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The storybook opening is a recurring theme in several of Disney's films, almost always used as an opening sequence. A similar trait is used for the closings, known as storybook closings.

Shorts[]

Movies[]

Trivia[]

  • Although Beauty and the Beast didn't feature an actual storybook opening, it did feature a similar opening where it focused on stained-glass windows at the castle, and the initial draft for the film as written by Linda Woolverton featured an actual storybook opening similar to that of Snow White. Similar openings were also used for Hercules, which featured clay mural pots, Pocahontas, which used parchment, Mulan, which also used parchment, and Brother Bear with cave paintings.
  • Chicken Little was originally supposed to have a Storybook opening, but it was cut. However, at the beginning of the movie there was a book, but then immediately turned down by Buck Cluck.
  • Storybook openings were frequently used in early Disney animated features and features that adapted fairy tales and other books. Some of these included a closing as well (such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, Cinderella, and Sleeping Beauty, and the three Winnie the Pooh shorts), while others only had an opening (such as Pinocchio, The Sword in the Stone, The Jungle Book, and Robin Hood); those movies simply ended with the words "The End" appearing over the last scene of the film. Openings later had a hiatus since the release of Robin Hood (not counting the anthology movie The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh) until being brought back via the direct to video midquel Beauty and the Beast: Belle's Magical World, the 3D animation film A Christmas Carol, and the traditionally animated film Winnie the Pooh, released in 1998, 2009, and 2011, respectively.
  • Make Mine Music and Melody Time presented the former as a stage play and the latter as a series of paintings. Music begins with the viewer "entering" the theater and the theater's curtains to reveal a program guide introducing the film's segments, and ends with the curtains closing, the lights turning back on, and "Make Mine Music: The End" being projected onto the curtains; while Melody begins with a magic paintbrush painting a picture of a stage with anthropomorphic masks introducing the film on the first painting, and ends with the brush painting the words "The End" on the last painting with "Melody Time" and "A Walt Disney Production" above and below the easel.
  • The 1955 edit of Mickey and the Beanstalk with Sterling Holloway is the only version of the cartoon to have a storybook opening and closing (as, unlike other versions, there are no narration segments).
  • Although it didn't have a direct storybook opening, The Princess and the Frog begins with Eudora telling the story of The Frog Prince to Tiana and Lottie using an actual storybook within the film itself.
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