(USA 1937 83 min)
Director William Cottrell, David Hand, Wilfred Jackson, Larry Morey, Perce Pearce, Ben Sharpsteen; Original Story Jacob & Wilhelm Grimm; Voice Acting Adriana Caselotti (Snow White)
by Stephen Russell-Gebbett
There is something rotten behind the Disney façade. Something creepy in the putty-faced characters and the cute anthropomorphised animals. Something disconcerting in the rubbery elegance of movement. Spurts of earnest story-stalling music and grating voices, so pretty and so prettily dumb.
There is something captivating about Snow White, though. We are drawn to the apple. We salivate at the thought of biting it. It may taste bitter, its core may poison us, but we want it. We can’t take our eyes off it.
I went into the woods and saw Snow White tip-toeing through her banal happiness, skipping through an Uncanny Valley. I saw her Betty Boop mannerisms (animator Grim Natwick worked on both). I saw those expressions, so vague, lips slipping around her face, eyelids batting lazy and shallow and I raised my dagger, glinting in the full-fat Disney sunshine. And…and…I can’t.
I was like her Wicked Step-Mother, wanting to write “the end” when we’d barely begun. I was like Grumpy, unmoved. What won me over was beauty, enough of it to crush my defences. Snow White made me dislike it and her and then it made me…well…
…I wouldn’t like to say. Her movements, which seemed so odd at first, like a slug’s in a puddle, became bewitching. The maelstrom of flurried and hurried activity, of animals and dwarfs, of Snow White’s dancing sweeping skirt, took my breath away. I like Snow White. She’s bold (squatting in the dwarfs’ house and ordering them about), she’s fun and she teases: “Oh…you must be Grumpy” she says in a grumpy voice. That darned Queen, I won’t have her tear the petals off this flower!
A single qualm remains, and one relevant to innumerable animations – that is the difference between the characters and the backgrounds. The light does not bounce off them in the same way. When a colourful shaded rabbit sniffs a dreary pitcher their substances are poles apart. Aren’t they made of the same stuff, grown from the same world?
One feels protective towards Snow White, an honorary eighth dwarf in awe of his enchanting house-guest. Perhaps that is where the film begins to succeed, when she is first in danger and flees into the dark woods. We have to make a decision whether to go with her or not. Ultimately it’s a pleasure to be part of a troop, plumping up Dopey’s bottom for a pillow.
What is most striking, in the wake of recent homages to Disney classics both loving (Enchanted) and irreverent (Shrek), is how Snow White has a tang that undercuts fleshy sweetness. Grumpy is Snow White‘s in-house spoofer, turning his nose up at the sing-songs and the bedtime stories. The exaggerated malevolence of the Queen, too, cannot fail but carry a hint of self-conscious humour. There’s nothing po-faced. Prince Charming is the only character who remains stubbornly insubstantial, as if he really were the ghost of a young girl’s dream. He is a type, and sopping wet. She deserves better.
This is the girl who took Eve’s apple and dropped it, in death, like Charles Foster Kane’s snow-globe. This is the girl whose Granddaugher Neytiri* would grace a different world of lush beauty, many light years away.
She was an inspiration because she was inspired. She is the fairest of them all and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs the greatest Disney film of all.
*In Avatar Zoe Saldanha was motion-captured, an evolution of an idea introduced by rotoscoping. Rotoscoping was first used in 1915 in Max Fleischer’s Out of the Inkwell. The Animators of Snow White actually disapproved of the technique, saying it damaged characterisation. Live-action pieces (Snow White being played by Marge Belcher) were used as a guide, or sometimes simply traced. The other characters feature less rotoscoping. Disney’s Cinderella was the first film to be entirely filmed in Live-Action first.
Marge Belcher, Snow White
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Yes Stephen, that red apple is an indellible Disney image, and it’s a glorious centerpiece of the gorgeous early color. I see this first Disney feature as one of the best still (as you do) and one of a quartet of irrefutable masterpieces from the studio (the others: PINOCCHIO, FANTASIA and BAMBI) and one that clicks in story, pastel visuals, voice work and that unforgettable operatic score by Frank Churchill, Paul Smith and Leigh Harline. The early aria, “One Song” remains one of the loveliest in the music anals at Disney and anywhere for that matter, and several others have taken on the timeless label. Still, I can go with you to a degree on your less than flattering assessment of the Prince Charming character, at least when compared to the title characters and the wicked queen.
The entire piece is enchanting, as good the 100th time as it was the first and one of the greatest works in any genre or form of the 20th Century. It was a debut that was matched only a few times, and perhaps never bettered.
Again, a terrific, appreciative essay!
Thank you Sam.
It’s a real pleasure to watch something that you don’t expect to be particularly good (having not liked the majority of Disney films) and then being surprised by a work of art that completely revolutionises your views.
This is my favorite review of the film – I just love the approach you’ve taken, and I think it’s easily the best essay of the countdown too. And a nice surprise as a pick – that the most obvious choice in the annals of animation is a “surprise” says something about the inventiveness and freshness of your choices too!
Thanks very much for the high praise, MovieMan. I should use that Bashful image again. I’m glad you liked it and I know it’s hard to come with a fresh look at a much-loved classic (though everyone has a unique take of course).
“And a nice surprise as a pick – that the most obvious choice in the annals of animation is a “surprise” says something about the inventiveness and freshness of your choices too!”
Haha!
WONDERFUL ESSAY STEPHEN…
There is a moment in this film that I think just pushes the envelope and all of about yanks out the stops when you think you saw it all.
It’s the spinning…
To clarify…
In one of the darkest moments of the film, the evil stepmother adjourns to her laboratory and drinks the potion that will turn her into the old hag that will eventually threaten Snow White. After the potion is downed, Disney’s artist pull the camera back as she drops the chalise and grasps her throat. It’s here that one of the great visual effects, the room beginning to spin out of control, of the film careens to almost out-of-control proportions and effectively homages the works of James Whale and Todd Browning. It’s a moment in the film when I, as an older viewer looking at the film today, realized that Disney was not only trying to create something no one had ever seen before, but used his supreme knowledge of the history of film to his advantage. It’s a kitchen sink moment that really has no business being in an animated film of this time. But, like Ford, Welles, Chaplin and Capra of the period, Disney reveals himself not only as one of the great innnovators but as an atrist of such consummate originality that he will do anything for the desired effect and emotion warranted by the story.
I was watching MOGULS AND MOVIE STARS on TCM last week and the documentary hailed Disney as one of the truest geniuses of this period. Leaonard Maltin called the work that Disney was doing at this time “pure showmanship” and the product of a true “film-maker” that was not just a animator. I agree with this assessment as I have always thought that animation was the purest medium for a real artist on film. Frankly, the vision of a filmmaker is only ever truly exposed perfectly in animation as the visions will only ever fall just short of those working in the realms of live action.
SNOW WHITE is one of those tremendous movies where everything that was in the head of the artist is fully realized on screen. Add to this the creation and use of the multiplane camera that can literally take you IN to a drawing in three dimensional space and you have animation film-making that, along with PINOCCHIO and FANTASIA, has never been bested by any filmmaker or animator in the history of animation.
SNOW WHITE was a huge success in 1937, the most popular film of that year and the biggest money maker, and it’s all rightfully due. In this, the first animated feature by anyone, Disney raised the bar on an artform that he not only created, but could only be bested by himself.
This is, without being dishonest to myself, a PERFECT motion picture. Funny thing is, I don’t think anyone who has seen it would disagree…
Many thanks Dennis.
I completely agree on the “spinning” moment. It really feels special for an animation now and not only for its time.
“Add to this the creation and use of the multiplane camera that can literally take you IN to a drawing in three dimensional space and you have animation film-making that, along with PINOCCHIO and FANTASIA, has never been bested by any filmmaker or animator in the history of animation.”
Very true on the camera. There are those people whose vision, whose imagination demands and facilitates innovation. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again (tomorrow, in fact) : the work of trailblazers seems to remain at or near the top of their art.
However, even in animation I think one’s vision will always be let down a little or distorted. Can you ever translate what’s in your mind into something concrete?
Well, STEPHEN, I think that if a “vision” ever translates MORE concrete on screen than any other than it is most certainly going to be in animation than in live action. The medium of animation is controled by the hand and the pencil. In animation the performances and the settings are all up to the artist, there are no real temperments to deal with, no walk outs or screaming demands. In animation it’s the vision of the film-maker that rides above all. A mistake is really only an afterthought once tackled by an erasure.
If you think back to one of your earlier choices BATMAN: MASK OF THE PHANTASM, I really think you can see my theory at complete work. The cityb the film take place in could never be constructed on a set or a sound stage and the acrobatics of the characters would result in the death of a stuntman or two if performed in reality. No, the vision of the artist, the director is closest in animation and its such because this particular medu=ium is only limited by the personal cap that the artist puts on his own imagination. In a million years you couldn’t make an actor dressed like a mushroom do justice to “The Chinese Dance” that Disney’s mushrooms perform in FANTASIA and I defy anyone to challenge Disney with a realitic reacreation of Monstro’s attack in PINOCCHIO. Simply put, you can’t do in live action what you can do in animation.
IMPOSSIBLE.
Yes, I agree that animation affords greater control and a more complete transfer of ideas and images (the Batman example is a good one). The only thing I was querying was whether a vision can ever be fully translated.
I’m very please to see this Disney classic make the final cut. I’m not sure if I like this one better than “Pinocchio” but there’s no use comparing them.
“I’m not sure if I like this one better than “Pinocchio” but there’s no use comparing them.”
I find it very hard, Frederick, not to compare films and rank them in some way. The idea of a Countdown was especially appealing to me(!)
I see that PINOCCHIO and FANTASIA are the most popular Disney films here.
Well Stephen my absolute ignorance in this genre has left me rather silent in your countdown. To show how little I follow animation I have only seen about three Pixar films at the present moment. I must admit to not liking Snow White at all when it comes to Disney movies. It’s an important picture in the history of animation but I find it to be awkward and stilted compared to Fantasia, Pinocchio, and Dumbo. I agree with Joel though that you have written one mighty fine essay………..
Thanks Maurizio.
I like Dumbo but Pinocchio and Fantasia are probably to me what Snow White is to you.
I’m sure you’ll be familiar with a couple more of the films coming up.
I loved the pastels colours, the darkness within the story, the smurfs- I mean Dwarfs, the story-telling guile. This is THE Disney film. What amazed me watching originally was the transformation, obviously inspired by Mamoulian’s Hyde 1931 film. Even more astonishing was the lit room in the castle – a foreshadowing of famous opening in ‘Citizen Kane’. Even the way the apple falls echoes the fall of the globe. Just goes to show that inspired creativity in the film community.