Disney's animated film versions of fairytales was part of a larger tradition of abridging and sanitizing European folktales, which were the oral novels of the pre-industrial world. Charles Perrault (1628-1703) and the Brothers Grimm were the true pioneers in transforming this adult oral literature into abbreviated published stories for children.

I have found it ironic that Disney, in seeking to produce feature-length films, needed to add details to the published stories he used, and so he augmented the abridged, published fairytales of the earlier authors. When Disney engaged in this process, he was taking a step back toward the original form of the primal folktale, which tended to be longer and more fully developed than the published fairytale.

At least in one case - that of "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," Disney created a means to diffuse a story back into the oral tradition of Europe. The Irish Folklore Archive in Dublin includes variants of this story, collected after 1936. The story was not indigenous to Ireland, and the versions that were collected clearly point to the film and not the published fairytale in the Grimm collection.

Disney was using "pre-soften" stories, so we can't blame him for watering them down. That process was 90% complete by Perrault and the Brothers Grimm. Disney was following a trend.