The Director of 'The Lion King' Also Made This Heartbreaking, Underrated Short for Disney

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A matchgirl holds up her matches in The Little Matchgirl

Published Feb 1, 2026, 10:25 AM EST

Kendall Myers is a Senior Author with Collider. As part of the TV and Movies Features team, she writes about some of the most popular releases before, during, and after they premiere. In three years, she has written over 900 articles with topics ranging from classic sitcoms to fantasy epics.

Ever since its conception, Disney has displayed a habit of rewriting fairy tales to create a happy ending. From Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to Tangled, the company has released sanitized versions of classic stories for family-friendly enjoyment. This often led to reworking or excluding major details to keep them from being too dark. Yet some stories don't work with that treatment. One short, in particular, embraced the tragedy of its original version in a haunting twist. The Little Matchgirl isn't an especially long entry into Disney's catalog, with only seven minutes, but it is moving because Disney allowed the ending to remain unchanged.

Disney put a familiar heart-breaker in charge of the project, Roger Allers. Best known for directing The Lion King, Allers was no stranger to tear-jerking animated stories. Mufasa's (James Earl Jones) death in The Lion King is infamous for its tragic portrayal, as it addresses loss even with a young audience. Allers brought the same energy to The Little Matchgirl a decade later. With its quiet release, the short has not received the same notoriety as Aller's earlier Disney film, but The Little Matchgirl remains a beautiful and emotional short that deserves more attention.

'The Little Matchgirl' Is an Emotional Exploration of Loss, Death, and the Afterlife

Like many Disney stories, the short is adapted from the work of Hans Christian Andersen. Though it was first published in 1845, Disney's 2006 version made very few changes. The story follows a little girl who cannot sell her matches. That night, as she curls up in the street to wait out the snowstorm, she uses her remaining matches for warmth, allowing the audience to see the things she dreams of: warmth, food, and a grandmother she lost. These depictions of suffering pull on the audience's heartstrings without the girl saying a word. Yet, when the story ends, it is even more emotional. Just when the story seems to be taking a happy turn, when the grandmother shows up in the street and scoops the matchgirl into her arms, it is revealed that the girl died in the cold. However, there is a glimmer of hope in the reunion between her and her grandmother, though it isn't the Disney ending fans may have expected.

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The short explores the (very literal) death of childhood as the matchgirl is not only on her own, but can only dream of the practical things she is missing, which is a far cry from Disney's more fanciful use of dreams. The Little Matchgirl also addresses the idea of an afterlife with the final moments, as the grandmother appears. Even with all of this tragedy, the short isn't as dark as it could have been. While there is no way to "Disneyfy" this story as the company did with Andersen's The Little Mermaid and countless other fairytales, it doesn't include the abuse the girl suffers at the hands of her father, which leads her to choose freezing in the snow over returning home. While it is an undeniably dark story, which is odd for Disney, Allers makes the tragedy beautiful.

'The Little Matchgirl' Flew Under the Radar

Disney shorts never travel quite as far as the animated films, and The Little Matchgirl is at a disadvantage because of that. Perhaps it would be more widely known if Disney stuck to the original plan of making the story part of a Fantasia sequel; however, the film was scrapped, leaving several shorts without a place. A few were released in various ways. After a film festival release, The Little Matchgirl was nominated for an Academy Award, though it lost the Animated Short category to The Danish Poet. Fortunately, even with its tumultuous history, The Little Matchgirl was made available to a wider audience as a bonus feature on the 2006 rerelease of The Little Mermaid, pairing it with another Disney adaptation of a Hans Christian Andersen story. Eventually, it was included in Walt Disney Animation Studios Short Films Collection, which gave the short a release more like originally intended, and now it is available for streaming. Ultimately, The Little Matchgirl received limited attention, but it remains a beautiful example of what Disney can do when it embraces the dark nature of fairy tales.