The first chapter of this book, written by Jack Zipes, discusses Disney's role in animating fairy tales and essentially making an industry out of it. Disney drew much of his inspiration for his films from various fairy tales, and in some cases as the book asserts, imposed new meaning to these tales. The chapter explores the history of fairy tales as means of passing morals, essentially having an indoctrination function. Literacy changed the audience and served a class-separation role, among other roles, all the way through the late nineteenth century. Zipes suggests Disney continued the tradition of putting fairy tales into "book" form through its animation department. Given his early success and the development of the animated film industry, Disney was able to implement and perfect other forms of technology to become a leader in animation.

While little credit is attached to where Disney got his inspiration from, the chapter is relevant to the thesis. It outlines some of the similarities, potentially directly drawn from German Expressionism in Disney's work. It was the revolutionary technology that put Disney's work above the rest. A couple of these techniques, which may have been borrowed from European animators on one of Disney's many trips, were experimented on by Reiniger, one being the multiplane camera. The use of this camera to create depth out of two-dimensional images is noted in several of Disney's early works. Reiniger used an early form of the camera to create an illusion of depth in her silhouette images, too. Furthermore, Reiniger's inspiration for using the Arabian Nights' tale was derived from the familiarity the audience would have with these tales and the artistic match between the Expressionist film and the fantastic tale.

Bell, Elizabeth. "From Mouse to Mermaid." Indiana University Press, 1995. (Chapter 1 by Jack Zipes).

Thesis: While Disney films are animated to be effectively realistic and in three dimensions, the silhouette film is two-dimensional, stylized, and mutable; this enhances the film's Expressionist nature. Furthermore, Reiniger's film experiments with techniques that would later be refined and used by Disney and other animators and filmmakers. Therefore, Lotte Reiniger's Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) influenced Hollywood, specifically the genre of animation and the Disney company, through its Expressionist style and its technological advances.