How our favorite Disney movies should really end, according to science

By Briana hansen

January 30, 2016

By Briana hansen

January 30, 2016

If you’re bored and looking for some articles that will completely transform your perspective on your most beloved childhood Disney movies, you’re in luck. The folks at WhatCulture have waved science’s anti-magic wand over all your favorite Disney movie endings, giving us completely different — and significantly more downer — endings for each.

Hur-rumph, indeed!

Listen. I’m well aware that the story of The Lion King, which is based on talking animals who act rationally and heed the advice of eccentric monkeys and the ghosts of their ancestors, is not real. But that doesn’t make the tears I cry when Simba completes the circle of life in the end any less real.

And that also doesn’t mean that I needed to know that, in actuality, alpha males of lion prides kill all the young cubs and in no way shape or form stay loyal to one partner. But now, thanks to this WhatCulture article, I know that.

Eeks.

I also realize Wall-E is not an animated documentary sent to us from some future civilization as a warning of what our species may become. But the fact that our species couldn’t even survive interstellar travel at the size depicted because gravity would basically crush our bodies when we returned to Earth is, like, a major bummer.

I want you to live, too!

My logic tells me that a Princess kissing a frog will most likely not transform him back into the handsome Prince he once was, as in The Princess and the Frog. But to know that the energy needed to complete that transformation would basically result in a nuclear winter is, not only going to me nervous for Tiana before she puckers up, but also much more prudent about which critters I choose to show affection to.

To be fair, Disney has some magical snowflakes all around in the end so maybe they were trying to be sort-of accurate.

Maybe?

And I’m certain, based on how I look after just the standard 7 hours of sleep, that a woman like Sleeping Beauty, who slept for 100 years would probably not look the same as she did the day she started her slumber. But the visual of a mummified woman, even if it’s more accurate, doesn’t seem to make for as compelling of a love story.

This is how we all wish we could look when we wake up.

But, I guess science is science and facts are facts. Personally, I think all these so-called “facts” totally overlook how even the tiniest bit of magic could make all these stories totally plausible.

I guess it’s no wonder Disney depicts so many scientists as evil!