric and wash her feet in his blood:

Before the sun rises you must plunge it into the heart of the prince; when the warm blood falls upon your feet they will grow together again, and form into a fish’s tail, and you will be once more a mermaid, and return to us to live out your three hundred years before you die and change into the salt sea foam. Haste, then; he or you must die before sunrise.”

She can’t bring herself to do it, however, and instead jumps into the water, where her body dissolves into sea foam.

In Victor Hugo’s original novel, Quasimodo watches as Esmeralda is hanged and then pushes Archdeacon Claude Frollo off of Notre Dame, killing him.

Years later, Quasimodo’s skeleton is found in a cemetery clutching Esmeralda’s:

[T]hey found among all those hideous carcasses two skeletons, one of which held the other in its embrace.

They quickly determine how Quasimodo died:

Moreover, there was no fracture of the vertebrae at the nape of the neck, and it was evident that he had not been hanged. Hence, the man to whom it had belonged had come thither and had died there. When they tried to detach the skeleton which he held in his embrace, he fell to dust.

In the 1883 novel, The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi, the Talking Cricket (renamed Jiminy Cricket for the Disney film) pushes Pinocchio to murder after implying he was lazy:

At these last words, Pinocchio jumped up in a fury, took a hammer from the bench, and threw it with all his strength at the Talking Cricket.

Perhaps he did not think he would strike it. But, sad to relate, my dear children, he did hit the Cricket, straight on its head.

With a last weak “cri-cri-cri” the poor Cricket fell from the wall, dead!

The Lion King is heavily influenced by William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, with Simba playing the part of the titular prince. Similarities include a prince’s uncle killing his father to become king, his father returning as a ghost, and the new king ordering his minions to murder his nephew.

In the play, however, Hamlet’s love interest, Ophelia (the analogue for Nala in The Lion King), goes mad after her father’s death, climbs a willow tree, and falls into a brook where she drowned. She is described as looking “incapable of her own distress,” implying that the drowning might not have been accidental.

In the Greek tragedy Heracles, Hercules comes back from the Twelve Labors and kills Lycus, which angers the gods. Hera – who in this version hates Hercules – infects him with madness using Lyssa, the goddess of rage and fury. Hercules blindly murders his wife Megara and their children. When he comes to his senses, he’s overwhelmed with sadness at what he has done.

In the original novel Peter and Wendy by J. M. Barrie, it’s heavily implied that Peter Pan killed some Lost Boys who grow up:

The boys on the island vary, of course, in numbers, according as they get killed and so on; and when they seem to be growing up, which is against the rules, Peter thins them out.

According to Māori mythology, the shapeshifting demigod Māui ultimately meets his match when he goes up up against the goddess of death, Hine-nui-te-pō.

While Hine-nui-te-pō sleeps with her legs spread, Māui turns into a worm or lizard and crawls up inside of her. His plan is to then exit out of her mouth, which would somehow make humans immortal. Some birds, however, laugh too hard at the sight, causing Hine-nui-te-pō to wake up and crush Māui to death with a set of obsidian teeth inside her vagina.

In the 1912 novel Tarzan of the Apes, Kerchak is actually responsible for orphaning Tarzan. He kills Tarzan’s father in a fit of rage, and Kala saves the one-year-old from a similar fate. She adopts him and changes his name from John Clayton II to Tarzan (“White Skin”).

As Tarzan grows up with the apes, he learns how to properly defend himself, which angers Kerchak. The two then fight to the death, with Tarzan winning and becoming the next king of the apes.

The ancient Vietnamese fairy tale, The Story of Tấm and Cám, shares many similarities with Cinderella, but the fate of her stepmother and stepsisters is much more sinister in it.

In it, Tam (this version’s Cinderella) boils her stepsister Cam to death out of jealousy, then pickles her skin in a jar and sends it to her stepmother.

Thinking the food is a present, the stepmother decides to eat it. A crow then tries to warn her what was actually in the jar:

What a tasty dish! Mother eating daughter. If you have any left, please give me some.

The stepmother, however, continues eating – until she finds her daughter’s skull at the bottom of the jar. She then abruptly dies from shock.

Oliver & Company (whose trailer called it “the classic story of Oliver with a Disney twist”) is loosely based on the Charles Dickens novel, using some similar plotlines and character names. One of the biggest differences, however, is changing the character of thief Fagin from a villain into a misunderstood hero.

In the novel, Fagin is hanged for his involvement in the murder of Nancy (the character Rita is based on in the movie) at the hands of the evil Sikes.

In the original Brothers Grimm fairy tale, Snow White and the Prince get their revenge on her stepmother, the Evil Queen, by placing red-hot iron shoes on her feet and forcing her to dance herself to death.