The song "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" was stolen from Zulu musician Solomon Linda. His estate fought Disney for years for compensation.
Most of their stories are based on public domain fairy tales from the Brothers Grimm.
A man once slaughtered a pig while his children were looking on. When they started playing in the afternoon, one child said to the other: "You be the little pig, and I'll be the butcher," whereupon he took an open blade and thrust it into his brother's neck. Their mother, who was upstairs in a room bathing the youngest child in a tub, heard the cries of her other child, quickly ran downstairs, and when she saw what had happened, drew the knife out of the child's neck, and in a rage, thrust it into the heart of the child who had been the butcher. She then rushed back to the house to see what her other child was doing in the tub, but in the meantime it had drowned in the bath. The woman was so horrified that she fell into a state of utter despair, refused to be consoled by the servants, and hanged herself. When her husband returned home from the fields and saw this, he was so distraught that he died shortly thereafter.
That reminds me of Struwwelpeter, another rather gruesome and explicit german children's book that was used during my childhood:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struwwelpeter
- https://archive.org/stream/englishstruwwelp00hoffrich#page/n...
One kid is a sociopath terrorizing animals, and the moral is a dog will steal your sausage. Another kid won't eat soup so he. fucking. dies. What the hell, Germany?