Snow White & the Seven Dwarfs (1937)

 

Film: Snow White & the Seven Dwarfs

Director: David Hand

Country: USA

Released: December 1937

Runtime: 83 minutes

Genre: Animation

Studio: Walt Disney

Influenced: Ron Clements, Hayao Miyazaki, Katsuhiro Otomo, Ari Folman, Chris Buck, Jennifer Lee

Nowadays, it's hard to appreciate how mind-blowing this film must have been for 1930s American audiences – writing this blog has certainly made it clear to me what a leap forward this movie represents in terms of cinematic artistry – and also how much of a risk it was for Walt Disney to commission a feature-length animated musical. This explains his "high anxiety" when Snow White & the Seven Dwarfs premiered in late 1937. Up until its release, Disney’s short films had continued to push technical boundaries and win awards but the cost of making them was rising, and they were no longer in demand as "fillers" before feature-length movies at the cinema; instead, the trend was towards double features.

But there was no need for Walt to worry, this is the Disney classic movie that started it all. An evil queen, jealous of her beautiful stepdaughter, orders her to be killed. After hearing the plan of the wicked queen, Snow White flees to the woods and is befriended by a group of seven dwarf miners. Cue poisoned apples, disguises, glass coffins and a kiss from a prince, in a wonderful story inspired by a 19th century Brothers Grimm's fairy tale. Turning the story into an animated musical film proved quite a task, involving 750 artists and a budget that ballooned from $250-500K to $1.5mn. Known as "Disney’s folly", it took 3 years from conception to release. It’s the highest grossing animated film of all time ahead of 101 Dalmatians.

A key reason for its success was the realist depiction of Snow White, allowing audiences to make an emotional connection with the film’s main character – no animation had achieved this before. In fact, Walt Disney conceived the film with the hope of making animation a more respected art form. By no means was it the first animated film – early forerunners include the wonderful Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) by Lotte Reiniger – but it was the first of feature length, and owes as much to arthouse horror films as it does to fairy tales, lovely musical numbers (Heigh Ho!) and advances in animation. There are echoes of Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr Caligari in the way the dark forest and the witch are portrayed.

Overseeing this vast project of 362,000 cels (the name of the transparent sheets upon which the animations were drawn) was supervising director David Hand and concept artist Albert Hurter. It was filmed using a pioneering multiplane camera, which gives a sense of depth to the 2D images. As for the catchy songs, these were written by Frank Churchill and Larry Morey, and recorded very quickly at the end of the long animation process. Adriana Caselotti, the voice of Snow White, recalls only being at Disney’s studios for a few days. According to layout artist Ken Anderson, the final Technicolor print only arrived at the theatre a few hours before the premiere. The rest, as they say, is history.