This sheer significance and importance of this film is so mind-boggling, that it surprises me that so many people find it to be a bore or not truly good when compared to films of the 1950's or 1990's. People seem to forget just how many filmmakers, executives, storytellers, musicians, and so many others have been affected by the simple existence of this movie. Without Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the following films/books would never have been made or known as significant as they are now:
The Wizard of Oz
Citizen Kane
Pinocchio
The Lord of the Rings
Fantasia
Star Wars
Indiana Jones
The Lion King
Beauty and the Beast
Harry Potter
The Chronicles of Narnia
along side dozens of others...
This film was the Titanic of it's day, garnering over $8,000,000 in revenue in a time when a child could get into the theater for 20 cents. In fact, some doubt that the record this film set for the most tickets sold in the film's life time has or will ever be matched. To draw some comparisons, an adult ticket for Gone With the Wind cost $2.50 for an adult because the film was so long and so expensive. The reason Gone With the Wind outgrossed this film was because of the sheer expense of the film (also don't forget that people still didn't want to release Snow White in their theaters because of a prejudice against animation).
It was a critical darling, winning the hearts of almost every single living being who watched the film. The film ushered in an entirely new era of movie making, and paved the way for an entire menagerie of animated films, cartoons, video games, and an assortment of many other various entertainment mediums. To put it bluntly, without arguably the greatest gamble in motion picture history, the world would be an entirely different place.
Welcome to a behind the scenes look at the One that Started it All, and is even to this day, still the Fairest One of All...The King's Analysis of Walt Disney's epic masterpiece, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
1. Depression Era Disney
At the start of the Great Depression, there seemed to be but one medium that remained largely unaffected by the downward spike in economic prosperity: Motion Picture. At a time, some studios employed nearly 1,000 workers who found new ways of expanding the medium to include many specific things into films that were deemed impossible before, from simple things like sound and color, to more drastic things like camera depth and action scenes. While the rest of the Motion Picture world prospered, the Walt Disney Studios in California was busy trying to find ways to make animated films more appealing. Walt Disney and his partner Ub Iwerks had already created Mickey Mouse in 1928's "Steamboat Willie", the first cartoon to use stereophonic sound. By the 1930's, the studio had expanded upon Mickey Mouse and had created a host of other characters to stand alongside him, including his girlfriend Minnie, his best friend Donald Duck, his rival Pete, or his trusted pal Pluto. Walt had even created a new kind of cartoon, Silly Symphonies, which were being used by Walt to further push the boundaries of animation to never before reached heights. Whether they were used to push forward the art of storytelling ("The Ugly Duckling", "The Cookie Carnival") or were being used to push the technology forward ("Flowers and Trees", "The Old Mill") these cartoons were all being made with the best in the business.
Despite the enormous amount of praise and adulation he was getting, Walt and his brother Roy both realized that the short subjects were not making enough money to profit much or to survive. The Disney Brothers both had the clairvoyance to see that the cartoon medium would not survive simply getting paid minor amounts for work that would get more and more expensive as time went on. In Walt's own words:
"The Short Subject is just a filler on any program. I figured if I could crack the feature field, I could do something..."
2. Disney's Folly
As Walt began to ponder the unthinkable in the early 1930's, he began to search for the perfect story to turn into an animated film. By 1932, he had several stories in mind, including "The Jungle Book", "Peter Pan", "Alice in Wonderland", "Jack and the Beanstalk", "Beauty and the Beast", "Cinderella", "Mary Poppins", and "Bambi", most of which would be made into feature length films in the future. But in the end, Walt chose the story of "Snow White" as written by the Brothers Grimm. He felt strong ties to Snow White, because the first movie he saw in theaters was a silent movie version in 1916. He hoped to adapt Snow White from that version into the movie he hoped to make of the classic Fairy Tale. As he began to prepare his artists for the adventure of a lifetime, even he didn't know exactly what he was in for. He estimated that Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs would cost a then reasonable $500,000 dollars. He let Roy budget out the movie, while he focused on making Snow White as wonderful a story as possible.
For the last several years, Walt had been bringing in many different animators and artists to help make his films more believable. These artists included the likes of European artists Gustaf Tenggren and Albert Hurter, who all contributed in many ways to the successful style that Walt needed for Snow White and later on for Pinocchio. And these artists would in turn pass on their expertise to many of the future leaders of Walt Disney Animation. One such animator was Grim Natwick, who had originally worked at the Fleischer Studios. Natwick was a specialized animator, who often animated female characters, giving them more depth and realism than was customary for characters at the time. Natwick was ultimately the animator chiefly responsible for the creation of Betty Boop and was hired by Walt to give the character of Snow White more feminine wiles and styles of animation.
But while many of the animators in the studio were overjoyed at the thought of making a movie, almost every person in Hollywood mocked the idea of an animated film being made, making up excuses that the animators would run out of jokes and that the bright colors would hurt the eyes of the audience. Barely a few months into production, people began calling the film "Disney's Folly", almost psoitve that regardless of how good the film was, that the studio would implode with such an enormous undertaking being made.
3. Storyboards...
Walt Disney is known to many as a man who could turn rocks into diamonds, being arguably the best Storyman the studio had to offer. But few know just how shrewd an editor he was, even with his most beloved project. In fact, it was only 6 or 7 months before the release of the film in 1937 that Walt had decided on the names of the Seven Dwarfs. But there were nearly a dozen scenes and concepts cut from the final film because Walt viewed them as irrelevant to the final story. Some of the ideas he used were used in later films. For example, before they began to seriously struggle with the animation of the human characters (Snow White, the Queen, or the Prince), there were many other scenes that had been written for these characters. The Prince was supposed to arrive to woo Snow White midway through the picture, and the Queen would have her guards kidnap him and chain him up in the dungeons while the Queen tried to win his heart. The Prince would perform a Doug Fairbanks routine and try to fight his way to save Snow White. Sound familiar? Well, this concept was used for Sleeping Beauty 20 years later.
Other scenes that were cut from the film included:
A Dream sequence for "Someday My Prince Will Come" with Snow White and the Prince
A Bed Building scene for Snow White
A Bedroom fight between Doc and Grumpy
The Death of the Huntsman
A Fully animated musical number of the Seven Dwarfs eating soup
Two other attempts on Snow White's life by the Queen
4. The Human Problem...
Walt had anticipated many issues with the production of his dream project, but never did he anticipate the drawing of realistic humans to be such an enormous issue for his young crop of animators. Most of his animators were used to drawing cartoons, be they Silly Symphonies or Mickey Mouse cartoons and had never been forced to be realistic with their art. This provided a serious problem for Walt, who was still trying to make the world in Snow White as believable as possible. Most of the original concept art for the three main humans was cast aside for being too unrealistic (the Queen looked more like the Queen of Hearts than her regally cruel persona she had adorned in the final film). While Grim Natwick was able to animate a believable Snow White and save the princesses character, and Art Babbitt and Woolie Reitherman animated the Queen and her Magic Mirror quite well, the animation of the Prince was so poor that his role was cut back to its barest minimum, unintentionally causing a curse on the concept of Princes in Disney Fairy Tales that would not be perfected in Walt's lifetime (Aladdin was the character who was the result of an incredible breakthrough that took years to perfect). Nevertheless, the animation of humans would continue to hamper Disney Animation until well into the 1940's, when the studio resumed theatrical releases after the conclusion of World War II.
5. The Villain Effect
One thing that Walt himself realized while making his magnum opus, was that he could not afford for his villain to be anything short of absolute soulless cruelty. He had done good comedic work with his villains like The Big Bad Wolf and Peg Legged Pete, but even he knew that Snow White required a truly diabolical villain. The Wicked Queen is the first in a long line of wonderful collaborations between animators and voice actors to help make the villain as truly heartless as possible. Lucille La Verne was the actress who voiced both the Queen and her hag form. In order to voice the Hag, La Verne volunteered to take out her dentures and speak without them. Art Babbit, Norm Ferguson, and Albert Hurter were the lead animators who perfected the Queen, in making the woman as shrewd, calculating, and diabolical as possible. Her most imfamous scenes are when she demands that the Huntsman brings her Snow White's heart in a box, and her sheer joy in watching Snow White succumb to the poisonous apple. The Queen was a huge breakthrough in the history of Disney Animation, because of just he subtlety of her character. She is beautiful, yet vain, and in her efforts to be deemed the Fairest in the Land, she forces herself to become a form equal to her soul. But while the Queen is more reserved in her evil behaviors, the hag is extremely over the top in her attitudes with regards to her cruelty, which is sheer brilliance. But the Queen is also a breakthrough, because her cruelty and malice with which she acted gave way to a plethora of other diabolical baddies, including Maleficent, Ursula, Lady Tremaine, Cruella De Vil, Jafar, Claude Frollo, and Scar.
6. Musical Magic
Most movie historians inaccurately give Rodgers and Hammerstein's "Oklahoma" credit for creating the idea that music could be used to guide the story. This is untrue for many reasons, but mostly because six years prior, Snow White was released and utilized the same formula. Disney Animation was no stranger to music, having already had a successful song written: "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?". The songs for Snow White were not songs that halted the story or slowed the pace of the film. Rather, the songs set the pace for the film themselves. If the pace needs to speed up, a brisk and cheerful song like "Whistle While You Work" or "Heigh-Ho" is plugged in to move the pace along. If the scene was slower and needed more emotional depth, the musicians plugged in "Someday My Prince Will Come". This immediatelty impacted two other major movie musicals that followed it: Pinocchio and The Wizard of Oz, both of whom adhered to this formula before "Oklahoma" even left the ground. Frank Churchill and Larry Morey wrote the lyrical music, giving the film the emotional depth it required. Meanwhile, Leigh Harline and Paul J. Smith wrote the score, which often ranged from innocent and light to dark and heavy, utilizing the art of music to sheer perfection.
7. Crisis
As production of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs began to gain momentum in the winter of 1936 and spring of 1937, Walt and Roy both realized they were in a serious crisis. Not only had the film dramatically exceeded it's budget of $500,000, but it was also in serious danger of being shut down because the studio was practically out of money. The Bank of America was incredibly reluctant to give Walt the money he so desperately needed to finish the film before it's December 1937 release, primarily because none of the executives had seen a hint of the film's completion and feared they wouldn't get any money back. Roy set up a meeting for Walt and a banker named Joe Rosenberg to run what was finished of Snow White. The film was hardly colored and some scenes were still using storyboards. Walt would have tp plug in many different times to show Mr. Rosenberg just how wonderful the film would be. Little is known about what exactly piqued Mr. Rosenberg's curiosity, but what is known is that Rosenberg got into his car, pulled back to Walt and said: "That thing is gonna make you a pile of money" and drove off. Against the wishes of the financing leaders of the world, Snow White cost an astonishing $1,500,000, which was the modern day equivalent of $250 million dollars.
8. The Premiere
Time replaced money as Walt Disney's greatest foe in 1937. With barely two weeks to go, the animation team finally finished the last scene. But nobody had taken any time to market the picture. Walt ultimately sent the boys around town, nailing signs to telephone poles for audiences to see Snow White.
In December 1937, an enormous premiere was held at the Carthay Circle Theater. Simple down to earth animators like Frank Thomas, Art Babbitt, and Milt Kahl were sitting a few seats away from Clark Gable, Shirley Temple, and dozens of various Hollywood starlets and screen personalities who were eager to see for themselves just what Walt was cooking up in his studio. As Walt and his animators had hoped, the audience laughed in the right moments, gasped in the right moments, and to the surprise of Ward Kimball, cried in the right moments:
"Half of these people had been ridiculing the movie a week before. Everybody was crying over a cartoon..."
And when the film concluded, the audience erupted in applause. Cheers rained down on the animators and Walt Disney for the most significant animated cartoon ever made. "Disney's Folly" had become Disney's Triumph. Snow White was beloved by critics and audiences alike and even to this day is still one of the most revered films in all of the history of motion picture.
9. The Legacy
In November 2014, the Walt Disney Animation Studios released Big Hero 6, their 54th animated film in the pantheon of animated feature film releases. Between Snow White and Big Hero 6, we have been treated to elephants who learn to fly, puppets who come to life, mermaids who dream of life on shore, young lions who would be kings, young boys who would unleash genies, and dozens of other animation ideas and stories that all owe their existence to the biggest gamble Walt Disney would ever take in his career. And, much to my surprise, the last 7 entries to the legacy:
Bolt
The Princess and the Frog
Tangled
Winnie the Pooh
Wreck It Ralph
Frozen
Big Hero 6
...have all been animated films that could perhaps one day motivate an entire generation to get involved in animation and to love the medium as millions of kids and adults in my generation have with our films. And yet, none of us truly grasp that without Snow White, none of these other films would have been possible. And Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs deserves nothing but praise, love, and adulation from the billions of people on earth as we come close to celebrating the film's 77th birthday. We will forever be in debt to the animators, musicians, technicians, actors, and of course, the dreamer at it's epicenter: Walt Disney. Our childhoods would never have been the same without him and them...
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