STILL THE FAIREST OF THEM ALL

I have often been asked which animated feature film is my favorite. As the years go by it is still the same one, and the choice is made easier than ever given today's assembly-line cookie cutter animation features. It is of course, SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS. The film is a masterpiece in every way, and its merits as a film and as an animated film have been written about ever since it was first released in 1937.

 

I take its merits as a given, but they are not what make this film my choice. It has something that no other animated feature since has had. Because it was the first Hollywood cartoon feature, it broke new ground and established new rules and expanded the horizons of animation to be sure, but there is something about the film that makes it an inspiration to all in animation.

 

When Walt Disney gathered his staff one night to tell them he was going to make an animated feature of the Snow White tale, they were hardly ready for the task at hand. This was like President John Kennedy saying, as he did, that the USA would land a man on the moon and return him to earth within seven years time. The USA was hardly ready for that task either, but they became ready, as Walt Disney and his staff became ready to accomplish their task.

 

While Disney cartoon shorts were acclaimed world-wide, and especially the Silly Symphonies were first-class experiments in constantly pushing forward the boundaries of animation, there was still a long way to go. The female character in THE GODDESS OF SPRING was a Snow White-like character but  was far from what Snow White would herself become, just as Disney deer in SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS were a fraction of what they would become just a few years later in BAMBI.

 

I like SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS best because it shows what I call “evidence of the struggle.” They were not good enough to pull it off when they started, but became good enough, even if  just barely so in some scenes, when it was completed. You not only see the drawings and the paint onscreen, it seems that you can also see the sweat.

 

They never took the easy way out of staging a scene or acting out a scene. A world-wide search for artistic talent brought hundreds of new people to the animation studio and the film was probably made by twenty key people and among them a handful of masters of animation. Had those people not been around, alive and available, the film could probably not have been made. Chief among them was, of course, Walt Disney himself, a unique force who cannot be overestimated.

 

I have spoken with people who worked on the film, including some of those top people, and they recalled the enthusiasm with which they worked on it, coming in on days off willingly, sharing their discoveries with one another and so on. They felt they were working on something important. Even decades later, they would speak of various Disney films and characters they worked on, but their voices, their expressions were often different when they spoke of SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS. It was a special time in their careers, possibly even their lives, maybe as wartime experiences are to veterans. And maybe you had to be there to really understand it.

 

There is no need to go into the impact of the film, an instant hit world-wide, the first to ever be dubbed into foreign languages, the highest money-making film in history etc etc etc. It stands alone as an artistic achievement, a new type of art. Their next feature, PINOCCHIO, for all its merits is, compared to SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS too polished, too  slick. By then they could achieve all they wanted. With the first feature that was in doubt.

 

For audiences, SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS is magnificent entertainment. For those interested in animation, or in animation themselves, it is a wondrous experience. Here were some twenty-somethings engaged in something new, with no history or past to guide them as we have today. They invented it as they went along. They did it and did it well.

 

I recall animator Ward Kimball saying that at the premiere on December 21, 1937 near the end of the film where the dwarfs approach the dead Snow White he thought there was a technical problem with the film. The film was so long and hard to do that the final scenes were back from the lab that afternoon and cut into the final film, which was first seen by anyone in its complete form at the premiere (!) He heard a clicking sound on the soundtrack throughout the theatre and thought this sound glitch would harm the effect of the film on the audience. Then he realized that the clicking sound was coming FROM the audience. Women were opening their purses to take out their handkerchiefs to wipe away their tears at the moving scene.

 

“They were crying---at a cartoon!” he said in amazement so many years later. Animation entered a new era that night. It could not only make people laugh, but cry, like any live-action film. And soon, with FANTASIA it would also amaze audiences. All that we do since then is tell unlimited stories, explore styles and add new technologies, as SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS added the Multiplane Camera. We build on the one that started and did it all.

 

I have heard many stories from ordinary people who were deeply affected by the film and many for whom it ushered in a lifelong interest in or even caused a career in animation. I saw the film for the first time when I was six years old. I don't remember that viewing but was later told that when the dwarfs chased the witch near the film's end I got out of my seat and ran to the screen to join the chase.

 

I kept pestering my parents to take me to see it again and again, long after the theatre engagement had ended. To shut me up, my mother told me there was a fire in the theatre where it was showing and part of the movie got burned and that they were making part of it again. That worked, but I'm told I looked at the movie ads in the newspaper every dayfor years after that to see when they would be done.

 

The film came back to theatres again when I was twelve, to a theatre down the street, and I saw it many times. I  recall going one Saturday morning with sandwiches and sitting through four showings in a row. I remember well the “Whistle While You Work” cleaning up the cottage sequence. On the large screen I could follow a single bird or squirrel throughout the detailed scenes, focusing on one animal per screening.

 

It returned in 1967, six months after Walt Disney died. I had forgotten that the film ended with the castle in the sky, and that was a moving moment. A few years later I obtained a film print and the idea of seeing it whenever I wanted was hard to comprehend. We all studied and enjoyed it many times. I have had most of the features on film but none gives you goosebumps like this one does when the film's opening music begins.

 

 Some years after that I got on film the soup-eating song and sequence that was cut from the final film. I inserted it into our copy and showed it to people and it works so well. I think it has story points that help the film, and if something had to be cut, it should have been the long and frankly boring sleeping sequence which is about the same length. Knowing that Disney would probably rerelease it to theatres for its 50^th anniversary, about two years before that when I was at the Disney studio I met with management and tried to talk them into putting it into the anniversary prints of the film as a special draw and tribute. We had just started our computer animation and knew we could color the soup-eating sequence, which had only been pencil-tested complete with layouts and full soundtrack but no color. We could match the original characters' colors by computer and paint the backgrounds in Samuel Armstrong's style. Weeks later I got their decision, that they were hesitant, almost afraid to tinker with it in any way. Later they called to say they did agree with the other suggestion I had given them at that meeting, to rerelease SONG OF THE SOUTH to theatres again. This they did and it was a huge success, but that's another story.

 

Years later, at the Disney studio, I asked for the animation drawings for my favorite moment in the film, when Snow White kisses Dopey on the head at the end of the film after being kissed back to life herself by the Prince. To hold and see the original animation drawings was a magical moment.

HEY- anyone ever notice that she only kisses six of the seven dwarfs goodbye?

 

See SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS again but this time as an artistic breakthrough and achievement. See the young men and women doing their best and pulling off a great experiment, led by a man of vision and courage. Still the fairest of them all.