Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was
Disney’s first animated feature,
but not just that.
The 1937 film was also the first theatrically released
animated feature in history.
People tend to overlook how groundbreaking that is.
If you adjust for inflation, it also grossed
more money than Frozen.
But now that Disney's got 56 animated features
under its belt, not counting Pixar,
it’s easy to watch Snow White now and think it’s bland or basic
compared to what we've seen since.
We shouldn’t forget just how much innovation Snow White represented,
both for Disney and for animation.
With this movie, Disney created an entirely new genre,
as well as the blueprint for all of their
iconic features to come.
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To pull off a feature length cartoon,
Disney needed to create a brand new style that
married the Disney spirit with a form
that would appeal to a wide audience.
During production, executives called Snow White “Disney’s Folly.”
No one believed that anyone would pay to watch
a feature length cartoon in theaters.
That seems ridiculous to us now in a world full of
Disney franchises, theme parks, and merchandise.
But none of that would exist without the leap of faith
it took to make Snow White,
and the new style of visual storytelling that
came out of the movie.
Cartoons of the time, including Disney’s shorts,
were known for their “rubber hose” aesthetic,
meaning a very exaggerated type of motion,
usually against a static background.
We see this sensibility in the seven dwarfs.
Their personalities are communicated very visually,
and we see it in scenes where the animals provide visual humor
But Walt Disney thought that this style couldn’t keep
an audience’s attention going for a whole 90 minutes.
So he set out to create a new kind of animation.
In order to create the illusion of depth, Disney pioneered
a new, multiplane camera technique.
Rather than photographing one drawing, artists layered multiple sheets of drawings
and moved the camera through them.
Disney tested this technique in the Oscar-winning short “The Old Mill,”
and used it in Snow White to make the art more realistic
and more broadly appealing.
Aside from the dwarfs and animals, the characters in Snow White
look much more human than anything
Disney had produced up until this point.
Artists brought in live models to sketch,
another totally new concept in the animation world.
On the down side, this increased realism came with
less expressive facial features.
Snow White herself has fairly indistinct, blurry features,
presumably because Disney was trying to move away
from the cartoony faces they were known for.
The effects of this style decision can be traced
through almost every Disney film to date.
Disney has gotten criticism for having very diverse male faces,
but essentially one princess face.
In Snow White, it’s worth noting that the prince
also has this inoffensive, pretty face.
But the dwarfs don’t.
They’re expressive, with varying faces.
Over time, the range of looks has increased
for male Disney characters.
But unfortunately for the female characters,
beauty is still prioritized over expressiveness.
Walt Disney shaped the future of animation forever
when he decided to make his first film about a princess.
When we think Disney now, we immediately think Princess.
But Snow White, the original Disney Princess
has been largely forgotten about.
Snow White is kind, gentle, and motherly.
She sings, and animals flock to her.
We see these traits in all three original princesses,
Snow White, Cinderella and Aurora.
But the later two are more nuanced, interesting,
and likable than Snow White --
they have more personality, and that's because they benefited from
what Disney learned from the Snow White experiment.
Disney himself has commented that looking back
they “weren’t ready” to develop a leading lady who could
sustain our interest for the length of a whole feature.
Cinderella is basically Snow White 2.0, new and improved.
Her personality is pretty much the same,
but we get to spend more time with her.
So we come to a clearer understanding of her motivations.
We know Snow White’s story because we’re told about it,
but we don’t really see much of it.
She doesn’t interact with the Evil Queen at all
until she eats the poison apple.
And none of her relationships with the dwarfs or animals
are ever made very specific.
"Why, Grumpy.
You do care."
When the Huntsman can’t bring himself to kill her
because she’s so pure and innocent,
we mostly have to take his word for it,
because we haven’t seen why she’s worthy of his mercy.
We witness Cinderella as kind,
"Cinderelly likes you, too.
She's nice, very nice.
That's better."
but Snow White’s kindness is general and vague,
so it comes off as a little shallow and boring.
Disney didn’t make Cinderella until 1950 --
that's 13 years after Snow White.
And the third princess movie, Sleeping Beauty,
was 9 years after that -- 1959.
Disney himself didn't really care about
continuing to make princess movies
He was interested in pushing his creative limits.
He considered his biggest visual achievement to be Pinocchio,
and his passion project was the experimental
and largely unsuccessful Fantasia.
So Disney didn’t make princess movies with any frequency until 1989,
with the release of The Little Mermaid.
The Little Mermaid marked the beginning
of the “Disney Renaissance.”
In this era the Disney brand was cemented,
and the princess story was cemented with it.
The princesses from then on become even stronger,
more specific and well-developed:
Ariel is curious and adventurous,
Belle is intellectual and stubborn,
And later, post-Disney Renaissance, in 2009,
Tiana is industrious and persevering.
But everything that followed improved on the
original princess model we got in Snow White.
So everything we think of as quintessential Disney now
is because the company made the choice
to return to Snow White’s style of storytelling,
and that wasn't a given for many years.
Disney movies also tend to be known for their romance
between the princess and the handsome prince charming.
This is part of Snow White, but it’s by no means
the focus of the story.
The prince’s personality is far less developed
even than Snow White’s,
and he gets way less time with our heroine than the dwarfs.
He has very few lines and he doesn't even get a name.
Snow White meets him at the very beginning of the movie,
and doesn’t mention him again until about an hour into the film.
He’s a plot device.
The same can be said of Disney’s next princess movie, Cinderella,
where the prince is also nameless, and used only
to give Cinderella the just ending she deserves.
But Disney has said,
"They wanted to sell Snow White as a romance,
because it had a prince and a princess in it.
I said, 'I believe in selling a thing for what it is.
This has got dwarfs and a girl named Snow White in it,
and the title is going to be Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.'
So that's the way it was billed and that's the way
it was sold."
The romantic plot doesn’t really become important
until Sleeping Beauty in 1959.
Starting with Aurora and Prince Philip, the romance
becomes the focus,
and the prince actually gets a personality.
This carried through the Disney Renaissance.
The most recent Disney movies, like Frozen,
and especially Zootopia and Moana,
are taking a step back from romantic plots.
What was originally something audiences desired
is now seen as tired and clichéd.
People want to see independent heroines.
It’s interesting to consider that this mentality aligns
with Walt Disney’s original vision --
he didn’t see Snow White as a romance,
even when everyone else wanted to.
Snow White also gave birth to the classic Disney villain.
The Evil Queen is Snow White’s stepmother,
and this idea of the “evil stepmother” is
a huge part of the Disney myth.
Funnily enough, there's actually not an evil stepmother
in very many Disney movies.
Cinderella has one, and so does Rapunzel arguably
in the much later Tangled, but that’s pretty much it.
The only other Disney movie that has an evil stepmother is Enchanted,
which is a self-aware parody of Disney conventions.
So this aspect of Snow White has managed to
become thought of as a “Disney convention”
and has had a lasting effect on pop culture,
even though it wasn’t actually repeated in most future Disney.
That said, even if most classic Disney villains aren't stepparents,
they do incorporate key aspects of the evil queen.
She’s jealous and vain, obsessed with her own beauty.
And although she’s supposed to be “fairest in the land”
besides our princess, she’s pretty severe-looking.
Not to mention, most of her screen-time is spent
disguised as a hideous old woman.
This uncanny combo of glamour and ugliness
can be seen in many Disney villains.
They tend to possess a heightened, drag-queen-esque femininity,
and facial features that might be objectively pretty,
but are considered a little unsettling
because they’re so exaggerated.
As a result, the villain's beauty serves as a foil for
the innocent beauty of the heroine.
Of course, the Evil Queen isn’t the visual opposite of Snow White,
the way a hulking male ogre might be.
But her vanity and artificial glamour emphasize
Snow White’s natural, effortless beauty.
The curated “look” makes us subconsciously aware
that she’s covering up the evil inside her.
And that concealed evil is scarier than an ugly monster,
which is why this archetype is so successful.
The lovable sidekick is the secret sauce to every Disney movie,
probably every animated movie,
and this trend was also started by Snow White,
whose sidekicks are arguably more successful
than the film itself.
However little attention Snow White as a princess might get,
everyone still loves the seven dwarfs.
They represent Disney’s roots --
the Mickey Mouse sensibility of very visual,
wacky, over-the-top characters.
And that spirit that comes from Disney’s very first cartoons
shows in the sidekicks in almost every Disney movie that followed.
No matter how painterly and beautiful the movies become,
there's always a sidekick to remind us that
all of this started with a fun and personable mouse.
And of course, Disney is known for their musical numbers,
a tradition that started with Snow White.
“Hi Ho,”
“Whistle While You Work,”
“Someday My Prince Will Come”
all became standards of the time.
Snow White introduced the idea that a song
from an animated movie could be a hit,
paving the way for global phenomenons
like Frozen’s “Let it Go.”
But Snow White actually has a lot more songs
than we tend to remember.
A lot of people might be able to name every song
in Beauty and the Beast or The Little Mermaid,
but most of Snow White’s songs have been forgotten.
A number are sung in that very stylized, 1930s soprano voice,
so they haven’t aged well given our current pop sensibilities.
But even at the time of release, those three songs
“Hi Ho,” “Whistle While You Work” and
“Someday My Prince Will Come”
stood apart from the rest.
So clearly after Snow White, Disney realized that
they could make every song in the movie stand on its own.
"In the most delightful way."
They learned from the three hits of Snow White that
there are two key reasons why Disney songs last.
In the case of “Hi Ho” or “Whistle While You Work,”
the appeal came from the catchy hook.
And this led to favorites like:
“Hakuna Matata,”
“Be our guest, be our guest, be our guest.”
"Mister I'll make a man out of you."
“Under the sea.”
Meanwhile, “Someday My Prince Will Come” is
a heartfelt expression of Snow White’s desire.
So if a song doesn’t rely on a memorable hook,
it can get its power by relating to something
central about the conflict or character’s inner world.
This is why the “I want” song has become such a staple
in many Disney movies.
"I wanna be where the people are."
"I just can't wait to be king."
"Will my reflection show who I am inside?"
In later movies, almost all of the songs fit into
one of these two categories,
which explains why they remain so hummable decades later.
All in all, Snow White doesn’t have the most original plot,
or the most interesting characters.
Few people probably rank it as their favorite Disney movie.
But without Snow White, we wouldn’t have
our other Disney favorites,
and the world of animation might be entirely different.
So Snow White changed the course of film history
in a very real and tangible way,
and its fingerprints can be seen on every Disney movie since.
"I don't know what I had or what would happen or anything
we had the family fortune, we had everything
all wrapped up in Snow White."
It's Debra.
And Susannah.
You're watching ScreenPrism.
Thank you guys so much for watching.
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