Login
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is one of the few classic films that I can tell you exactly when I saw it. In 1993, I was six-years-old, and Disney had re-released the film in theaters a few months before the eventual VHS release. My mom took me to see it, and the magic mirror on the wall freaked me out, but in a way that I found enjoyable. I think this was the exact moment I realized I’ll always love the villains more than the heroes in many Disney films.
Who could blame me? It’s not like Snow White or her prince are given much in the way of personality. No, they’re both handsome blobs of color and shape, chess pieces used by other characters to move the plot along. I thought then, and still believe now, that the magic mirror needed a good cleaning if it thought that pubescent girl was more beautiful than the Evil Queen, a glamorous and enigmatic figure, dripping with the promise of malice and cunning.
God, what a difficult film to talk about as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs practically added itself to the canon the moment it was released, after a three-year production period that left Disney praying it would connection. It did, in a major way. Hailed as a masterpiece by Sergei Eisenstein, who would know a thing or two about making film masterpieces, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was a huge hit, and a promise of things to come. So what left is there to talk about?
Well, I hope to find something to add. Who knows if it’ll be of any value.
Let us first look at the technique on display. Prior to Walt Disney and Max Fleischer pushing animation to the brink of its creative and artistic promise, cartoons were regulated to children’s entertainment, six-to-ten minutes of filler between live-action shorts, new reels, and the features. They featured crudely drawn characters acting out popular songs, everything appeared rubbery and bouncing away. Or, backgrounds were static and the characters were lively and energetic creatures, bounding around the limits of the frame causing chaos.
Fleischer pushed the short into more daring and artistic realms, while Disney decided that the world was ready for feature-length animated films. No one else saw his vision, and the press was quick to dub the film “Disney’s Folly,” a cynical jab at his quest for bringing prestige to the art form and his own studio. The production was not easy, Disney mortgaged his house, and the production ran over budget to the final tune of roughly $1.5 million, an unthinkable sum for a feature in 1937. It took three long years, but when the film was finally released it silenced everyone.
No longer were the characters confined to a static frame, no longer were the backgrounds immobile, everything was free from the limitations of physics and gravity, and the only limit was the artist’s imagination. The multi-plane camera allowed the camera to pan through locations until arriving at the final destination, much in the way a tracking or dolly shot allowed for in live-action. An off screen breeze caused the leaves to blow, birds spiraled in and out of the corners of the frame, and the feeling of possibility is alive in the film.
The story may be slim, even at 83 minutes there does appear to be some padding, but the animation is hypnotic to watch. The quality of the drawings are impossibly high, the characters designs specific and unique, and the big-money moments highly memorable and well done. Snow White’s frightening trip through the forest is the stuff of nightmares, as she imagines branches turning into monstrous hands, trees into demonic figures, and floating logs into crocodiles. It is still wonderful to behold this sequence, as it is so imaginative and alive.
Even better are the segments where Snow White and the forest animals clean up the dwarfs house, or our first interaction with the dwarfs in the diamond, and everything with the Evil Queen is stellar. No sequence is more disturbing than her transformation from glamorous queen to old hag. Her hands changing still creeps me out, now that is some primal power.
With a slim source material, the fairy tale is only a few brisk pages in my copy of The Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales, it was necessary to add to it. The dwarfs barely occupy a few sentences in the source text, but they’re the true stars here (along with the Evil Queen). Disney would revisit the ingredients here many times over, but to watch this film is to see them being born before your eyes. So yes, some of it plays awkwardly, even unevenly at times, but these growing pains come with being the first major work of its kind.
I don’t hold these moments against the film. How could you? This had never been attempted on this grand a scale before, and what it lacks in narrative coherence it more than makes up for with the quality of its animation, memorable segments, and beloved characters. I’ve always been partial to the stuttering Doc, surly Grumpy, and the Harpo Marx-like Dopey, who appears to have a second center of gravity in his pelvis and frequently leads with his lower half. Without this film, there would be no Disney feature films. But there also wouldn’t be an entire secondary movie industry, no Disney means no Pixar, Studio Ghibli, DreamWorks, and all the rest. Undoubtedly, this is one of the all-time greatest films. The following three films would surpass it in the Golden Era, and various films from the other eras would as well, but it somehow seems unfair to compare to what came after.
