NFR Project: 'Betty Boop in Snow-White' (1933)

 

NFR Project: ‘Betty Boop in Snow-White’

Dir: Dave Fleischer

Animation: Roland Crandall

Premiere: March 31, 1933

7 min.

Next to Disney, the Fleischer Studio was the premier animation studio of the silent and early sound eras. Formed in 1929 by brothers Dave and Max, they created challenging and adept cartoons that leaned into the surreal and macabre, sparking many a child’sfantasies and  nightmares.

Their technical innovations – combining live action with animation, rotoscoping, and layering planes of action to give a 3-D effect – were combined with whimsical characters and absurd situations. Their biggest success was Popeye the Sailor; the next most memorable was the nifty Betty Boop.

Betty Boop was a brunette flapper-girl with a high, squeaky Brooklyn accent, fun-loving and kind, and unbearably sexy in a cartoony way. She and her allies, Koko the Clown and Bimbo the mutt, had wild, wide-ranging adventures.

Here she is Snow White, four years before Disney’s feature film version. She comes in out of a cold winter landscape to the castle of the grotesque-looking queen, who’s just asked her magic mirror if she’s fairest of them all. (Bimbo lays out a pair of long underwear at her feet, and out of a pocket pops a little creature that looks like Mickey Mouse! – hmmmm.)

Soon the mirror changes its tune, the queen gets mad, turns into a witch, and orders Snow White’s execution. Betty’s pleas soften the hearts of Koko and Bimbo, and she escapes. Koko, in the voice of Cab Calloway, sings “St. James Infirmary” as the witch changes his into a spirit. Eventually, the witch becomes a dragon and pursues the trio. It takes Bimbo turning her inside out to resolve the conflict.

The film can be attributed most definitely to the work of its animator, Roland Crandall. It is his transmogrifying imagination that morphs and mutates the character and their surrounds, making a dream world that grabs you and pulls you in. It would be decades before animation would get as adventurous again.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Sons of the Desert.