NFR Project: 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs' (1937)

 

NFR Project: ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’

Dir: David Hand, Perce Pearce, William Cottrell, Larry Morey, Wilfred Jackson, Ben Sharpsteen

Scr: Ted Sears, Richard Creedon, Otto Englander, Dick Rickard, Earl Hurd, Merrill De Maris, Dorothy Ann Blank, Webb Smith

Premiere: Dec. 21, 1937

83 min.

Snow White is a revelation – the first animated feature film, it’s magnificent and beautiful construction, animation’s version of building the Pyramids.

When Walt Disney decided to make the jump from cartoon shorts to feature films, he assembled tribes of writers and animators to get the job done. All animation at that point was hand-made, cel by cel, a painstaking and frustrating effort that required dozens of workers to complete. Disney thought of several stories to adapt before settling on Grimm’s fairy tale, something known to almost all Western children.

Snow White is, of course, the princess whose evil stepmother, the Wicked Queen, keeps her in rags, scrubbing the castle floors. Still, Snow White remains charming and optimistic, as every Disney heroine will from this moment on. She sings (this is also the first film to have a soundtrack album issued from it), she waits, she meets a handsome (singing) prince and charms him.

Meanwhile, though, the Wicked Queen’s magic mirror informs her that she is longer the fairest in the land, but that Snow White is. The queen, in a rage, orders her taken to the forest and have her heart cut out. The woodsman consigned to this task urges her to flee, and she does, spending a scary night in the woods.

In the morning, she charms a whole barrelful of forest creatures, who lead to the house of the Seven Dwarfs. She enters, cleans up, sings, and goes to sleep. Soon the comical septet return and find her – wary at first, they are soon won over. They live happily together.

But wait! The Wicked Queen discovers that Snow White still lives. Taking a poiton, she transforms herself into the guise of an old woman peddler, and prepares a poison apple for Snow White. She convinces her to bite into it, and Snow White drops dead.

But wait! The dwarves don’t have the heart of bury her, so they enclose her in a glass coffin and worship at it. Soon the prince (remember him?) shows up, kisses Snow White’s dead lips (huh?), and wowza! She comes back to life. The End.

There are no words for the quality of the work. It is simply astonishing, and a tribute to the scores of creatives who sweated out the details. Every frame is composed, every sequence is dynamic. The bright colors, the neat characterizations, the sheer beauty of the settings -- it all comes together here.

Though all Disney products, since the beginning, have been designed for be acceptable for the whole family, there is an essential and terrifying darkness in his tales. Here, the sequence into the woods at night, the queen’s transformation, and her eventual end during a terrific storm are all nightmare fuel for young children. As one theater owner said after a screening of the film, “There wasn’t a dry seat in the house.”

From this point on, Disney strove to reach the broadest possible audience, creating fairy tales, funny animal adventures, and the like. Innovation, unless it was technical, was not tolerated and soon the Disney house style was recognizable – one grounded in cuteness.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Angels with Dirty Faces.