It’s One of Disney’s Best Animated Films, But It Angered an Entire Country – Film News

Action, romance, adventure and mythology. It had everything to attract the public, but it also offended Greek culture.

Over the years, Disney has excelled at adapting great stories, tales, myths and legends to its own perspective, but at times it has also neglected the more meticulous and obscure details of these productions. Thus, in 1997, the studio ventured into the odyssey of a young god who, having lost his powers, needs to prove that he is a true hero to return to Olympus, where his parents, Zeus and Hera, eagerly await him.

The film in question was Hercules, which won the public’s affection and became considered one of Disney’s best epic films. However, the controversy did not leave him aside and even earned him derogatory comments from governments around the world, as in the case of Greece, where it was considered that this adaptation did not respect the founding myths of that culture.

As the creation of the Hercules animation was originally planned since 1992 to broaden Disney’s creative scope beyond Nordic and European fairy tales such as The Little Mermaid and Cinderella, the company drew on several episodes from Greek culture for this production.

Although they first tried to approach Homer’s Odyssey, this work proved to be extremely complex due to the vastness of the characters contained in it and, therefore, the perspective was changed to Hercules, in a proposal by animator Joe Haidar.

After a trip to Greece to delve deeper into the story of the mythical hero, Disney’s creative team took to heart a tour guide’s explanation that “a myth was a collection of various ideas” and thus created a story that , although it has some elements of the character, it does not follow the traditional lines of this demigod.

When the animation was ready, Disney attempted to premiere it in Greece with a grand screening ceremony on Pnyx Hill in Athens, but, to their surprise, the Greek government was opposed to this because the reception of the work by the press and citizens of the country was not good.

On the other hand, many took a dim view of Disney’s intrusion into local culture, pointing out, in some cases, that the studio completely ignored the great tradition of Hercules and synthesized the film into a romantic drama.

For newspapers such as Adesmevtos Typos, the film was “another case of foreigners distorting our history and culture just to satisfy their commercial interests”, and this was compounded by its poor reception at the box office, in which it only made $252 million.

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