J.R.R. Tolkien hated Disney and knew they’d ruin any story they touched. 

Why? Because his storytelling philosophy was profoundly different…

The Hobbit was published a few months before the original Snow White movie came out in 1937, and Tolkien went to see it with his friend C.S. Lewis. He later insisted Disney never be allowed to adapt his own works.

Tolkien dedicated his life to the study and creation of myths and "fairy-stories." For him, age-old tales like Beowulf weren't just entertainment, but vehicles of profound truth, emerged from cultural soil over generations. Disney took folkloric material like this and stripped it of its spiritual depth, commercializing what he deemed essentially sacrosanct.

Take Snow White. In the original Brothers Grimm tale (1812), Snow White flees into the forest, bargains, and works to earn her shelter. In Disney's version, she simply sings to animals and waits to be rescued.

Danger, violence, and ambiguity were erased throughout, replaced by a tale designed to comfort children instead of warn them. Instead of Grimm's brutal justice delivered to the queen (forced to dance in red-hot iron shoes until she dies), the story ends with a kiss.

Tolkien loathed sugar-coated storytelling like this and kept the rough edges in his own works. The Hobbit was written for his children, but it contains anger, hardship, horror, evil, and death. As G.K. Chesterton once said:

Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.

"Disneyfication" also deprived stories of spiritual weight in other ways. Grimm's original lost its deeper symbols of renewal, death, and resurrection, and Disney's bumbling dwarfs lacked the depth of Norse tradition. Tolkien had a strong affinity with “dwarves” of earlier folklore (he chose his spelling to distinguish from “dwarfs” in other stories), which were craftsmen of the mountains with deep, spiritual ties to the land.

Why exactly were fairy-stories and myths so sacred to Tolkien? Because he knew that myths are not lies, but the precise opposite: "Myths convey the essential truths, the primary reality of life itself."

Indeed, he saw the great man-made myths through history as fragments of divine truth:

We have come from God, and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God...

More than mere fiction, Tolkien's myths were designed be lived at a much deeper level of the human imagination.

He saw fantasy world-building as a kind of "sub-creation" mirroring God's creation — NOT something to be cheapened or commercialized.